Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton meets with local residents at the Jones St. Java House in LeClaire, Iowa, on Tuesday. AP View Enlarged Image
Free Speech: How is Hillary Clinton appealing to an ever-more-radical Democratic base? By talking up changing the First Amendment. What better way, after all, to end the political power of anti-Big Government forces?
'We need to fix our dysfunctional political system and get unaccountable money out of it once and for all, even if that takes a constitutional amendment," Clinton said Tuesday at an Iowa community college.
Look up "unaccountable money" in the encyclopedia — it says "see Clinton Foundation."
Beyond that, it's chilling that the Party of Jefferson's establishment candidate had to appeal to its envelope stuffers not just by featuring a lesbian couple in her TV ad — but also by calling for restricting the Bill of Rights.
As IBD's indispensable Andrew Malcolm pointed out on Wednesday, there is little chance of getting three-quarters of the states to agree to amend the First Amendment. Still, one could imagine such a class warfare-based movement being launched, if just to raise money.
Consider the Supreme Court's 2009 Citizens United ruling, abrogating the McCain-Feingold campaign finance "reform" — a decision that centered on a film critical of Clinton, "Hillary: The Movie."
In that case, the court declared, "The government may not suppress political speech on the basis of the speaker's corporate identity." For-profit companies, unions, charities seeking no profit — it doesn't matter.
And, of course, curtailing corporate political speech means that the political power of liberal-dominated "television networks and major newspapers owned by media corporations," as the Supreme Court described them, becomes impossible to thwart.
Citizens United also noted, "When word concerning the plot of the movie 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington' reached the circles of government, some officials sought, by persuasion, to discourage its distribution." So even Jimmy Stewart's 1939 love letter to the U.S. Senate wasn't sufficiently worshipful for some politicians.
But who needs amendments when you can take over the courts and rewrite the Constitution through activist judges? That is the real danger of a President Hillary Clinton: a permanent stacking of our courts with Elena Kagan-Sonia Sotomayor clones who will dismantle everything in the Constitution that holds back the ongoing expansion of government power.
