Thinkin’bout Stuff

Well.. I spent my lunch time transcribing Newt Gingrich’s speech at the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications because I believe you should read it for yourself and form your own opinion… I’ll try to resist commenting too much (but will be “bolding” a few areas). I have edited out some of the fillers, like statements of how great it is to be here and asides about his recent tour of Washington, but the rest of the speech is included for your review. Decide for yourself, is Newt Gingrich trying to eliminate your First Amendment rights? My original post on the topic is here.:

Freedom is always under siege. There are people on the planet who hate freedom.

Free people only remain free if they are prepared to defend their freedom against those who would destroy it.

The Star Spangled Banner in the first stanza ends with “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” because both are intertwined, if you are not brave do not expect to remain free.

A First Amendment dinner is about the struggle every day to reaffirm our freedom in the face of those who would take it away.

It is a peculiarly American thing that the First Amendment to our Constitution explicitly extended rights to the American people rather then to the government.

It’s not a question of power being centered in the government but a question of power being centered in the people; it is not a question of citizens being limited, it’s a question of government being limited.  It’s a remarkably American pattern that has very deep roots in our history. 

He describes three major challenges in applying the First Amendment in the 21^st century. Then elaborates on them:

The process that began in the 1970’s to find a way to regulate free speech is a disaster.  It is fundamentally wrong, and the McCain-Feingold bill was the most severe act of censorship since the Alien and Sedition Acts of the 1790’s. (APPLAUSE)

It is profoundly wrong for the government to say to any citizen what they can say is free speech and if the government has the right to regulate what you give and can say to you “90 days before a campaign you can’t say ‘x’” then they can say to you “120 days before a campaign you can’t say ‘x’” then they can say to you “a year before the campaign you can’t say ‘x’”  because once you cross the threshold of believing that power is centered in the bureaucracy and not in the citizens, there is in the end no logical limit.

This model is, first of all, just wrong. It’s constitutionally wrong, it is wrong in terms of how America works, it’s wrong in terms of where it centers power, but there’s something more fundamental.  It has, by any objective measure, failed.  It hasn’t taken money out of politics, there’s more money today in politics then ever before; it’s just nastier money, hidden money, irresponsible money, negative money, vicious money. 

You have more negative ads and more negative emails and more negative direct mail and more negative phone calls then you ever had before we tried to regulate it.  So both at a practical level, this has been destructive of the American system because it has driven power away from the candidates to all sorts of consultants who make allsorts of money surrounded by all sorts of lawyers who figure out loopholes at a rate 40% faster than the FEC can close them. And it’s an endless game.

All we’ve done is created a huge legal thicket of total irresponsibility. It doesn’t slow down the flow of cash, literally more money was spent this year than any off year in American history, and it was spent for worse ads.  I have never seen more negative, banal and destructive campaigns than 2004 and 2006.

And to reduce America’s decisions to whether false reports about whether a National Guard record in 1970 is more important than Swift Boat Veterans just strikes me as an insane way for a free society to pick a leader in a world where we are the leading country on the planet. And yet that’s what we’ve degenerated to.

So I would propose, first of all, if you want truly free speech and you want the First Amendment to work, go back to the original meaning of “no law”, and say simply: anyone can give any amount to any candidate as long as it is reported on the internet within 24 hours. And then if you decide you don’t like who is supporting that candidate, vote against the candidate. But suddenly you’ll take out 90% of the interest groups, 90% of all these special ads, and you’ll now have candidates responsible for campaigns and candidates with resources that they control and candidates to be held accountable. And it will be a healthier, cleaner, and more honest and dramatically less lawyered system.  And all of those strike me as a good thing.

We have had, since 1963 when the Supreme Court made a fundamental mistake in suggesting that school prayer was unconstitutional, we have had a 43 year lawyer drive secular assault on the American system.  Now you saw part of it this evening, we pledged allegiance to the flag.  A number of you, probably not yet realizing that the 9th Circuit Court has ruled it was unconstitutional, probably actually said the words “One Nation Under God”.  Now, the fact that the 9th Circuit Court would rule that it was unconstitutional to say “One Nation Under God” should not tell you to quit saying it; it  should tell you to support a bill abolishing the 9th Circuit Court and getting a court that has people who understand America (LAUGHTER & APPLAUSE)

And I believe this is fundamental to the future of America.

… We started (our tour) at the National Archives, where we have a document which is political, which says: “We are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  This is very important on two levels.  First of all, we are the only society in history which has said power comes from God to you personally. Each one of you is sovereign. And then you loan power to the state, which is why our constitution begins “We the People of the United States”. Doesn’t begin “We the Lawyers”, “We the Politicians”, “We the Bureaucrats”, it begins “We the People”.

Now, if there is no Creator, then where do your rights come from? What’s the base of your freedom? Why should you be respected? And yet, in our model, we have pretty successfully, for over 200 years, protected the sanctity of your freedom against the state. It’s a very important core model.

