Press[n] – a machine that is used for printing. – Cambridge Dictionary
Greetings my fellow Americans!
Before we dive into the next clause of this foundational amendment to our national Constitution, I’d like to take a moment to explain why I embarked on this deep-dive analysis of the original meaning and purpose of the Bill of Rights; the reason is twofold: (1) to cut through the noise and obfuscation about human “rights” which have been conjured up and accumulated over the years with the true intent of accruing power and control to those in government, and (2) to remind ourselves of the responsibility we have had, and still have, to maintain government Of, By and For the People which emanated from these historic words nearly 250 years ago. On to the next part of Amendment 1.
“…[n]or of the Press…;”
Popular modern-day thought assigns the noun form of “Press” here exclusively to anyone involved in the profession of journalism, i.e., news collection and presentation. In his speech to the first Congress on June 8, 1789, James Madison perhaps best encapsulated the Founders’ intent of this four-word clause: “The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.” As the second half of the clause addressing freedom of speech, and in the context of Madison’s further exposition, it becomes clear that the Founders were referring to the publication and distribution of written words, the printing press being the most advanced technology available at the time to facilitate this.
That being said, it should also be clear now that everything in Part 3 of this series as regarded free speech applies to this Part 4 as well, especially insofar as “Congress” is expressly prohibited from using its constitutional power to abridge freedom to distribute anything in writing. (I’ve explained previously that the use of the word “Congress” here implies the entire national government, by virtue of Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution). In the context of our modern-day culture, I imagine that such a lack of legal restriction on any speech, especially that considered vile, offensive, pornographic, hurtful, etc., may seem unthinkable, but that sentiment would be more an indictment of the health of our current society than on any naivete or indifference on the part of our Founders; the latter knew from their experience as British subjects that any such governmental (or government-sanctioned) abridgment would lead to far worse than exposure to objectionable speech spoken or written without censorship.
Although both halves of this “speech” clause are truly and inexorably related in the Founders’ original statement, I decided to make this focus on “the press” a separate part precisely because we have also woefully distorted the latter’s meaning to the point of believing it does not pertain to “the People,” but rather to a relatively privileged class of individuals who reserve the right to purvey “news and information” to the rest of us, and to whom special and exclusive access is granted to those in our governments who apparently have the most important things to say to the rest of us about how and why they are governing us as they do. This club also includes legal and historical “experts” who get to explain how and why we’ve adopted the societal ills we have today, and why the origins of our government Of, By and For the People is now illegitimate and hopelessly flawed. More recently, its membership also counts those who electronically publish speech under the auspices of “private companies” who are granted the right to censor any such speech with which they purportedly disagree or deem hurtful to society at-large.
That so-called private companies in the United States still have any rights to operate without permission from one or more governmental entities is illusory at best; and if the past two years have taught us anything it’s that the former will readily act largely at the behest of the latter in order to maintain their rights to operate, especially including rights to speech.
If you still believe that the U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of our land, and understand why it was written as it was, then you’ll know why the abridging of our seminal right to “freedom of speech and of the press” to which we are now regularly subjected is anathema to the American ideal, and are repulsed by the abject violation of that law. In the words of the late Nancy Reagan, we must “just say no” before we lose it completely.
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