Supreme Court Errors - #1. Giving Money to Politicians is Protected Speech

The Supreme Court made a HUGH mistake when it decided that giving money is the same as speech that is protected by the 1st Amendment. Or maybe it was not a mistake; maybe it was corruption.

The 1st Amendment states the following:

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 is a regrettable run-on sentence that clumps together three different restrictions on the Congress. Let’s focus on the freedom of speech restriction portion of the Amendment:

Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;

The subject of this section of the 1^st Amendment is spoken or published by the press. The meaning of "the press" at the time of adoption included all forms of printed speech produced and distributed by in written form. A fair application of the 1^st Amendment to modern conditions would be application of the restriction to include all forms of published speech that have emerged in the intervening years, such as broadcast radio and television.  These are modern manifestations of the “press” that existed at the time that the Bill of Rights was ratified.The scope is clear and it remained clear until the activist Court imposed their dictatorial redefinition of speech to include gifts of money to politicians in office, also known as bribes.

But the Court, actually the corporate-friendly members of the Court known as Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia, and sometimes Kennedy engaged in a, Earl Warren-like act of tyranny and decided that for the first time in the history of the United States, the “speech” in the 1^st Amendment did, and was always intended to protect gifts of money to politicians while they were in office. And these are bribes. Let’s be perfectly clear about this: No one gives money to a sitting government official except with the expectation of getting something in return. The President is not a charitable cause, or a foundation for social good. He is a man with great power to control the employees of the Executive Branch of government which happens to include all Federal Regulators. Regulators, as in, the people charged with telling Banks what they cannot do and enforcing it, and imposing all sorts of rules and restrictions on the purveyors of food and medicine about how they must make, label, and sell their product, and lots of expensive rules about how manufacturers must dispose of waste products. All of these rules are without a doubt inconvenient and costly to the businesses that must comply with them. It is often MUCH cheaper to pay politicians to change the rules or to order the regulators to back off.

The redefinition of “Speech” to include gifts of money to politicians is one of the biggest misstates that the Supreme Court has ever made. Money is not speech. Corporations are not people.