How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment

Space_Time · Jul 5, 2018

Can the Left be accused of hypocrisy? Did the Left ever really believe in the 1st Amendment? Please read both pieces at their links:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/30/us/politics/first-amendment-conservatives-supreme-court.html

How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment
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Trump supporters signing a poster promoting free speech at a rally in 2017 in Berkeley, Calif.CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times
By Adam Liptak
June 30, 2018

WASHINGTON — On the final day of the Supreme Court term last week, Justice Elena Kagan sounded an alarm.

The court’s five conservative members, citing the First Amendment, had just dealt public unions a devastating blow. The day before, the same majority had used the First Amendment to reject a California law requiring religiously oriented “crisis pregnancy centers” to provide women with information about abortion.

Conservatives, said Justice Kagan, who is part of the court’s four-member liberal wing, were “weaponizing the First Amendment.”

The two decisions were the latest in a stunning run of victories for a conservative agenda that has increasingly been built on the foundation of free speech. Conservative groups, borrowing and building on arguments developed by liberals, have used the First Amendment to justify unlimited campaign spending, discrimination against gay couples and attacks on the regulation of tobacco, pharmaceuticals and guns.
“The right, which had for years been hostile to and very nervous about a strong First Amendment, has rediscovered it,” said Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University.

The Citizens United campaign finance case, for instance, was decided on free-speech grounds, with the five-justice conservative majority ruling that the First Amendment protects unlimited campaign spending by corporations. The government, the majority said, has no business regulating political speech.

The dissenters responded that the First Amendment did not require allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace and corrupt democracy.

“The libertarian position has become dominant on the right on First Amendment issues,” said Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer with the Cato Institute. “It simply means that we should be skeptical of government attempts to regulate speech. That used to be an uncontroversial and nonideological point. What’s now being called the libertarian position on speech was in the 1960s the liberal position on speech.”

And an increasingly conservative judiciary has been more than a little receptive to this argument. A new analysis prepared for The New York Times found that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been far more likely to embrace free-speech arguments concerning conservative speech than liberal speech. That is a sharp break from earlier eras.

As a result, liberals who once championed expansive First Amendment rights are now uneasy about them.

“The left was once not just on board but leading in supporting the broadest First Amendment protections,” said Floyd Abrams, a prominent First Amendment lawyer and a supporter of broad free-speech rights. “Now the progressive community is at least skeptical and sometimes distraught at the level of First Amendment protection which is being afforded in cases brought by litigants on the right.”

Many on the left have traded an absolutist commitment to free speech for one sensitive to the harms it can inflict.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/07/04/left-celebrates-july-4-denouncing-first-amendment/

The Left Celebrates July 4 By Denouncing The First Amendment
It is not news that the Left wants to shut us up. But now the leading publication of the mainstream Left is openly coming out against the First Amendment.
Robert Tracinski By Robert Tracinski
JULY 4, 2018
The biggest news this week is that the Left has officially turned against the First Amendment and freedom of speech — and just in time for the Fourth of July!

If you’re on the Right, it is not news that the Left wants to shut us up. The only change is that this goal is being announced openly in the leading publications of the mainstream Left, specifically in a long article in The New York Times warning about “How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment.” Weaponized. That’s right, they’re giving the First Amendment the same treatment they gave the Second. Does free speech seem as scary and dangerous as an AR-15 yet?

So what’s wrong with the First Amendment? It protects people the Left doesn’t like. No, really, that’s the argument.

On the final day of the Supreme Court term last week, Justice Elena Kagan sounded an alarm. The court’s five conservative members, citing the First Amendment, had just dealt public [employees’] unions a devastating blow. The day before, the same majority had used the First Amendment to reject a California law requiring religiously oriented ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ to provide women with information about abortion. Conservatives, said Justice Kagan, who is part of the court’s four-member liberal wing, were ‘weaponizing the First Amendment.’

The article laments that free speech arguments at the Supreme Court used to mostly protect speech by people on the Left.

‘Because so many free-speech claims of the 1950s and 1960s involved anti-obscenity claims, or civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests, it was easy for the left to sympathize with the speakers or believe that speech in general was harmless,’ [Frederick Schauer, a law professor at the University of Virginia] said. ‘But the claim that speech was harmless or causally inert was never true, even if it has taken recent events to convince the left of that.’

So now — the horror! — “free-speech claims” are being used to protect Christians and corporations and people who don’t like being forced into unions, and how dare anyone stand up for those people.
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Spooky · Jul 5, 2018

Liberals are selective in how they wish to use the Constitution and its good to see the conservative Court pushing back against them and protecting everyone.

Liberals are going to be in for a very long and rough time in regards to Supreme Court cases for the next couple of decades.

No matter what Trump does for the rest of his presidency he has already won the game just with his work on the courts alone.

Its more than we could have asked for.

So impeach him if you want, we already won.

Lil Mike · Jul 5, 2018

Space_Time said: ↑

Can the Left be accused of hypocrisy? Did the Left ever really believe in the 1st Amendment? Please read both pieces at their links:
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I think at one time, the left really did believe that they believed in the First Amendment. Those days are long gone. Hillary began her Presidential campaign with a promise to support an amendment to disable the First Amendment. It's sad because if the left successfully demonizes free speech as racist, sexist, homophobic ect... it's going to crumble.

