Political Quotes

“Congress would certainly have the authority to pass just such a law, I say, Mr. President, to my friend from Kentucky. I think as a former State attorney general, he has argued a number of cases in the Supreme Court. I would probably be willing to take that challenge on a reasonable basis to the Supreme Court of the United States, and I might well win at that $50,000 figure. But the vice of this constitutional amendment is that I would have to do that in the first place, and there would be an argument that that was a reasonable limitation. When we start down this road, we put the right of free speech and political matters of the people of the United States into the hands of Congress. As the Senator from New Mexico said earlier, each of us believes sufficiently in this system to hold the opinion that most of the time we do the right thing and that almost all of the time we try to do the right thing. We are probably least likely to do the right thing when it affects our own individual fates and our own individual careers. Even when we are, we sometimes, at least, can make mistakes. That, I must say, is obviously the reason that Madison and the first Congress wrote the first amendment in unequivocal terms with a primary focus on political speech. They simply did not wish to give this authority to Congress, and they were right.”