ALL OF THE CORRUPTION in Washington today, the fact that it is two ersatz Democrats who are holding up a bill which polls as being hugely popular with the American People, virtually all of their own party, even within their two conservative states, hugely popular at least in part with virtually all non-Republican-fascists is due to the interpretation of the Free Speech-Press provisions of the First Amendment that I spent the end of last week and the beginning of this week slamming.
If the campaign finance reform laws overturned by the unelected, appointed, Supreme Court and passed by those mythically virtuous bi-partisan majorities in Congress and signed by even Republican presidents, Gerald Ford being forced by the corruption already endemic in the Republican Party and his predecessors outrageous corruption into signing, none of this would have happened as it did. That was the bill that the Supreme Court overturned two years later in 1976 in Buckley v Valeo. A case brought by the crypto-fascist brother of William F. Buckley who, in the 1950s and perhaps beyond, supported the suppression of Black Voters in the South because they would elect people to represent them and they wouldn't be conservative Republicans.
Sinema, Manchin and all of the Republicans rely on the corrupt money they can raise in the wake of the slew of "First Amendment" cases in which the Supreme Court created a right to lie about politicians, made money the same thing as speech (giving a billionaire billions of times more speech than someone with nothing) and otherwise overturned laws the better for them to allow unbridled corruption in our politics in the name of ersatz, secular, "virtue". If they couldn't reliably rely on TV, radio, internet and, even the quaint form of print lies and propaganda to sucker enough voters to vote for them, they would never feel so comfortable in hindering what the voters in their own states want and would find they wanted if they experienced it. As they did in the American Care Act, which the Supreme Court nearly destroyed in full even as Roberts forced its crippling in that goddamned Court.
All of the corruption in Washington has become worse since the First Amendment became the tool of the fools on the Warren Court to unleash the money fed lie machine of the media and the fools and thugs on the Berger Court, the mostly thugs on the Rehnquist and Roberts Court to produce the level of corruption that gave us Trump and is giving cover for two Conservative Democrats who are doing what the Senate has been so good for, thwarting the will of the American People on behalf of wealthy funders of THEM.
All of that flows directly out of the huge holes and gaps in the inspecific language of the First Amendment, which makes no distinction between the absolute right to tell the truth and that there is no right to lie and there never has been.
The notion of there being a "right to lie" is so daft that its creation must have come from the fallibility and corruption of fallen humans because God certainly didn't endow us with a right to lie. It is so stupid that I doubt it could pass a serious and honest analysis as a rational proposition and the experience of real life as opposed to law-scholar manipulation of words to achieve a corrupt end proves what terrible results come from it.
The Covid denialism which is killing tens and scores and thousands and, if science had been unable to find even the viral fixes they have so far managed, could very well be killing millions soon is a product of the First Amendment and the Supreme Court creation of a right to lie within it. That is a product of the modernism of figures such as Holmes and the members of the ACLU who would probably scoff at my point that, as the Declaration of Independence says, people are endowed with rights by God.
I can well imagine lots of them, secularists, post-religion types, perhaps even Bert Neuborne would believe that all of this is a manifestation of physical processes and any imposition of values on the truth as opposed to lies is merely an expression of societal consensus - you wonder why the desire of a large majority to have clean elections and honest government and things like universal healthcare, universal vaccination and the Build Back Better bill don't figure in those things are allowed to be made real without the opposition of these true believers in the banal power of social consensus. Of course any notion of God should be kept out of it, though the friggin' founders in the contract with the world and the people they wanted to fight their revolution, the Declaration of Independence, correctly noted that rights in any durable conception cannot be anything but an endowment from God. Even a "social consensus" on that count would depend on the society believing that.
I don't think that the sciency desire to keep questions of morality out of it, as someone like the patron saint of free speech-press absolutism, Holmes did, is ever going to produce anything but the kind of clash of sides he loved to think the Law should produce, the strongest winning out against the weaker ones. He was truly a depraved human being because he believed in nothing but the late Victorian science he read. Amorality in a Supreme Court justice will turn into them doing whatever they want to do, which is another of the enormous problems with the self-created power of Supreme Court review of laws adopted by Congress and signed by an elected Executive. I think we have a depravity majority court and the real history of that unelected branch seldom has anything but that on it. As they take their excuses for maintaining the privilege of the privileged, protecting their wealth and power and power to destroy from the Constitution, its language and, sometimes, even its meaning a no-holds-barred critique of that document, its language INCLUDING THE IDOLIZED BILL OF RIGHTS is not only permissible but essential. Changing it is, I assert, necessary if we are ever to have egalitarian democracy and all of the good things that a majority wants but a minority of scumbags can thwart through the slave-owner protection features intentionally embedded by them in the structures and words elevated by the Constitution.
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