The First Amendment of the US Constitution says:<\/p>\n
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I am concerned about “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech…”<\/p>\n
If Congress is not allowed to pass laws abridging freedom of speech, is there an implication that Congress may pass laws protecting freedom of speech?<\/p>\n
If someone monopolizes the channels of free speech so that other people have no chance to exercise their right of free speech, does the Congress have the authority to pass laws that protect the free speech of the people who are being blocked?\u00a0 If someone uses their money to buy up the channels of communication, can the Congress pass a law that limits this monopoly?\u00a0 Is that abridging free speech or protecting free speech?<\/p>\n
Is the first amendment meant to protect the free speech of a limited number of people, or is it meant to\u00a0 try to protect the free speech of as many of the people as possible?\u00a0 When the amendment talks about “the people”, does that refer only to the powerful people, or does it refer to all of the people?<\/p>\n
I guess I will have to do some research to see if\u00a0 any lawyer has ever made this case to the Supreme Court?\u00a0 Has any Supreme Court Justice ever identified this right of Congress in a written opinion? If any of my readers already know the answer,\u00a0 are you willing to supply pointers to the answer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The First Amendment of the US Constitution says: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. I am […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17066","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17066"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17070,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17066\/revisions\/17070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}