Replies

Im not seeing this overwhelming popular support but what I am seeing is the flood of money from Soros , corporate media and tech giants, into the game to manipulate elections across the board. This needs to be investigated. It seems as though the losers in the last election, the prior administration and their weaponized agencies are keeping Trump and his team busy while the others are making these moves at the state and local levels

New York Times v. Sullivan was a case decided by SCOTUS in 1964. It was a unanimous decision (of the Warren Court). Mr. Sullivan was a Southern Democrat who sued the NYT over an advertisement which the Times published. The ad was critical of a particular situation in a city in which Mr. Sullivan served (I think as chief of police) - tho Mr. Sullivan was not named explicitly in the ad. My point is that the Sullivan case has plenty of particularities - and yet SCOTUS elected to take the occasion of Sullivan to announce the sweeping principle that judges can’t sue for libel at all, and public figures generally can do so only if they can meet an onerous burden of proof of malicious intent on the part of the publisher. Not only was the majority unanimous, but the opinion was joined by two concurrences expressing the wish of three justices to go even further.
So there’s that. Another way to look at it is that the Morrison v. Olson SCOTUS decision was 8-1 - unanimous but for the dissent of then-freshman Justice Scalia - and history quickly showed that only Scalia had been right. Point being, Scalia wasn’t on the Court in 1964 - and maybe that is the only difference in the validity of the two “consensus” SCOTUS decisions.
IMHO SCOTUS was grossly overenthusiastic in Sullivan because of salient issues they were uniquely situated, in 1964, to be oblivious to. First, let us dispose of the conceit that the First Amendment established freedom of speech and press. Obviously it articulated that, but there is a reason for the “odd” expression “the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The freedom of speech and press already existed at the time of the ratification of the Constitution and of 1A. But the freedom of the press was traditionally limited to non-pornographic, non-libelous press.
In short, like the Second Amendment with its reference to "the right of the people to" keep and bear arms, the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights was conservative. It created no rights, but merely made some rights explicit in the Constitution - and rejected the conceit that the Constitution touched the rights of the people or of the states in any way not explicitly articulated in the Constitution.
One of the rights not explicitly articulated by the Constitution but whose existence is clearly implied is the right of the people not to be libeled. And to sue for compensation if they are. And, judges and other public officers are people in addition to having an official capacity. Not only do public officers have a right to the reputations they have earned, but the people at large have a right to access to the earned reputations of public officials and candidates. All very well to say that I have a right to my own opinion, which is unfavorable to some politicians and favorable, in one degree or another, to others. I do not have a right to my own facts about those public figures. And that is what I have if I have a press, and none of those figures have any recourse against libel.
For example, I might think of a particular person as a racist. If so, articulating that belief is in bounds. But if I say that so-and-so is an open racist, and he sues, it would be incumbent on me to be able to cite actual documentation of his open racism. It is a matter of fact, not merely of opinion. And if he is not an open racist - such as an old-line Dixiecrat, openly articulating racism - he has a right to compensation to protect his reputation. The alternative, frankly, is anarchy and ultimately appeals to the sword. And not one-way only - but consider what happened at the Republican congressional baseball practice.
In 1964 “bias in the media” was rampant. It was so rampant, and so casually suggested, that it was taken for granted as being “objectivity.” After the Thomas-Hill hearings and the Kavanaugh-Ford hearings, the idea that any fewer than two justices on SCOTUS know better than that is a fatuous conceit. The conundrum is that criticism - even erroneous criticism - of public figures must be accepted, on the one hand - and blatant disregard for fact about public figures can be a toxic hazard. Another conundrum is that on the one hand, any given journalist has a right to associate his views with any given politician or political party (and vice versa) - but when all journalists are of one accord - favoring the Democrat Party, in this case - a rule inhibiting lawsuits by government officials is a rule inhibiting lawsuits by Republican government officials - Democrats simply do not get libeled.
And it is not to be thought that this is pure self-pleading on the part of a Republican voter. Books such as Slander by Coulter, and others, document it. And it has a logical explanation in the fact that journalism is systematically slanted to be bad news, systematically suggesting flaws in society - and just as systematically suggesting that the government must “do something.” Which is precisely the position of the Democrat Party, and in opposition of the Republican position that society spontaneously creates progress faster than the government can - or ever would intend to. There is a deep problem with systematically disadvantaging that philosophy, which is precisely the perspective the founders of the country espoused.