I am challenged - I would guess by an admirer of the late phony baloney Nat Hentoff and Joel Gora, who I guess is still alive - to say what it is about the First Amendment that I would change.
First, why limit it to that? I'd start with the Second Amendment and be specific that people could own one gun, not a semi-automatic or automatic weapon, nor one tricked out to be one though not admitted to be one by the ass that lawyers and judges make of their profession and, so, all of us. I would certainly make it clear that Congress, state legislatures, municipal councils and, more than any of those THE VOTERS have a right to regulate gun sales, gun ownership, gun manufacture, gun sales and importation. And that the insane, the violent, wife abusers, abusive boyfriends, stalkers, etc. can have the limited rights to guns removed from them - in fact, I don't think I'd ever assert there was any right to own guns that didn't contain a provision that such people with a record of violence can be banned from buying or owning or carrying guns. I don't trust state legislatures or municipal councils to not do what the Republican fascists under the influence and patronage of our contemporary version of Murder inc, the gun lobby have done in that regard.
Now that that's out of the way. I would specifically need any amended First Amendment have language that would prevent the abominations that Supreme Courts have created out of it - we don't need to conjecture as to whether the vague, minor, 18th century poetry the "founders" set out has the potential to destroy democracy because they've already done their darndest to do that USING THE VERY LANGUAGE THAT IS PRESENTLY IN THAT OBJECT OF WORSHIP.
It would have to specifically:
- Reject the invitation to corruption placed in the lore of Constitutional interpretation by a sleazy law clerk and a perhaps even sleazier Chief Justice, corporate personhood. Democracy will never be safe as long as that Supreme Court invention that the "originalists," "strict-constructionists" and "Federalist(fascists), don't seem to mind though it appears no where in the text. Of course, that's probably more a 14th Amendment issue but it is the one that Republicans on the Supreme Court, with some concurrence by some Democratic members, used to make money into speech and so gave billionaires like the Kochs, the Mercers, putrid Peter Thiel, etc. and corporations, as much more speech as dollars they have over real people.
- Reject that there is a right to lie with impunity in the Constitution and include the fact that democracy lives on the truth and it dies from lies, especially those told by the mass media.
- Speaking of that, it would have to stop pretending we live in the 18th century when hand written letter and the printing press decentralized "the press" that they said Congress had no power to regulate. One of the stupidest and biggest mistakes in letting long dead, White slave owners and corrupt businessmen, aka "the founders" determine our law is that they had no idea of what we would learn about the power of mass media, modern methods of advertising, market research to destroy democracy through mass deception designed to prey on peoples' weakness. Regulating the electronic media may have its dangers, failure to require they not churn out FOXian or even the lesser cabloid and radio network propaganda our media largely has for the past fifty years is guaranteed to be a fatal poison to democracy. Pretending that a FOX-Sinclair world is the same as the quill pen and hand set type is as stupid as pretending a bump-stock virtual semiautomatic murder machine is the same as an 18th century Pennsylvania single ball musket
But we don't need to go to regulation of the mass media, making violation of laws a crime*, we just have to say that those they choose to lie about have a right to sue them on the same basis as everyone else does and that media which has lied about people have to restore what they've destroyed, retracting the lie in the same way it was told, with as many repetitions as prominently displayed as the lies, payment for damages and court costs. I'd prefer to let that part of it depend on civil processes instead of criminal ones. That said, any electronic mass media, including cable and internet, should have their ability to continue in that business of lying removed. Lies being so dangerous to democracy, self-government and beleaguered people who they lie about.
I mentioned things like the undemocratic Senate, the Jim Crow, New Jim Crow voter suppressing extensions of 3/5ths into 5/5ths for congressional representation of people who are the ones suppressing the votes and the electoral college all being abolished or changed. I think that anyone who doesn't see the need for the right to vote being contained in the Constitution, one real, human person - one vote, is an idiot, especially after Scalia, from the friggin' Supreme Court bench deny that there was right to vote and to have those votes count. Corporate personhood arose from the corrupt clerk quoting a remark of the corrupt Justice in a headnote in a decision. What those asses say can have the most far reaching dangers.
And as to what else you said in the comment that I'm not posting, fuck you and anyone who looks like you.
* Though if that were necessary to defend egalitarian democracy and the right to self-government on the basis of a truthfully informed electorate, it will be a necessary step. "The press" is an artificial, corporate entity, artificial corporate entities don't have natural rights which only belong to people because they are living entities. The natural rights of people to equal justice, egalitarian democracy and the blessings of self-government on the basis of reality is over and above that of any artificial entity. The "right" to "freedom of the press" should be explicitly stated to exist only in so far as "the press" serves the right of The People to accurate and sufficient information necessary for them to cast informed votes and so representatives who will really serve them instead of the crew of pirates who hijacked the United States and so many of the individual state governments and so many of our courts.
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