R.I.P. The 1st amendment 1791-2021

Tucker Carlson proved...

The Supreme Court is supposed to enforce the Constitution as it is written.

The government is violating the Constitution by failing to have a militia by the way. The first half of the Second Amendment requires the government to keep up a militia to ensure the nation's security.

People who are not in the militia still have the right to have guns for private self defense.

But what you're admitting here is that the Supreme Court doesn't enforce the Constitution.

So why should we expect any particular interpretation of the 1st Amendment, given the shoddy treatment of the 2nd?

This is simply a political interpretation of convenience

and could be reinterpreted and overturned at a later date by a different court.

The 2nd Amendment should be repealed as the anachronism it is.

Reasonable gun regulations could be drawn up

under a federal statute

ownership would no longer be a constitutional right but a legally permitted one.

They are slowly getting better though.

The correct interpretation of any amendment is easy enough for people to determine for themselves.

It is a fact that the right to keep and bear arms includes people's right to have guns for private self defense.

They appoint judges who uphold the Constitution.

This is one reason why progressives are evil.

Freedom is not an anachronism...

...and we should never repeal freedom in America.

It would be better for America to be destroyed than to live a single day without freedom.

The Establishment clause has taken a beating.

Is that a realistic option? I thought that's why we have courts.

Couldn't the types of firearms for self defense (as opposed to militia training) be regulated?

They uphold a corporate-friendly interpretation of the Constitution.

Casting your political opponents as "evil" is unnecessary and detracts from the effectiveness of your argument. It's a form of name-calling.

But the laws which fail to recognize the social effects of allowing near universal access to firearms and fail to recognize the difference between flintlock rifles and modern weapons can certainly be anachronistic.

You can't repeal "freedom". But it is commonly restricted in certain cases.

I've lived without the freedom to do many things. It's not the living hell you make it out to be.

I've seen "freedom" turned into some sort of cultural fetish by totally irresponsible people and used in a coercive and/or exploitative manner...that sort of "freedom" is destructive to society.

Brandon9000 wrote:

Again, give me a quotation in which Trump solicited any illegal behavior. Obviously you cannot because he did not.

Do you acknowledge that some speech is not protected by the first amendment? It is pretty useless to show you the speech in question if you refuse to believe that such speech is possibly illegal.

All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media. That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.

Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore and that’s what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with: We will stop the steal.

We will not let them silence your voices. We’re not going to let it happen, I’m not going to let it happen.

You will have an illegitimate president. That’s what you’ll have. And we can’t let that happen.

These are the facts that you won’t hear from the fake news media. It’s all part of the suppression effort. They don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to talk about it. In fact, when I started talking about that, I guarantee you, a lot of the television sets and a lot of those cameras went off. And that’s a lot of cameras back there. But a lot of them went off.

But these are the things you don’t hear about. You don’t hear what you just heard. I’m going to go over a few more states. But you don’t hear it by the people who want to deceive you and demoralize you and control you. Big tech, media.

Republicans are, Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back. It’s like a boxer. And we want to be so nice. We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we’re going to have to fight much harder.

Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.

Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.

Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.

But we’ve done it quickly and we were going to sit home and watch a big victory and everybody had us down for a victory. It was going to be great and now we’re out here fighting.

And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.

Our exciting adventures and boldest endeavors have not yet begun. My fellow Americans, for our movement, for our children, and for our beloved country.

And I say this despite all that’s happened. The best is yet to come.

So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we’re going to the Capitol, and we’re going to try and give.

I think you left out the part where he said: "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."

More name-calling?

Come on, you can argue more substantively than just smearing all your political opponents as evil.

You mean the repeated use of the word fight after telling people that their country is going to be taken away from them doesn't work for you? Sorry, of course it doesn't. Trump said he could shoot someone and get away with it, and now he has. There's a dead policeman and you're happy to give him a pass. Those in the crowd who are now claiming in court that they were doing what Trump told them to do clearly got the message.

People tell their supporters to fight every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

People tell supporters that the country or something valuable is being taken away from them frequently.

If this were illegal, tens of thousands of people would have faced legal consequences for urging protest and resistance over the years, both of which are absolutely protected rights.

What, you learned nothing from growing up in the US and hearing free speech praised as a fundamental right over and over?

It's sickening.

