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EDITORIAL: Horsford among those who would limit political speech

Count Nevada Rep. Steven Horsford among Democrats who seek to rewrite the Bill of Rights to allow government censors to regulate political speech, potentially even banning issue-oriented pamphlets, movies and books.

On Thursday, Team Horsford sent out an email plea urging recipients to sign a petition advocating for “a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United,” the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision which held that the Constitution protects independent political expenditures.

To hear Team Horsford tell it, this has unleashed a torrent of “dark money” into politics that threatens our “democracy.” So Rep. Horsford embraces an addendum to the First Amendment. If successful, it would be the first time in our nation’s history that Congress had amended the Bill of Rights.

But it gets worse. Left conveniently unsaid by progressives is that this would probably open the door for the government to police all manner of political speech, which is precisely what the First Amendment was intended to protect and promote.

It is often forgotten that Citizens United turned on whether a campaign finance law could prevent the airing of a film that was critical of Hillary Clinton and partially funded with corporate money. Incredibly, a federal appeals court ruled that the law did indeed give federal election officials the power to keep the movie off the air — and to prohibit advertisements for the film — within 60 days of a primary election or 30 days of a general election. When the case reached the Supreme Court, Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart, arguing the government’s position, went even further.

“By the time Stewart’s turn at the podium was over,” former Federal Election Commission member Bradley A. Smith wrote in 2010, “he had told Justice Anthony ­Kennedy that the government could restrict the distribution of books through Amazon’s digital book reader, Kindle; responded to Justice David Souter that the government could prevent a union from hiring a writer to author a political book; and conceded to Chief Justice John Roberts that a corporate publisher could be prohibited from publishing a 500-page book if it contained even one line of candidate advocacy.”

These stunning admissions led the court to hold a second round of oral arguments. Mr. Stewart was replaced by Elena Kagan — later named to the Supreme Court by Barack Obama — who downplayed the book ban talk, saying that “the government’s answer has changed.”

Yet the dangers of the law were now clear. And don’t forget that this proposed constitutional amendment would carry much more force than just a simple statute.

“We don’t put our First Amendment rights in the hands of FEC bureaucrats,” Chief Justice John Roberts noted during Citizens United. Yet that’s precisely what Rep. Horsford and many other Democrats would have Americans do.

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