Pelosi: Amend the First Amendment !!!

reply to post by ProfEmeritus




If you can't keep up with the conversation, it would be best if you didn't post at all.

The op clearly addresses the issue of corporations free speech rights and the SCOTUS decision. It is quite clear that we are talking about the rights of corporations to participate in the election process.

For the record anyone is free to post in any forum in any thread.

Don't have to like it but you do have to deal with it.

Guess only some people are allowed free speech.

What would be best......

Is for Members to post on topic:

Pelosi: Amend the First Amendment !!!

You are responsible for your own posts.

Originally posted by Indigo5

Originally posted by Jean Paul Zodeaux
and satisfying yourself that all Pelosi, et al, want to do is limit free speech to "natural born persons".

In as much that that I would like to limit the definition of "person" to living, breathing, human beings, yes...I would like to limit the definition.

You have yet to answer my basic question, here or in past threads.

If the founders had intended "free Speech" to include media originating from legal entities, why then did they also choose to include "freedom of the press" in the firrst amendment?

Would not that have been covered under "Speech"?

You seem to want to somehow equate "legal entities" with "press", but why you are doing this is not clear. Press is generally used as a verb, but in the context used in the First Amendment, "press" is used to describe a machine, the printing press, which relies upon placing pressure upon an inked surface. As radio and television technologies were created, at some point the word "press" became equated with the entirety of media, including broadcasts, but this has nothing to do with the "Founders" intent.

The fact of the matter is that the term "press" was not defined by the First Amendment, and Congress cannot at any later date redefine the word to mean anything other than what it meant at the time the First Amendment was written, and at that time "press" did not mean "legal entity". The distinction between "speech" and "press" is clear and that distinction lies in that one is vocal, the other written word. Both are rights every individual has, and attempting to frame one as being some sort of collective right as opposed to an individual right is antithetical to the Bill of Rights.

You will not find any Founder quotes suggesting, and certainly not asserting that "freedom of press" means a group right, and for good reason. The credentialed "journalists" of today are antithetical to the First Amendment, and no act of legislation can prevent any non-credentialed "journalist" from using "the press" to rightfully express their beliefs.

Despite popular misunderstanding the right to freedom of the press guaranteed by the first amendment is not very different from the right to freedom of speech. It allows an individual to express themselves through publication and dissemination. It is part of the constitutional protection of freedom of expression. It does not afford members of the media any special rights or privileges not afforded to citizens in general.

www.law.cornell.edu...

it is pointless to quote any of the Founders on this because - to the best of my knowledge - there are no quotes making any distinction between "speech" and "press" that would either support or refute your implications.

Originally posted by Jean Paul Zodeaux
...but in the context used in the First Amendment, "press" is used to describe a machine, the printing press, which relies upon placing pressure upon an inked surface. As radio and television technologies were created, at some point the word "press" became equated with the entirety of media, including broadcasts, but this has nothing to do with the "Founders" intent.

To add to your fact on this JPZ, here is the known dictionary used in the period that the Founders would have likely utilized and learned from.

Johnson's Dictionary

In that we see the entry for "the press" and it reads: "The instrument in which books are printed." When the founder's utilized the wordage of "the Press" it was in the context as you stated the tool in which we take the spoken word and apply it to the written. May it be the computer, pen, pencil or the press, we have the Right to use whatever means to produce our thoughts and speech.

Originally posted by neo96
For the record anyone is free to post in any forum in any thread.

Don't have to like it but you do have to deal with it.

Guess only some people are allowed free speech.

edit on 24-4-2012 by neo96 because: (no reason given)

Unlike you, always complaining about what other people post about you.
But you think it is fine to allude to all kinds of unsavory things about others.

reply to post by braindeadconservatives


www.abovetopsecret.com...

Read

Originally posted by ProfEmeritus

I'm sure you impress your customers of these alleged S-Corps you have, with your spelling and grammar.

Spelling and grammar? That is what you have left? Personal and irrelevant to the topic, but I expect nothing less when reality does not support your arguments.

Originally posted by ProfEmeritus
but have diverted the conversation to the point of "gotchas". Have a nice day.

How perfect

It reminds me of Sarah Palin and how whenever she demonstrates her painful ignorance of a given issue publicly, she dismisses the preceding question as a "gotcha" question.

How inconvenient facts are.

Originally posted by ownbestenemy

Originally posted by Jean Paul Zodeaux
...but in the context used in the First Amendment, "press" is used to describe a machine, the printing press, which relies upon placing pressure upon an inked surface. As radio and television technologies were created, at some point the word "press" became equated with the entirety of media, including broadcasts, but this has nothing to do with the "Founders" intent.

To add to your fact on this JPZ, here is the known dictionary used in the period that the Founders would have likely utilized and learned from.

Johnson's Dictionary

In that we see the entry for "the press" and it reads: "The instrument in which books are printed." When the founder's utilized the wordage of "the Press" it was in the context as you stated the tool in which we take the spoken word and apply it to the written. May it be the computer, pen, pencil or the press, we have the Right to use whatever means to produce our thoughts and speech.

