Senator McCain Decries Free Speech

I have never liked McCain and this article only cements that dislike - Also, the fact that he is in partnership with Feingold only makes it worse.


April 29, 2006

McCain: Trade The First Amendment For Clean Government

Mark Tapscott has a clip of John McCain's appearance on the Don Imus Show that demonstrates the truly frightening prospect of having the Senator from Arizona occupy the White House. McCain told Imus that he would trade the First Amendment for "clean government":

"He [Michael Graham] also mentioned my abridgement of First Amendment rights, i.e. talking about campaign finance reform....I know that money corrupts....I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected, that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I’d rather have the clean government."

Senator McCain apparently has no love for the First Amendment, nor any understanding of why it occupies the primary position in the Bill of Rights. The right to free speech recognizes the inherent and natural right to speak one's mind and to argue for one's political beliefs. Free speech costs nothing and it requires nothing other than a lack of government interference.

The right to speak out informs all of the other natural rights recognized in the Constitution; without it, none of the others make sense, including the right to religious expression, property rights, the right to bear arms. None of these make sense if the government can control your political speech and determine about what its citizens can protest and when they can do it.

Furthermore, the entire reason the founders saw fit to recognize this natural right in the primary position was to guard against corruption and totalitarianism in the federal government. They had just broken free of a particularly ill-tempered monarch who actively sought to oppress dissent regarding British policies in the colonies. The crafters of the Constitution understood that the only barrier to its new government's potential for creating another tyranny would be the free and unfettered poltical speech that would point out such corruption and abuse of power.

The founders would have laughed at McCain's notion that one could trade free political speech for 'clean' government. They knew that the only manner in which to keep the government clean was to enable its citizens to speak out against abuses. Trading free speech for any kind of government only enables the villains of power to accumulate and abuse it all the more.

Senator John McCain has many fine qualities, but an understanding of free speech is not among them. He would trade our primary birthright for a mess of bureaucracy and trust it to operate in our interests while limiting our ability to criticize it. That path leads to autocracy, corruption, and ruin.
Posted by Captain Ed at April 29, 2006 09:28 AM