“[We are not] arguing for a right to lie. We’re arguing that we have a right not to have the truth of our political statements be judged by the Government.”
With this simple argument, the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List PAC and its attorneys successfully convinced a federal judge last week to throw out Ohio’s Orwellian political false-statements law. The Ohio law, which threatened up to six months in jail for those running political ads deemed to be false by a state panel, will not be missed by those who love the First Amendment.
There is no question that politicians frequently lie or at least bend the facts on the campaign trail. As frustrating as this may seem, the Supreme Court has correctly pointed out on several occasions that there is no more effective remedy for falsehood than the truth. Writing in favor of Susan B. Anthony, Federal District Judge Judge Timothy S. Black even quoted from the Netflix series House of Cards: “There’s no better way to overpower a trickle of doubt than with a flood of naked truth.”
The best part about the truth is that it usually wins, contrary to what many people think. The political graveyard is littered with the bodies of politicians who told outrageous lies about their opponents, only to be slapped down by journalists and the public. Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, may soon join them for his ad blaming his Republican opponent for causing a gruesome murder. All it earned him was a “pants-on-fire” rating and a lot of grief.
Even more importantly, any law that empowers government panels to judge the truth and falsity of campaign statements is bound to behave according to political motivations. Not only could obviously true statements be ruled false, as Judge Black noted, but even statements that are best taken as expressions of opinion (“John Kerry is a flip-flopper”) could be suppressed by a sufficiently determined and partisan government panel right up until until election day. Such an arrangement would be antithetical to America’s political culture, to say nothing of the offense against the Constitution.
The final victory in the Susan B. Anthony case comes after an earlier trip all the way to the Supreme Court. All nine justices agreed that the PAC had a right to seek injunctive relief against the Ohio law, lest it intimidate them out of engaging in further election advocacy.
As great a victory as this ruling is for free political expression, freedom’s fragility was also on display last week. Fifty-four of the 55 Democrats in the U.S. Senate voted to weaken the First Amendment protection of political speech. Their proposed constitutional amendment would have granted both Congress and state legislatures plenary power to regulate political spending. This, in turn, will doubtless prompt both Congress and state legislatures to attempt to regulate the content of paid political messages as well.
Should Democrats ever succeed in curtailing the free political speech that Americans currently enjoy, the Ohio Speech Police might make a comeback. Lovers of the First Amendment beware.
