Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has made some unforgettable statements during her political career. Some of them have been laughable, while others have pushed the limits of believability—like her contention that the abortion coverage in ObamaCare will actually save lives.
How can killing preborn children save lives?
Recently, she added another statement to the list when she expressed support for the idea of amending the First Amendment. (That’s not a typo.)
Pelosi is pushing this under the guise of removing the influence of money from political campaigns. Because her first attempt to do this, via the McCain/Feingold Campaign Finance Reform legislation in 2003, was squashed when the Supreme Court ruled large swaths of that law unconstitutional, she is now taking the only viable alternative—just change the Constitution itself:
We have a clear agenda in this regard…reducing the role of money in campaigns, and amend the Constitution to rid it of this ability for special interests to use secret, unlimited, huge amounts of money going to campaigns.
She went on to say that in overturning portions of McCain/Feingold, the Supreme Court had “unleashed a monster that was oozing slime into the political system.” This assertion is quite disturbing when you think about the fact the Supreme Court’s decision didn’t create a new law. Rather, it reinstated the rights protected by the First Amendment as predominant over campaign contributions.
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How can the First Amendment be a “monster”?
Truth be told, Pelosi’s problem is not with money in politics but with protections her political opponents are afforded via the First Amendment. Their freedom to donate to opposition candidates or run ads that highlight weaknesses in Pelosi’s voting record appears to be the real problem that she wants to get rid of.
Someone who knows what they’re doing might even use their free speech rights to remind the voting public that Pelosi has been side-by-side with Obama in the abortion pill and contraceptive mandate. Thus she’s referred to Roman Catholic priests and other prominent opponents of the mandate as people who are hindered by “this conscience thing.”
And to avoid such hindrances from making their way into commercials during campaign seasons, Pelosi simply wants to change the First Amendment.
Promoting what she calls, “The Peoples’ Rights Amendment,” she wants to limit constitutionally protected rights to “natural persons,” thereby eliminating protections for corporations, organizations, and other entities. The problem with this is that corporations, organizations, and the other entities she targets are all composed of the same thing—individual Americans.
Because of this, reality dictates that the real victims of amendment would most likely be the same groups that have that “conscience thing” regarding the mandate—groups like churches, ministry organizations, associations, and family policy councils, as well as any other group that would dare engage in political speech or organize religious expression against the politicians who forced them to pay for the abortions of others.
It’s just the same song, different dance. As the author of Ecclesiastes reminds us, “There is nothing new under the sun.”
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