How Can They Be So Stupid?

Or is it that they think we're so stupid?  Maybe it's both...

The first amendment of the U.S. Constitution says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

That's the whole thing. It's simple, straightforward, and is one of the most important freedoms we have as Americans. The first amendment gives us a right that is surprisingly rare in this world, though most Americans don't realize it. 

The first amendment was ratified as part of the “Bill of Rights” (the first ten amendments), on December 15, 1791 – some 220 years ago.  In all that time, nobody has ever seen the need to modify it.  It does its job quite admirably.

But now the Democrats (led by the harridan-in-chief Nancy Pelosi) want to change it.  In particular, they want to remove this freedom from corporations.  I suspect that their internal noodlings are that corporations, being businesses, are more likely to lean right – so shutting them up would be advantageous for Democrats. 

This is a very dangerous step down the slippery slope.  You can bet on this: if they managed to amend the Constitution for reduce our freedom of speech for this reason, they'll keep trying to impose more restrictions.  But slippery slope aside, this is dangerous for another reason.  The law considers a corporation to be a person in a legal sense, and with very good reason: a corporation is nothing more than a collection of people (the shareholders).  Restricting freedom of speech for a corporation is exactly the same thing as restricting the speech of a group of people.  The argument is sometimes made that corporations are comprised of people who aren't necessarily Americans, and that's true.  But it's also true that foreigners in America have freedom of speech here.  So why would we treat them any differently simply because they're part of a group?

Thankfully, there's very little chance that Pelosi's amendment would ever be ratified.  The Founding Fathers made amending the Constitution very, very hard for a reason – and this is an excellent demonstration of that reason.  Their best hope to accomplish something like this is to pack the Supreme Court with allies – one of the main dangers of allowing Obama to stay in power.

Remember all this when you vote in November!