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" Over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Scott has a neat little evisceration of Eric Posner&amp;#039;s transparent longing for the days of a circumscribed First Amendment, particularly that part of Posner&amp;#039;s argument that seems to wax nostalgic for the days when &amp;quot;Congress shall make no law...&amp;quot; translated into &amp;quot;Congress shall make no law, except as dealing with, among other issues, the Negroes...&amp;quot; Scratch an American constitutional contrarian hard enough and, eventually, you&amp;#039;ll find Alexander Hamilton Stephens lurking down there. (Speaking of whom, the trailer for Spielberg&amp;#039;s Lincoln is out there and, while Spielberg&amp;#039;s historical dramas generally have given me the feeling that someone is force-feeding me my green veggies, the cast is the bomb, including Jackie Earle Haley as a properly cock-eyed AHS, one of the truly slimiest weasels in American political history.) As Scott says... I can understand why Posner would prefer not to bring this up, but if we&amp;#039;re going to use civil rights as a rhetorical cudgel here, it seems relevant to note that the systematic repression of freedom of speech and freedom of association were crucial to the maintenance of both the slave power and the apartheid police states that emerged after Reconstruction. Odd how this doesn&amp;#039;t make it into Posner&amp;#039;s narrative about the good old days when we weren&amp;#039;t bound by the &amp;quot;symbolism&amp;quot; of providing robust protection for free speech rights. As it happens, the destructive effects of the slave power on free speech reached even into the Congress, where a gag rule was put in place in the House Of Representatives that prevented the reading of &amp;quot;petitions&amp;quot; from citizens around the country requesting that slavery be abolished in the District Of Columbia. Eventually, any mention of the word &amp;quot;slavery&amp;quot; was banned. (People now arguing for the importance of &amp;quot;civility&amp;quot; in our political discourse will be happy to know that the slaveholding congresscritters who passed the ban would have agreed wholeheartedly with them.) It was on the First Amendment that an aging John Quincy Adams made his final stand. He was one of the coldest fish ever elected president. He got his one term through a deal with Henry Clay that so outraged the partisans of Andrew Jackson \u2014 The Corrupt Bargain! \u2014 that Adams faced general congressional obstructionism of a kind that would be unseen again until January of 2009. In the next election, Jackson buried him. Adams came home to the Commonwealth (God save it!), thinking he&amp;#039;d retired, but he got talked into running for the House and, there, found himself a home. He served in the House for 17 years, eventually dying in the House chambers. In his old age, he went to war with the slave power. He fought the gag rule for over a decade. For a long time, he fought it alone. His life was threatened at least twice. He fought off an attempt to censure and to expel him. He was undaunted, and he simply never shut up, inveighing against the threat to every American&amp;#039;s freedom that slavery had become and, undoubtedly, accelerating the country toward a Civil War that Adams, at one point, thought not only inevitable but perhaps even salutary. He turned the rules of the House against his opponents, at one point arguing: &amp;quot;Let every gentleman, let every member of this House, ask his own heart with what confidence, with what boldness, with what freedom, with what firmness, he would give utterance to his opinions on this floor, if, for every word, for a mere question asked of the Speaker, involving a question belonging to human freedom, to the rights of man, he was liable to be tried as a felon or an incendiary, and sent to the penitentiary.&amp;quot; And he won and, by the time he won, he was celebrated throughout the non-slave parts of the country as a giant figure in defense of human rights. So, as it happens, no, I would not prefer that we go back to an earlier conception of the First Amendment, thank you. (By the way, if anyone wants to read more about this, the definitive study is William Lee Miller&amp;#039;s Arguing About Slavery.) "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a15935/free-speech-john-quincy-adams-13098570/>