It also raises the question of what do you teach in school, because actually, if starting in the 1st grade you simply taught the Declaration of Independence, you’d be faced with this shocking question: What did they mean by the word “Creator”? How could you explain that? You’d have to say: Gosh, they meant God. And how could you explain that?

And that’s why the secular legal assault is so profoundly wrong and so profoundly dangerous. 

So we take you from there to the Washington Monument, which at its very top says “Glory to God” … and if you read Washington’s life, he said over and over the: the survival of the Americans was a miracle. 

We then take you to the Jefferson Memorial, Jefferson often being cited as the president who was the most interested in secularism, remember he wrote the Danbury Baptists and said: We need a wall of separation between Church and state.  What no one will tell you is what he meant by that is this should not be an official state religion.  He clearly did not mean that you could not have God in public because two days after he wrote that letter he went out front of the Whitehouse, got in a carriage, road up the hill to the Capitol, and went to church in the US House which served as a church until the 1860’s. He also loaned the treasury building every Sunday as a church.

And if you go to the Jefferson Memorial he says around the very top of it: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against all forms of tyranny over the minds of man”.  Now you can ask your secular friends what do you think Jefferson meant by “I have sworn upon the altar of God’, but it’s fairly difficult for them to explain that he meant large purple banana or some other deeply symbolic meaning.  It’s quite clear if you read Jefferson’s writings in total, they meant God.

We then take you to the Lincoln Memorial which has two extraordinary documents…  first of course is the Gettysburg Address, very short, which is where the term “One Nation Under God” comes from.  And the second is the Second Inaugural, in which, in 703 words, Lincoln refers to God 14 times and has two quotes from the Bible.  You read that Second Inaugural and tell me how you can explain an America that is secular and in which God does not exist.

So I would argue that we need a serious effort to communicate to the courts that we have real limits to our willingness to have them impose on us. The Jeffersonians did this, I’ll just give you one brief historical example, the Jeffersonians in 1802 passed the Judicial Reform Act of 1802, they abolished 18 out of 35 federal courts, slightly over half. I don’t think we need anything like that radical an approach, but there is clear precedent for the legislative and executive branch saying to the judicial branch: You have gone too far and this is wrong.  And I would argue that on issues like the right to say “One Nation Under God”, we need to reassert the authority of American history over the authority of secular legalism and that this is a very serious issue about the nature of our rights as a country. (APPLAUSE)

On those two fronts I’ve suggested that we actually expand the First Amendment back to its original meaning. Increase freedom to have God in public space, increase the freedom of political speech.

The third thing I want to talk about very briefly is the genuine danger of terrorism and in particular terrorism using weapons of mass destruction and weapons of mass murder, nuclear and biological weapons.  And I want to suggest to you that we right now should be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of if it weren’t for the scale of the threat. 
 
Let me give you two examples. When the British this summer arrested people who were planning to blow up ten airliners in one day, they arrested a couple who were going to use their six month old baby in order to hide the bomb as baby milk. 
 
Now, if I come to you tonight and say there are people on the planet who hate you, and there are 15-25 year old males who are willing to die as long as they get to kill you, I’ve simply described warrior culture which has been true historically for 6 or 7 thousand years. 
 
But, if I come to you and say there’s a couple that hates you so much that they will kill their six month old baby in order to kill you, I am describing a level of ferocity, and a level of savagery beyond anything we have tried to deal with.
 
And, what is truly frightening in the British experience is they are arresting British citizens, born in Britain, speaking English, who went to British schools, live in British housing, and have good jobs.
 
This is a serious long term war, and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country, that will lead us to learn how to close down every website that is dangerous, and it will lead us to a very severe approach to people who advocate the killing of Americans and advocate the use of nuclear and biological weapons.
 
And, my prediction to you is that either before we lose a city, or if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people before they get to reach out and convince young people to destroy their lives while destroying us. 
 
This is a serious problem that will lead to a serious debate about the first amendment, but I think that the national security threat of losing an American city to a nuclear weapon, or losing several million Americans to a biological attack is so real that we need to proactively, now, develop the appropriate rules of engagement.
 
And, I further think we should propose a Geneva Convention for fighting terrorism which makes very clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction, and those who would target civilians are in fact subject to a totally different set of rules that allow us to protect civilization by defeating barbarism before it gains so much strength that it is truly horrendous.
 
This is a sober topic, but I think it’s a topic we need a national dialogue about, and we need to get ahead of the curve rather than wait until actually we literally lose a city which I think could literally happen within the next decade if we are unfortunate. So… (APPLAUSE)

My opinion? This is not an attack on the First Amendment, or any part of our Constitution. This is a call for dialogue on addressing the real concern that our enemy is using our freedoms as a tool in their war against our great nation with the ultimate goal of eliminate the very freedoms they are exploiting.
 

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 30th, 2006 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Election 2008, Politics, Terrorism, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.