First Amendment

In the waning days of New Hampshire’s leftist experiment of 2007-2010, in the months leading up to the crackling heat of the 2010 election, the Democrat-lead state legislature attempted to pass the Sullivan/Hassan speech intimidation amendment attached to NH HB1459 .

This kitchen-table Frankenstein was strung together by Democrat party Committee creature Kathy “Lawsuit” Sullivan and then Democrat state Senator Maggie “The Red” Hassan, from dead bits of left wing jack-booted policy dreams.  The goal was to quickly replace the gag that the Supreme Courts Citizens United v. FEC ruling had removed.  They would require businesses to get permission to engage in political speech if they intended to spend over a certain sum.

Assigning government regulated speech limitations based on some arbitrary, government defined value was hardly the worst of it. The democrats also wanted to empower third parties to intimidate political speech for them as well.  Anyone with the money and time could file a lawsuit against any business that it thought could have violated the law.  This would give every out of state funded left wing non-profit the ability to pay its left wing, democrat supporting lawyers, to cast a chilling anti-speech pall across the New Hampshire Landscape.   Fear of litigation would instantaneously exclude thousands of voices from the political debate simply because they could not risk the time and expense of being sued, even erroneously, should they fail to dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s.

From square one this was a partisan, prejudicial and intentionally unconstitutional act.

Government can do nothing without first denying someone of their legally earned income, so this bill established that it was acceptable for 51% of those doing the taxing to define what constituted free speech.  When that happens free speech is no longer a protected right, it is a legislated privilege regulated by a democratic mobocracy.  It no longer mattered that every business pays some kind of tax, in most cases dozens of them, to finance government. It did not matter that the right to free association can take the form of a business or group that might have an interest in it’s relationship to how government exercises power in their name.  All that mattered to New Hampshire Democrats was that free speech continues to be a barrier to their political success, and if they could silence any class of persons they could find a way to silence any dissenter they chose.

Ask yourself, which party is forever trying to limit free speech and the answer is Democrats?  The war on business, the fairness doctrine, the war on new media and Fox news.  The insults and slurs hurled at the TEA party.  These are all efforts to intimidate or limit speech to which the left objects.  They have no interest in fairness or equality of message.  They seek to control the message.

The New Hampshire Democrat effort to complicate, regulate, and even intimidate anyone out of having free reign to speak about how or how often they are taxed, about how those taxes are used, and to actually sanction random intimidation by entities outside the government, should have immediately disqualified them from every holding another elected office.  We came just a few votes shy of passing a bill that Governor Lynch said he was prepared to sign.

This is not something we can forget.  It defines the character of everyone who voted for it, sanctioned it, or supported it.  This thinking permeates everything about their grasp of your relationship to government.  They still think this way, and they will continue to argue in support of it, even though their actual justifications for it, are fatally flawed.

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