Skip has been sounding the alarm on Democracy Spring, the latest (no-doubt well-funded) progressive-barbarian horde sent to pillage your constitutional rights.
But Justice Clarence Thomas, quoted here in Luis v. United States, also makes a case (IMO) for WHY the progressive left’s get-“outside”-money-out-of-elections fraud would violate those rights (emphasis, mine).
Constitutional rights protect the necessary prerequisites for their exercise.
In the case of the right to choose your own counsel–which requires money,
“…the Sixth Amendment denies the Government unchecked power to freeze a defendant’s assets before trial simply to secure potential forfeiture upon conviction.Unless the right to counsel protects the right to use lawfully owned property to pay for an attorney, the right to counsel—originally understood to protect only the right to hire counsel of choice—would be meaningless.
This maxim would apply to all natural rights so-protected, but let us stick to the topic at hand. If Constitutional rights protect the necessary prerequisites for their exercise, then the First Amendment must protect the right to use any lawfully owned property to pay for speech, or it is meaningless.”
By extension, the government may not force someone to pay for speech, which the funding of public elections–the NH Rebellion and Democracy Spring backdoor into advocating for government controlled speech–would require.
(The ruling class believes you are ill prepared for many things in life, including political speech, but they are happy to ask you to pay for all of them as long as you don’t get to decide the particulars. Coincidentally, controlling speech during elections ensures the proper sort of people are always making those decisions.)
The marches, demonstrations, and all that community organizing (paid for by left-wing standard-bearers) are nothing but theater and stagecraft to empower the government and those in the ruling class. They want to make it easier for insiders to benefit from money in politics while making it more difficult for outsiders to see that influence. Remember, removing private money from campaigns or campaign speech will not remove it from Washington. Just the opposite. It funnels it there, hiding more and more of it from your eyes; the actual goal of the ‘reform,’ by the way, whether all of its advocates know this, admit this, or not.
So the Constitutional right to free speech and a free press (both of which are impossible without money) must protect the necessary prerequisites for its exercise. Whether that prerequisite is a million-dollar media corporation, a coalition of small business owners, a local activist group, a labor union, or just a person; including the desire to not pay for speech or that right is meaningless.
Finally, can someone over at NH Rebellion explain to me, as the title suggests, how speech can be funded with public money unless money…is speech.
There we go again — slaying progressive shibboleths at every opportunity.