WASHINGTON — Claims by former President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers that his conduct around the Jan. 6 Capitol riot is shielded by the First Amendment are “legally frivolous” and should do nothing to stop the Senate from convicting him in his impeachment trial, 144 leading First Amendment lawyers and constitutional scholars from across the political spectrum wrote in a letter circulated on Friday.

Taking aim at one of the key planks of Mr. Trump’s defense, the lawyers argued that the constitutional protections do not apply to an impeachment proceeding, were never meant to protect conduct like Mr. Trump’s anyway and would most likely fail to shield him even in a criminal court.

“Although we differ from one another in our politics, disagree on many questions of constitutional law, and take different approaches to understanding the Constitution’s text, history, and context, we all agree that any First Amendment defense raised by President Trump’s attorneys would be legally frivolous,” the group wrote. “In other words, we all agree that the First Amendment does not prevent the Senate from convicting President Trump and disqualifying him from holding future office.”

Among the lawyers, scholars and litigants who signed the letter, a copy of which was shared with The New York Times, were Floyd Abrams, who has fought marquee First Amendment cases in court; Steven G. Calabresi, a founder of the conservative Federalist Society; Charles Fried, a solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan; and pre-eminent constitutional law scholars like Laurence Tribe, Richard Primus and Martha L. Minow.

The public retort came after Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Bruce L. Castor Jr. and David Schoen, indicated this week that they planned to use the First Amendment as part of their defense when the trial opened on Tuesday. They argued in a written filing that the House’s “incitement of insurrection” charge “violates the 45th president’s right to free speech and thought” and that the First Amendment specifically protects Mr. Trump from being punished for his baseless claims about widespread election fraud.

The House impeachment managers have argued that Mr. Trump’s false statements claiming to have been the true winner of the election, and his exhortations to his followers to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell” to reverse the outcome, helped incite the attack.

In their letter, the constitutional law scholars laid out three counterarguments to the president’s free-speech defense that the Democrats prosecuting the case were expected to embrace at trial.

First, they asserted that the First Amendment, which is meant to protect citizens from the government limiting their free speech and other rights, has no real place in an impeachment trial. Senators are not determining whether Mr. Trump’s conduct was criminal, but whether it sufficiently violated his oath of office to warrant conviction and potential disqualification from holding future office.

“As a result, asking whether President Trump was engaged in lawful First Amendment activity misses the point entirely,” they wrote. “Regardless of whether President Trump’s conduct on and around January 6 was lawful, he may be constitutionally convicted in an impeachment trial if the Senate determines that his behavior was a sufficiently egregious violation of his oath of office to constitute a ‘high crime or misdemeanor’ under the Constitution.”

What is more, they argued, even if the First Amendment did apply to an impeachment trial, it would do nothing to bar conviction, which has to do with whether Mr. Trump violated his oath, not whether he should be allowed to say what he said.

“No reasonable scholar or jurist could conclude that President Trump had a First Amendment right to incite a violent attack on the seat of the legislative branch, or then to sit back and watch on television as Congress was terrorized and the Capitol sacked,” they wrote.

Finally, they contended that there was an “extraordinarily strong argument” that the defense would even fail in a criminal trial because the evidence against Mr. Trump is most likely strong enough to meet the Supreme Court’s high bar for punishing someone for inciting others to engage in unlawful conduct.

Many of the signatories to Friday’s letter had signed on to a previous one pushing back on another key argument in Mr. Trump’s defense: the assertion that the Senate does not have jurisdiction to try a former president because the Constitution does not explicitly grant it that power.

The letter emerged as Mr. Trump’s legal team, which was hastily pulled together in recent days after he dismissed his original impeachment lawyers, worked feverishly on Friday to get up to speed on the case and prepare for the trial.

Mr. Schoen said that he and Mr. Castor had yet to learn anything about how the trial would operate — including its schedule, how much time the defense would have to present its arguments and the rules for entering evidence.

“I’m in shock we’re starting Tuesday and have no agreement for how any resolutions will be put forward,” Mr. Schoen said in a telephone interview. “We have no rules, no agenda, no time-frame — there is no possible way this is consistent with due process.”

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, is expected to lay out his proposed rules next week, just before the trial begins. Last year, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the top Republican and the majority leader at the time, revealed the rules less than 24 hours before Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial was set to begin.