The Pentagon Papers case was about corporate rights?
by digby
Samuel Alito spoke to the Federalist Society this week:
Alito said arguments can be made for overturning Citizens United, but not the popular one that boils down to one line: Corporations shouldn't get free speech rights like a person.
“It is pithy, it fits on a bumper sticker, and in fact a variety of bumper stickers are available,” Alito told a crowd of about 1,400 at The Federalist Society’s annual dinner. He cited two: “End Corporate Personhood,” and “Life does not begin at incorporation.”
Then Alito pointed out the same people do not question the First Amendment rights of media corporations in cases like The New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the Pentagon papers case. If corporations did not have free speech rights, newspapers would lose such cases, he said.
Alito aded that nobody questioned whether First Amendment rights extended to the corporation that broadcast the awards speech during which Nicole Richie swore on air, an episode immortalized in Fox v Federal Communications Commission.
Alito censored himself when repeating Richie’s quote to the conservative crowd: “Have you ever tried to get cow bleep out of a Prada purse, it’s not so bleeping simple.”
Alito said the real issue is whether free speech rights “should be limited to certain preferred corporations, namely those media organizations.”
You know, I'm just an old country blogger who didn't even go to law school. So maybe I just don't understand the complex legal thinking in that statement. But the last time I looked at the constitution, I thought the first amendment made an explicit grant of "freedom of the press" which would seem to me to be the basis of the Pentagon Papers case. And if Nicole Richie's freedom to use salty language is based upon a "corporate right to free speech" rather than a common sense application of individual free speech then I guess I think it's faulty logic.
Moreover, corporate speech is regulated all the time. They aren't for instance, allowed to lie about the effects of their products. Drug companies are expected to reveal their side-effects in vast detail. So --- what corporate free speech is he even talking about except for the fact that they must be allowed to use their money to influence elections? (Is he in favor, for instance, of corporations being allowed to show porn on the public airwaves?)
Anyway, as I said, I'm obviously no expert. But I think it's a little bit weird that a Supreme Court Justice would say that the Pentagon Papers was a "corporate free speech" case. Maybe he should think about the phrase "freedom of the press" in the literal way he thinks about "right to bear arms" in the second amendment. That might clear it up for him.
And perhaps this explains it:
The crowd heard a few zingers from Alito about how he learned constitutional law. Alito said Yale assigned him to the class of Charles Reich, a professor who had written several popular books about the decline of society. Reich thought “redemption could be found in the college hippie,” Alito said.
Reich started asking each student why they wanted to become a lawyer, and then engaged them in an extended debate. “This went on for weeks,” Alito said. The point he was trying to get across was that “there are no livable lives to be lived in the law.”
Reich also spent class time telling the students about a law firm at which one partner died during a tirade against an associate and another committed suicide by jumping down the elevator shaft.
One day, someone brought wine into class. “He began to chant, ‘Who put the acid in the wine, who put the acid in the wine,’ and that was the end of the class for the day,” Alito said. Soon, there was a note on the class door: “I have found it necessary to go to San Francisco, the rest of the classes are cancelled.”
“That was the end of my instruction in constitutional law,” Alito said, to applause from the audience. “I was forced to teach myself.”
Reich wrote The Greening of America and famously came out as gay in San Francisco. The dripping contempt Alito shows for him is a vivid illustration of his cultural identification. And since that cultural identification is even more hostile to open-mindedness, I would expect him to become more and more cynical and misanthropic as he ages. Scalia has a true partner in him.
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