The First Amendment Center has launched a new online series, Presidential Candidates and the First Amendment, to explore the First Amendment record and views of the 2008 presidential candidates, both Democrat and Republican. Already published: the reviews of the records and views of Democrat John Edwards and Republican Rudy Giuliani.
The article on Edwards notes that his legal career focused on personal-injury law and, "as a result, First Amendment law was not a major feature of his legal practice."
But Edwards served in the Senate from 1999 to 2005, where he was called on to take stands on several free-speech and religious-freedom issues, including the free speech-restricting McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation, which Edwards backed.
More recently, Edwards attacked the Supreme Court's decision in Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life, in which the court struck down a portion of McCain-Feingold which prohibited groups like Wisconsin Right to Life from running political ads close to an election.
In its decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., the court ruled that the Wisconsin group’s ads were clearly a form of political speech deserving First Amendment protection. "Where the First Amendment is implicated, the tie goes to the speaker, not the censor," wrote Roberts. The Court’s liberal minority would have upheld the ban on such ads.
Two days after the ruling, a victory for free-speech advocates, Edwards issued a statement attacking the ruling.
As for Giuliani, the article reviewing his record shows him to be not a very good friend of the First Amendment.
Before he became an iconic figure in the war on terror, presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani waged a prolonged war on another target: the First Amendment.
In his seven years as mayor from 1994 to 2001, Giuliani took on a wide range of public expression — from ads on the sides of buses to controversial art at the Brooklyn Museum — in legal battles that earned him a reputation for brushing aside First Amendment values in pursuit of his goal of bringing order back to New York City.
“Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do,” Giuliani said early in his tenure as mayor. “You have free speech so I can be heard.”
The New York Civil Liberties Union took the Republican mayor to court more than 20 times in First Amendment disputes, and won most of them. In April 1999, Giuliani earned a dubious distinction from the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression: a “lifetime Muzzle award,” given to spotlight his attacks on the First Amendment. “He has stifled speech and press to so unprecedented a degree, and in so many and varied forms, that simply keeping up with the city’s censorious activity has proved a challenge for defenders of free expression,” the center said at the time. And that was five months before the start of the Brooklyn Museum controversy, the best-known First Amendment target Giuliani went after.
Read the whole Giuliani/First Amendment review here.
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