This past weekend marked the two-year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United.  Protesters, dubbed Occupy the Courts, gathered at the Court to voice their disapproval of the decision:

As Institute for Justice campaign finance expert Paul Sherman explains in the video above:

The irony of those protests is that you had groups of people getting together to speak out against a Supreme Court decision that protected the right of people to get together and speak out.

Indeed, people should not lose their right to free speech simply by exercising their right to freely associate.   And when people group together—be it on the steps of a courthouse, in the form of a trade union or as a corporation—they don’t lose their freedom to speak out.

Occupy the Courts protesters also mistakenly believed that the Citizens United ruling held that “money is speech.”  In fact, the Court never said that.  Rather, it ruled correctly that money facilitates speech.  And if the government has the power to control how much money you can spend speaking, then it effectively can control your speech.

Importantly, the law in question in the Citizens United case empowered the government to fine and even imprison ordinary people for engaging in certain types of speech.   The government argued in court that it had the power to ban videos and books.  I don’t believe that many Americans, including the Occupy the Courts protesters, think the government should be in the business of banning books.

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On Tuesday the Institute for Justice went to federal court to find out.

Two years ago IJ teamed up with three Philadelphia tour guides to file a major First Amendment lawsuit seeking to vindicate the freedom to speak in Philadelphia.

Ann Boulais, Mike Tait and Josh Silver sued because officials passed a law making it illegal for anyone like them to give a tour of much of the city’s downtown area without first passing a test and obtaining a government license—that is, getting the government’s permission to speak.

The case immediately sparked nationwide interest.  Robert McNamara, the First Amendment expert who filed the case, appeared on shows like All Things Considered and Marketplace to point out that the Constitution protects our right to communicate for a living, whether we are speaking out as bloggers, journalists, stand-up comedians or tour guides.

The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page feature:

Feeling tyrannized, Ms. [Ann] Boulais and two fellow guides summoned the constitution’s protections by suing the city in Philadelphia Federal court. The history test, they claimed, breached the Bill of Rights — a set of rules, as any good guide should know, that took effect while Congress sat here at 6th and Chestnut streets, on Dec. 15, 1791.

Of course, the guides are quick to point out that officials are violating fundamental American liberties in the very place those liberties were first enshrined in our Constitution.

In 2009, a year after the suit was filed, the city asked a federal judge to dismiss the case.  Their reason?  They had not allocated money in their 2009 budget to enforce the law right away.

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Karen Sampson and her Colorado neighbors just won a serious victory for liberty.

In a unanimous decision on Tuesday, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Colorado’s disclosure laws for grassroots political groups.  This is a big deal.  As the Associated Press put it, “The issue is ripe for an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

The federal appellate court held that Karen and her neighbors in the tiny subdivision of Parker North, Colo., should not have been forced to register with the government and comply with burdensome campaign finance laws simply for opposing a ballot issue involving the annexation of their neighborhood.

I wrote previously at Big Government that Karen and her neighbors opposed an effort to annex their town into a neighboring city because it would raise their taxes without providing them benefits.  So they printed up fliers and yard signs.  And then they got sued.

Under what basis?  Colorado’s campaign finance laws, which state that any group of individuals that spends over $200 magically becomes an “issue committee” that is forced to register with the state.  Further, they had to track and report all their “contributions” and “expenditures” and disclose the identities of anyone who gave them money.

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Hey mom and dads, it’s election week!  Does your child like to argue?  Does he like to boss his younger siblings around?  Does he love the sound of his own voice?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, your child is a natural born politician.  Now to ensure his success in the political world, send him to Camp Politics for a three-week intensive training program:

Once he gets elected to office, the most important thing for him to learn is how to stay there.  If he does a bad job, people will want to get him out of office.  So your child will need to learn how to silence those that want to speak out against him.

Of course, this violates basic free speech rights.  But Camp Politics has figured out a sure-fire way around the First Amendment that means politics will remain a game for special interests and political insiders.

It’s called campaign finance laws.

We all know that speaking takes money.  And the only way ordinary Americans can speak out effectively about politics is to pool their resources with their friends and neighbors.  But campaign finance laws limit the amount of money people can spend on political ads and organizing and they wrap people in red tape to the point that they can’t even speak!

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Carla Main wrote an outstanding book called Bulldozed.  A veteran journalist, she brought to life a heart-wrenching, true-life tale of eminent domain abuse in a Texas fishing town.  She told the truth.  And for that, she’s being sued.

Today, Carla is fighting back.

This morning, Carla asked a Texas appeals court to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against here by a developer involved in the Texas case.

Some background:

The Texas developer behind this abuse project is H. Walker Royall.  As the video makes clear, millions of taxpayer dollars later, the project is now an epic debacle.

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A blogger at the popular progressive blog Daily Kos has attempted to smear many Americans with a very wide brush of anti-Islamic bigotry, while at the same time espousing a decidedly bizarre progressive view of the worst terror attack in this nation’s history:

…a new CNN poll  that shows that 68% of the nation opposes the construction of the community center in Manhattan. The question asked was about a mosque which I find a little misleading, and it used the inflammatory “Ground Zero” name for the site of the Twin Towers,  but that is not really the point. This new data shows a couple of things that we know already to be true. First off, the majority when asked their opinion will almost always be against the rights of a minority. This is a particular hot issue because of the 9/11 attacks where carried out by Muslims, but it is to be expected even if that were not the case.

Muslims are only a small minority in the United States, with somewhere between 1.3 million and 7 million of our citizens being practitioners of this faith. This makes Muslims between .3% and 2.1% of the over all population. However world wide the followers of Islam are closer to 25% of the planetary population.

Given that they are such a small minority in this nation, it is odd that so many of our fellow citizens see them as such a threat. Yes, the 9/11 attacks were horrific, but they were more about optics than actual harm. The economy was already taking a hit before the Twin Towers fell.  The reaction of the nation to seeing two major buildings in New York fall on T.V. has boosted the attack out of proportion. While the loss of even a single life is to be condemned and the devastation these deaths caused the families of those killed, more than this number of teens are killed every year in car crashes. These are also tragic losses but we do not make the kind of high profile issue of it that the 9/11 attacks are.

It is this sort of disconnected, community-based reality that these elitists have fabricated for themselves that had led the majority of the nation to find these elitists not just out of touch, but dangerously out of step with the rest of the nation.

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With the onset of the holiday season, Washington, D.C., is getting quieter by the day.  However, opponents of net neutrality—which the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering implementing—are not taking a break from tough policy debate quite yet.  With the FCC expected to reach a decision on net neutrality early next year, one major foe of the policy spoke out against it again last week in harsh terms, suggesting that if net neutrality rules were implemented, they might fall afoul of the First Amendment’s intent and purpose.

Kyle McSlarrow, President of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, said at a lunch held last Wednesday by the Media Institute that the implementation of net neutrality rules “would ultimately decrease the overall amount of speech on the Internet, thus harming, not helping, First Amendment interests.”  Furthermore, he argued, net neutrality proponents who claim the policy is needed to protect First Amendment rights have their facts “upside down.”  McSlarrow went on to add, “By its plain terms and history, the First Amendment is a limitation on government power, not an empowerment of government.  Making these arguments is, ironically, almost proof that First Amendment rights are being implicated…let’s not forget that the First Amendment is framed as a shield for citizens, not a sword for government.”

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