Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) railed against a proposed constitutional amendment by Senate Democrats to restrict campaign speech at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights, going so far as to propose replacing the text of the Democrat’s amendment with the First Amendment, a proposal that Democrats on the committee unanimously rejected.
During the hearing, Cruz argued that the Democratic amendment would give Congress the power to severely restrict or ban political speech, stating the proposed amendment “would repeal the free speech protections of the First Amendment” and would endanger “the liberty that we revere,” a position that he shares with the ACLU, who says the proposal would “severely limit the First Amendment and would lead directly to government censorship of political speech.”
He added that he thought it strange that Senate Democrats thought they were smarter than the framers of the Constitution. In the end, he proposed an amendment to strike the text from the proposal offered by the Democrats and replace it with the First Amendment. Cruz’s amendment was unanimously rejected by the Democrats at the hearing.
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