Welcome to the Collective…Justice Breyer turns the First Amendment on its head.

James Taranto:

In his plurality opinion in yesterday’s free-speech case, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, Chief Justice John Roberts notes an anomaly in contemporary “liberal” First Amendment jurisprudence: “If the First Amendment protects flag burning, funeral protests, and Nazi parades–despite the profound offense such spectacles cause–it surely protects political campaign speech despite popular opposition.”

We’d take the point a step further. The examples Roberts cites all involve fringe politicalexpression. But the First Amendment also protects outré speech outside the political realm–most notably pornography, the subject of a great deal of Supreme Court jurisprudence over the past few decades, in which judicial liberals took the lead in expanding free-speech rights.

In recent years something of a consensus has emerged. When the court extended First Amendment protection to “depictions of animal cruelty” (U.S. v. Stevens, 2010) and violent video games (Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 2011), the decisions were written by Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia, respectively, for 8-1 and 7-2 majorities.

So why have the court’s “liberals” adopted a hostile attitude toward political speech, which has long been understood as being at the core of First Amendment protection? In his McCutcheon dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer elaborates the theory behind this odd development.

We should note that Breyer has proved more willing than his liberal colleagues to uphold restrictions on nonpolitical speech. He was one of the two dissenters (with JusticeClarence Thomas ) in Brown v. EMA, which involved a statute restricting sales of games to minors. He also dissented in U.S. v. Playboy Entertainment Group(2000), which invalidated limits on sexually explicit cable TV programming.

But in both those cases Breyer was alone among the court’s liberals. In McCutcheon, his dissent gained the support of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. It’s a familiar pattern: A series of high court rulings pitting campaign finance restrictions against free speech, beginning in 2007, have been decided 5-4, with the same majority as in McCutcheon and the identity of the dissenters varying only by virtue of changes in the court’s personnel.

Yesterday’s decision was fairly narrow. It invalidated a statutory provision limiting the total contributions an individual could make to congressional candidates, party committees and political action committees during an election cycle. But it let stand the limits on contributions to each candidate or committee. That means, among other things, that a contributor may now give to as many candidates as he wants, but only $5,200 apiece ($2,600 each for the primary and general election). Thomas argued for striking down the individual limits too, which is why Roberts’s opinion did not command a majority.

In making the case for the constitutionality of restrictions on campaign contributions, Breyer advances an instrumental view of the First Amendment. He quotes Justice Louis Brandeis, who in 1927 “wrote that the First Amendment’s protection of speech was ‘essential to effective democracy,’ ” and Brandeis’s contemporary Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who in 1931 argued that ” ‘a fundamental principle of our constitutional system’ is the ‘maintenance of the opportunity for free political discussion to the end that government may be responsive to the will of the people” (emphasis Breyer’s).

After citing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (!) views on the shortcomings of representative democracy, Breyer quotes James Wilson, one of the Founding Fathers, who argued in a 1792 commentary that the First Amendment’s purpose was to establish a “chain of communication between the people, and those, to whom they have committed the exercise of the powers of government.” Again quoting Wilson, Breyer elaborates: “This ‘chain’ would establish the necessary ‘communion of interests and sympathy of sentiments’ between the people and their representatives, so that public opinion could be channeled into effective governmental action.”

And here’s how Breyer sums it all up: “Accordingly, the First Amendment advances not only the individual’s right to engage in political speech, but also the public’s interest in preserving a democratic order in which collective speech matters.”

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