EDITORIAL: Resolution in Carson City urges U.S. Senate to amend the Bill of Rights

Democrats in the state Legislature have proposed a measure that seeks — for the first time in the history of our republic — to alter the Bill of Rights to empower the government at the expense of freedom and liberty.

Senate Joint Resolution 2 urges the U.S. Senate to pass a constitutional amendment allowing Beltway bureaucrats to police political speech under the guise of good government.

The proposal is the latest progressive effort to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the justices held that limits on independent political expenditures violate the Constitution’s free-speech protections. The ruling triggered howls of protests from those seeking to limit the role of money in politics.

“It’s a problem of a concentrated money from relatively few sources,” said Jeff Clements, president of American Progress, which is pushing state lawmakers to support SJ 2.

What Mr. Clements fails to mention, however, is that revising the First Amendment would be a victory for censorship and repression. Let’s remember that Citizens United involved the government’s attempt to use campaign finance law to suppress an unflattering documentary of Hillary Clinton as a presidential campaign neared. During oral arguments before the high court, the deputy solicitor general defending the law admitted it could also be used to ban books.

Liberals may recoil at the thought, but the hyper-activist government they advocate breeds the cash-rich influence peddlers they constantly decry. The most effective way to get money out of politics would be to embrace a government that respects its constitutional boundaries rather than one that meddles in every conceivable facet of daily existence.

Nevada lawmakers tempted to support Senate Joint Resolution 2 should explain why they favor giving federal authorities the power to jail book publishers or other dissenters simply seeking to express their political opinions.