Speak Freely

IBD Editorials ^ | September 10, 2009 | INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY Staff

[Kaslin]

Supreme Court: Signs are that the McCain-Feingold law restricting campaign messages will soon be significantly reined in. What made Congress think it could flout the First Amendment anyway?

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What could be more obviously protected by the Constitution than a documentary film about a leading presidential candidate? Yet, when the nonprofit group Citizens United released "Hillary: The Movie" as a video-on-demand product last year, the Federal Election Commission stepped in and banned it because it was too close to election time.

The group sued, and the Supreme Court has just heard a repeat of the arguments pro and con. The Obama administration's solicitor general, Elena Kagan, was so unpersuasive in defending the McCain-Feingold law that allows suppression of political speech, even the liberal justices knew it.

Rather than backing her arguments, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and her ideological confreres pleaded for a narrow ruling against McCain rather than throwing out the bulk of the law. "A corporation, after all, is not endowed by its creator with inalienable rights," Ginsberg quipped.

But it was Chief Justice John Roberts' declaration that "we don't put our First Amendment rights in the hands of FEC bureaucrats" that should go down alongside Oliver Wendell Holmes' maxim about free speech not including "falsely shouting fire in a theater."

[Kaslin]

[DNME]

There is no such thing as too much free speech. It’s incumbent upon us, the voters, to separate the wheat from the chaff in all the cacophony.

Besides, the only thing that should be illegal about yelling “fire” in a crowded theater is the public endangerment it causes, not the speech itself.