Jerry Nadler: “this debate is an exercise in surrealism. The Supreme Court recently handed down a decision directly on point. What the…”

“this debate is an exercise in surrealism. The Supreme Court recently handed down a decision directly on point. What the sponsors of this bill are trying to do is to overturn a Supreme Court decision that they do not like by statute. We know we cannot do that. Congress cannot overturn a Supreme Court decision. Now, it is elementary that the first amendment says that one can say, write, draw, or photograph and distribute whatever one wants. The Supreme Court has made one exception to that, or a number of exceptions. One exception is obscenity. If it is obscene, one cannot ban it. There is another exception: where, to protect children from exploitation, we can stop the distribution of child pornography, defined as pornography that shows children. Why? To protect the children who are exploited in making it. Now, if the material is itself obscene, we can ban it anyway; but if it is not in itself obscene, it has to be real children, because those are the people we are protecting. The Court clearly said the government cannot criminalize images which are not obscene unless the product involved actual children, because if it does not, the images do not fall outside the protection of the first amendment.”