EDITORIAL: Nevada’s new U.S. senator, Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, jumps on board the effort to amend the First Amendment

Barely a month in office and Nevada’s new U.S. senator, Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, now announces that she favors government censorship of certain books, movies and other communication.

On Friday, Sen. Cortez Masto jumped on board a progressive effort to rewrite the First Amendment under the guise of good government. The move intends to give bureaucrats the power to limit political speech. If passed, it would be an intentional effort to impair the Bill of Rights.

“The Democracy for All Amendment,” Sen. Cortez Masto said in a release, “returns the right to regulate elections to the people by clarifying that Congress and the states can set reasonable regulations on campaign finance.”

The measure would repeal Citizens United and other U.S. Supreme Court decisions which recognized that groups and individuals have a free speech right to express themselves through financial support for political causes.

Let’s remember that when the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill was argued before the high court in 2009 during the Citizens United case, the deputy solicitor general for the United States told the justices that the law could indeed be used to ban books.

Further, don’t forget that Citizens United concerned the government’s efforts to use campaign regulations to stop a filmmaker from airing a documentary during election season that was critical of Hillary Clinton.

Criminalizing the publication of a book? Erecting government hurdles to the distribution of a film because of its content? How does this comport with the First Amendment?

Yet Sen. Cortez Masto says she is “proud” to get behind a constitutional rewrite that would increase the authority of federal agents to curtail free expression while imposing restrictions on participants in the political debate.

If the Nevada senator and her fellow Democrats were truly interested in limiting the role of money in politics, they would eagerly embrace reforms intended to confine the obese Washington bureaucracy to its constitutional boundaries. That would reduce the need for special interests to shower protection money on Beltway politicians in search of special favors or protection.

But that reality conflicts with the a central tenet of modern liberalism, which rejects the limited government of the Founders in favor of a condescending paternalism that depends on an unceasing expansion of the federal administrative state.

Instead, Catherine Cortez Masto and other supporters of the amendment prefer to throw their support behind a proposal that will empower the campaign police to ban certain books, movies and pamphlets.