Your argument is disproven by your own source...

In the same contemporary dictionary we find the defintion of "Speech" to also include "written marks" so by your logic the inclusion of "press" in the first amendment was redundant?

johnsonsdictionaryonline.com...

Originally posted by Jean Paul Zodeaux

Originally posted by Indigo5

Originally posted by Jean Paul Zodeaux
and satisfying yourself that all Pelosi, et al, want to do is limit free speech to "natural born persons".

In as much that that I would like to limit the definition of "person" to living, breathing, human beings, yes...I would like to limit the definition.

You have yet to answer my basic question, here or in past threads.

If the founders had intended "free Speech" to include media originating from legal entities, why then did they also choose to include "freedom of the press" in the firrst amendment?

Would not that have been covered under "Speech"?

You seem to want to somehow equate "legal entities" with "press", but why you are doing this is not clear. Press is generally used as a verb, but in the context used in the First Amendment, "press" is used to describe a machine, the printing press, which relies upon placing pressure upon an inked surface. As radio and television technologies were created, at some point the word "press" became equated with the entirety of media, including broadcasts, but this has nothing to do with the "Founders" intent.

A strange time to become literal on definitions. A strict and literal interpretation of the 1st amendment would seem contrary to the founders intent of a document designed to endure the test of time, but if we are follow that suspect reasoning to assign a literal definition of "press", why at the same time assign an exceedingly liberal and contemporary definition to "Speech".

At the time the first Amendment was written, "Speech" was most certainly not meant to include corporations.

Corporations at the time ......

Justice Stevens Opinion

Those few corporations that existed at the founding were authorized by grant of a special legislative charter.

Corporate sponsors would petition the legislature, and the legislature, if amenable, would issue a charter that specified the corporation's powers and purposes and "authoritatively fixed the scope and content of corporate organization," including "the internal structure of the corporation." J. Hurst, The Legitimacy of the Business Corporation in the Law of the United States 1780–1970,pp. 15–16 (1970) (reprint 2004).

Corporations were created, supervised, and conceptualized as quasi-public entities, "designed to serve a social function for the state."Handlin & Handlin, Origin of the American BusinessCorporation, 5 J. Econ. Hist. 1, 22 (1945).

It was "assumed that [they] were legally privileged organizations that had to be closely scrutinized by the legislature because their purposes had to be made consistent with public welfare." R. Seavoy, Origins of the American Business Corporation, 1784–1855, p. 5 (1982).

The individualized charter mode of incorporation reflected the "cloud of disfavor under which corporations labored" in the early years of this Nation. 1 W. Fletcher, Cyclopedia of the Law of Corporations §2, p. 8 (rev. ed. 2006); see also Louis K. Liggett Co. v. Lee, 288 U. S. 517, 548–549 (1933) (Brandeis, J., dissenting) (discussing fearsof the "evils" of business corporations); L. Friedman, A History of American Law 194 (2d ed. 1985)

("The word ‘soulless' constantly recurs in debates over corporations. . . . Corporations, it was feared, could concentratethe worst urges of whole groups of men").

Thomas Jefferson famously fretted that corporations would subvert the Republic.54 General incorporation statutes, and widespread acceptance of business corporations as socially useful actors, did not emerge until the 1800's. See Hansmann & Kraakman, The End of History for Corporate Law, 89 Geo. L. J. 439, 440 (2001) (hereinafter Hansmann& Kraakman) ("[A]ll general business corporation statutesappear to date from well after 1800").

The Framers thus took it as a given that corporationscould be comprehensively regulated in the service of the public welfare.

Unlike our colleagues, they had little trouble distinguishing corporations from human beings,and when they constitutionalized the right to free speech in the First Amendment, it was the free speech of individual Americans that they had in mind.

yubanet.com...

You seem to want to have it both ways?...'Press" as a machine and "Speech" including corporations? Despite the status of corporations at the time the First amendment was written?

Originally posted by Indigo5
Your argument is disproven by your own source...

In the same contemporary dictionary we find the defintion of "Speech" to also include "written marks" so by your logic the inclusion of "press" in the first amendment was redundant?

johnsonsdictionaryonline.com...

That doesn't disprove the argument. The argument made was that "Press" in its original context was, it was the means and tool in which we disseminated our speech. The premier technology of the day was the printing press. Congress recognized that if we are to protect the Individual from Government that both speech and the tool need to be identified. That is why they are distinctly expressed in the First Amendment as two separate ideas.

One, our Natural Right to speak and our Natural Right to utilize the methods to produce and spread that speech. The argument made by JPZ, as I read it, was that "the Press" has been convoluted and construed to mean some ordained order of mystics that fall under the coveted "Press Corp" or other media types and that the First Amendment is meant to protect them and not the means and the tool. Well, maybe he didn't quite put it that way...