Democrats seeks constitutional convention to limit free speech

Democrats: "Let's limit free speech."

• Leftist California loons want to limit the free speech of businesses that oppose Socialism.  
• But the speech of unions who fund the Democrat Party with dues taken by force from their membership is "protected". 

There hasn't been a U.S. constitutional convention in 225 years, and it would take a daunting number of states, 34, to call another one.

That didn't deter Democratic legislators this week from making California the second state, after Vermont, to demand a nationwide gathering of delegates for a single purpose: to propose an amendment repealing the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 decision that allowed unlimited corporate spending on political campaigns.

On a party-line vote of 23-11, with little debate, the state Senate on Monday approved AJR1, asking Congress to call a constitutional convention that would draft an amendment allowing limits on corporate campaign financing.

The amendment would declare, among other things, that money is not speech and that corporations do not have the same scope of political rights as human beings reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

"I doubt our founding fathers had the free-speech rights of multinational and foreign corporations in mind when they drafted the First Amendment," said Assemblyman Mike Gatto, D-Los Angeles, author of the resolution.

The Assembly had previously approved the measure, which now will be submitted to Congress. It does not need Gov. Jerry Brown's approval because AJR1 is a resolution rather than a proposed law.

A number of state legislatures, including California's in 2012, have passed symbolic measures urging Congress to approve and submit to the states a constitutional amendment overruling Citizens United. But only California and Vermont have approved resolutions invoking a constitutional procedure that requires a convention when two-thirds of the states - 34 - formally request one.

An amendment becomes part of the Constitution when ratified by legislatures in three-fourths of the states, or 38.

Other constitutional amendments have been proposed at the state level in the past, including a still-pending proposal to require a balanced federal budget, and have never reached the threshold required for a convention. The partisan divide over campaign finance would appear to make any such amendment a long shot at best, but Gatto said it's far from hopeless.

"In every state there are people upset about money in politics," including some Republicans, he said.