Kagan’s Contempt for the First Amendment

The duty of a Supreme Court Justice is to uphold our Constitutional liberties — unless that Justice is appointed by B. Hussein Obama, in which case her role is to destroy those liberties, starting with the most fundamental:

President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, argued certain forms of speech that promote “racial or gender inequality” could be “disappeared.”

In her few academic papers, Kagan evidences strong beliefs for court intervention in speech, going so far as to posit First Amendment speech should be weighed against “societal costs.”

“Societal cost” means that it runs counter to the progressive agenda.

In a 1996 paper, “Private Speech, Public Purpose: The Role of Governmental Motive in First Amendment Doctrine,” Kagan argued it may be proper to suppress speech because it is offensive to society or to the government.

That paper asserted First Amendment doctrine is comprised of “motives and … actions infested [sic] with them” and she goes so far as to claim that “First Amendment law is best understood and most readily explained as a kind of motive-hunting.”

This means that you can say what you want — so long as leftist apparatchiks like Kagan deem your motives to be pure. Otherwise, shut up.

Kagan’s name was also on a brief, United States V. Stevens, dug up by the Washington Examiner, stating: “Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs.”

Her stance couldn’t be more clear: you have the freedom to say what we want you to say.

Kagan also believes that corporations have no right to political speech. This is convenient, because it’s harder to loot them and deliberately cripple them with counterproductive and often malicious regulations if they have some way of sticking up for themselves.

Solicitor General Elena Kagan, nominated Monday to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Barack Obama, told that court in September that Congress could constitutionally prohibit corporations from engaging in political speech such as publishing pamphlets that advocate the election or defeat of a candidate for federal office.

Chief Justice John Roberts explains why Kagan’s point of view is so pernicious:

“The Government urges us in this case to uphold a direct prohibition on political speech. It asks us to embrace a theory of the First Amendment that would allow censorship not only of television and radio broadcasts, but of pamphlets, posters, the Internet, and virtually any other medium that corporations and unions might find useful in expressing their views on matters of public concern,” wrote Roberts. “Its theory, if accepted, would empower the Government to prohibit newspapers from running editorials or opinion pieces supporting or opposing candidates for office, so long as the newspapers were owned by corporations — as the major ones are. First Amendment rights could be confined to individuals, subverting the vibrant public discourse that is at the foundation of our democracy.”

If tyrants can limit political speech to “individuals,” it will be child’s play to snuff it out altogether.

Our form of government was explicitly designed to protect the American people from the likes of Barack Obama and his appointees. The Constitution has held up this long because we’ve had the character to deserve it. Whether that still holds true remains to be seen.

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Here to crush our most fundamental liberties.

On tips from Dystopic PC. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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