Space_Time · Jul 5, 2018

Here's more:

http://freebeacon.com/blog/conserva...irst-amendment-liberals-didnt-keep-violating/

Conservatives Wouldn’t Have to ‘Weaponize’ the First Amendment If Liberals Didn’t Keep Violating It
BY: Alex Griswold

July 3, 2018 6:14 am
New York Times building / Getty ImagesNew York Times building / Getty Images
The New York Times appeared to make an error in this Saturday's print edition. An op-ed piece headlined "How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment" was published on the front-page and not labeled as an opinion piece. The piece was mistakenly bylined to the Times' Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak, rather than some sort of editorial writer.

The alternative is that the New York Times believes it's a verifiable, objective fact that conservatives are "weaponizing" the First Amendment. That'd be a good question for the public editor, if they hadn't axed that position.

The general thesis of the piece is this: once, the First Amendment was once used primarily to protect liberal speech and policy goals. Today, it is more often used to protect conservative speech and policy goals. This is the evidence conservatives on the Supreme Court are "weaponizing" the First Amendment (borrowing the phrase from a recent dissent by Justice Elena Kagan), and that is A Bad Thing.

The fig leaf for pretending this is an article rather than an op-ed is an analysis commissioned by the New York Times that purports to show that the Roberts Court "has been far more likely to embrace free-speech arguments concerning conservative speech than liberal speech" than prior courts.

Let me begin by saying I'm highly skeptical of the study the Times cites. It's based on an earlier study (which Liptak also uncritically passed along) that aimed to categorize the speaker in virtually every Supreme Court free speech case as either liberal or conservative. But few free speech cases fit nicely into a conservative-liberal dichotomy, and researchers had to make judgment calls about which tribe a litigant fell into.

The Roberts Court heard free speech cases about a pit bull enthusiast selling videos of dogfights, video game developers who make violent video games, and a father offering naked pictures of his daughter. Who's "liberal" and who's "conservative"? The study the Times analysis is based on dubiously decided that the Roberts Court ruled against "liberal speech" by siding against the pedophile and for "conservative speech" by protecting violent video games and the dogfight videos, even though no one could credibly claim the liberals and conservatives on the court empathized with their alleged ideological peers. When dealing with such a small subset of cases—the analysis claims Roberts Court only ruled on "liberal speech" 14 times in nearly as many years—even a handful of sketchy classifications drastically swings the percentage of free speech victories.
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Draco · Jul 5, 2018

Hmm, how can you weaponize something that is legal? I guess it makes sense, it's just wierd, to imply that freedom of speech can be used as a negative.

Just goes against what I think of when I think of the US, a lot of the people I talk to in Europe and Canada DO in fact scare the hell out of me that they think losing free speech is worth it. Baring the "bomb in an airport" or whatever else, the speed with which they ban speech creeps me out.

Space_Time · Jul 5, 2018

Here's more:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/free-speech-liberals-turn-against/

Liberals Sour on the First Amendment

By JONATHAN S. TOBIN

July 3, 2018 1:06 PM

A man, who declined to be identified, holds a sign as conservative demonstrators rally on Sproul Plaza at the University of California, Berkeley in Berkeley, California, September 27, 2017. (Noah Berger/Reuters)

Claims that conservatives have ‘weaponized’ free speech are a hollow excuse.

When in 1977 the American Civil Liberties Union defended the right of Nazis to march through a Jewish neighborhood in Skokie, Ill., the organization was lionized for its willingness to say that the principle of free speech was more important than the sensibilities of those who were offended by that demonstration. The ACLU took a similar position on campaign-finance laws, which it rightly saw as an attempt to silence the exact kind of expression — political speech — that the Founders were most anxious to protect.

No longer. An internal memo has revealed that the ACLU will stop standing up for the rights of those with whom its liberal donors disagree. And the group isn’t alone in changing its mind: After the Supreme Court’s conservative majority defended the rights of anti-abortion activists and civil-service workers in two separate cases, Justice Elena Kagan alleged that conservatives “were weaponizing the First Amendment.” The New York Times used the comment as the basis for a front-page story in its Sunday edition.

In recent years, the Court has defended the First Amendment in a variety of contexts, from campaign finance to religious expression. But, as the Times noted, while the libertarian position on speech used to be the liberal position, the willingness of conservatives to invoke the First Amendment on behalf of positions and policies that liberals dislike has soured the latter on the idea of free-speech absolutism. They see the individual rights they once zealously defended — when invoked by street protesters or pornographers — as harmful when invoked by corporations or devout religious believers. According to legal scholar Catherine McKinnon, the First Amendment has become the “sword” by which “racists” and “corporations buying elections” amplify and reinforce injustice.

Of course, while this is a departure for the ACLU, there’s nothing new about the Left in general opposing the concepts of tolerance and free speech. In his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” leftist philosopher Herbert Marcuse argued for stripping conservatives of the right to free speech and assembly. For a Marxist like Marcuse, tolerance should be extended only to those who oppose the mechanisms of liberal capitalist societies.
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