Democrat Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s view of the First Amendment right to free speech is completely the opposite of the Founding Fathers’ view.
Jackson is worried that a correct interpretation of the First Amendment is “hamstringing the federal government,” but that is the whole point. Jackson wants the government to decide what is true and what is not and enforce its views on everyone. That is precisely the nightmare that the Founding Fathers who framed the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were trying to prevent.
During oral arguments in the free speech case Murthy v. Missouri, Jackson griped, “My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the federal government in significant ways in the most important time periods.”
She added, “I guess some might say that the government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country, and you seem to be suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information.” George Mason, the “Father of the Bill of Rights,” would have been appalled at Jackson’s view.
Free speech is the cornerstone of a free society. The First Amendment is what makes America special.
— Senator Michael Rulli (@michaelrulli) March 19, 2024
If Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson can't grasp that, then she has absolutely mo business serving on our Supreme Court.pic.twitter.com/4QWNRLuTC4
Even if the government were always right, which it frequently is not, it cannot and must not be allowed to crush free speech. And the idea that a biased government with a proven track record of dishonesty should determine arbitrarily who can speak and who cannot is precisely the sort of tyranny that the Founding Fathers rose up against in the American Revolution.
The Founders rightly understood that, without free speech, all other rights are in jeopardy. Will the government trample free speech and then protect the right to keep and bear arms or the right to freedom of religion? Of course not. Free speech is at stake at the Supreme Court right now, but so are all other rights and liberties that Americans enjoy.
Some Democrats understand that. That is why they now argue that it is the government that gives us our rights, rather than our rights coming from God and through the Constitution. If all rights are merely subjective, entirely dependent upon the whims of whichever corrupt tyrant is in power, it is paradise for oppressive government officials. But we would no longer have the American Republic, and the Constitution would be meaningless.
Yet that is precisely what Jackson seems to want. Thomas Jefferson would have replied, “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?”
The Founders thought the right to free speech was so important and foundational that they put it in the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, listed only behind freedom of religion:
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.
Former slave, civil rights champion, and political official Frederick Douglass observed, “No right was deemed by the fathers of the government more sacred than the right of speech. It was in their eyes, as in the eyes of all thoughtful men, the great moral renovator of society and government.” Douglass had that same pesky understanding of the First Amendment and its framers’ intentions that Jackson criticized.
The father of our country, George Washington, wisely observed that “the freedom of Speech may be taken away — and, dumb & silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.” Free speech and a free press were foundational to the republican system of government established in the United States. Washington knew that. If only Jackson and her fellow Democrats thought the same.
Benjamin Franklin, writing under the pseudonym of Silence Dogood, emphasized, “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”
Of course, it is not really surprising that Jackson would come down on the side of the censorship-crazy Biden administration, defending their anti-free speech actions, since Joe Biden nominated her to the Supreme Court. But it is deeply disturbing and ominous. If the Supreme Court rules according to Jackson’s understanding, Americans will no longer have First Amendment rights, and therefore none of their rights will be protected from government totalitarianism.
