The U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment has long been understood to protect the political speech of the American people, individually and in groups, from government interference. But today’s Democrats, evidently upset that there is too much political speech going on in the election process, think it is deficient and want to change it. And this is not merely a back-bench effort, but one supported by the Democratic leadership, in the person of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., has proposed a “People’s Rights Amendment” to the Constitution that would exclude corporations — that is, groups of people that organize under a particular legal structure for economic or altruistic reasons — from acting with the same freedoms that the Constitution and our laws currently guarantee to “persons” or “people.” The intended effect is to reverse the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which has allowed corporations, unions and other groups to spend money on politics from their treasuries. But that would not be the only effect. Indeed, were we less protective of the Constitution and the freedoms it guarantees, it would almost be worth letting this amendment go into effect, just to see liberals stunned by its unintended consequences.
Nearly every major news organization is, after all, organized as a corporation. The language of McGovern’s amendment specifies that constitutional rights (including freedom of speech and the press) are only for “natural persons,” and that corporate entities shall be, by contrast, subject to whatever regulations state and federal legislators “deem reasonable.” So just imagine an America in which the only thing stopping vindictive state legislators from retaliating against media outlets is a majority vote. Do you think that’s what Pelosi has in mind?
Churches, nonprofits, labor unions and book publishers would all lose legal protections under the People’s Rights Amendment. During the Citizens United case, the Obama administration’s lawyers briefly argued (before reversing themselves later in embarrassment) that the government should have the power to ban certain political books. It was a logical position, though, fully consistent with the campaign finance fanaticism that underlies the People’s Rights Amendment.
The First Amendment right to free speech protects all Americans from government reprisals for their political speech. Where there has been doubt, courts have wisely erred on the side of more freedom rather than less. This should not change.
The People’s Rights Amendment, on the other hand, is motivated by the same obsession with campaign finance reform that recently prompted Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to compare the Citizens United decision to the infamous 116-year-old Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson. Such a comparison, to the decision that upheld Jim Crow, is just ludicrous. It is also revealing of the unlimited and misplaced faith that liberals have in campaign finance tinkering to solve all of America’s problems.
The current state of campaign finance is a symptom of America’s big problems, not their source. If you want to stop corporations from competing for their piece of the government pie, then there is a way: Stop making the pie so big. It’s a much better solution than this assault on the Constitution.
