How SCOTUS could 'drastically shrink' First Amendment 'protections' if Trump wins: analysis

With its 6-3 GOP supermajority, the U.S. Supreme Court is now, critics say, dominated by hard-right ideologues. But in an article published on August 12, Vox's Ian Millhiser warns that the High Court could move even further to the right if former President Donald Trump defeats Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. And if that happens, Millhiser argues, there is a good chance that the First Amendment will suffer.

"The good news for proponents of free speech is that, based on the Court's most recent First Amendment decisions, it does appear to have a 6-3 majority in favor of preserving the post-1960s understanding of that amendment," Millhiser writes. "The bad news is that there are three justices willing to drastically shrink the protections offered by that amendment. And those three could easily swell to five if former President Donald Trump gets to appoint more justices to the Court."

Millhiser adds, "Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one member of the Court's pro-free speech majority, is now 70. Chief Justice John Roberts, another member of that majority, will turn 70 shortly after the next president is inaugurated."

READ MORE: Trump is losing it because he's afraid of losing

The Vox journalist notes that Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch "have openly called for New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), the fount of press freedom in the United States, to be overruled" — and Trump agrees with them.

"More broadly, Sullivan stands for the proposition that state governments cannot use defamation law to maliciously target the press," Millhiser explains. "If a reporter makes a serious error, that reporter may still be liable for defamation. But governments that want to shut down a newspaper cannot simply wait until a reporter misremembers which song was sung at a rally, and then pounce with a multi-million-dollar lawsuit."

Millhiser points out that many times in U.S. history, the First Amendment has come under attack — from the Comstock Act to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) "ramping up his witch hunts against suspected communists."

"In the American system, where justices serve until they retire or die, no one can be sure how much power each president will have to reshape the Constitution," the Vox journalist observes. "A vote for Trump is a vote to roll the dice on a drastically different vision of free speech in the United States — one that bears far more resemblance to the not-so-distant past than it does to anything most modern-day Americans have experienced."

READ MORE: Inside the GOP plot to silence Texas voters

Read the full Vox article at this link.