Mr. Bush declined to push for a full block-grant amendment.
In the year since the Supreme Court handed down its 183-page decision in Citizens United, the liberal objection to it has gradually boiled down to a single sentence: The majority was wrong to grant First Amendment rights to corporations.
A judge in Manhattan has refused to grant First Amendment protections to an officer who claims his efforts to unmask a range of misconduct in his Brooklyn precinct led his supervisors to bring him to a psychiatric ward.
The authors, Samantha Graff, Dale Kunkel and Seth E. Mermin, note that advertising was only granted First Amendment protection in the 1970s, when a series of decisions established that commercial speech deserves a measure of protection because it provides valuable information to the consumer, like the price and characteristics of a product.
Among other significant cases, Judge Heaney wrote a decision that granted First Amendment protection to high school newspapers (the Supreme Court reversed that decision), and voted to reverse a lower court ruling that a person could be denied citizenship for refusing to take an oath to bear arms for the United States if that refusal was based on sincere opposition to all killing of human beings.
Mr Thomson was granted an amendment to the court document to state that his current place of residence was unknown.
Wolinetz thinks the grant-killing amendment will be removed when the Senate and House get together in conference later to produce a final version of this appropriation bill.
It unconstitutionally removed a federally granted Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination for many patients.
The court's conservative majority most certainly expected that its 2010 ruling, which granted First Amendment rights to corporations and equated money to speech, would unleash unprecedented amounts of political spending.
However, what really made that ruling so significant was not that the Court granted First Amendment rights to corporations -- formerly reserved only for individual citizens -- but that in doing so, the Court legitimized an incestuous relationship between government and its corporate controllers.
Federal District Judge William M. Conley ruled that the First Amendment granted public employees the right to free speech and association, but did not grant them collective bargaining rights.
