First Amendment

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, H. Sterling Burnett, Research Fellow and Managing Editor of Environment & Climate News, joins Host Isaac Orr to talk about the legal efforts by the Obama administration via Attorney General Loretta Lynch and several democratic state AG’s to prosecute companies, researchers and think tanks under RICO for disagreeing with them on climate science and policy.

O’Sullivan’s Law, named after British journalist John O’Sullivan, holds that any organization or enterprise that is not expressly right wing will become left wing over time.

Controversy continues to rage over whether foods from plants modified with molecular genetic engineering techniques should have to be labeled as such. The battle has been fought for years in the media, Congress, state legislatures, federal courts and through referendum issues. Most mandatory-labeling proposals have failed, and none is currently in effect–for good reason: They fail every test–scientific, economic, legal and common sense. That hasn’t prevented the more ignorant and ideological legislators from continuing to try.

Hilbert, Wisconsin high school basketball player April Gehl was suspended six games by her school over a tweet against a new state association policy banning popular basketball and hockey chants,…

Reverence and veneration of our national flag has long been profound in the United States, far more so than in other countries. Veneration of the Stars and Stripes has evolved beyond mere respect for it as a symbol of national identity, but as an almost religious emblem of American values and the American way of life.

The issues surrounding the right to bear arms are many and varied. Most often the debate centers around the lethality of modern firearms, especially “assault weapons” that can fire rapidly with large magazines. Yet one element of the debate frequently referenced obliquely in the mainstream media concerns the actual intent and function of the Second Amendment. Some progressive groups have been endeavoring to turn the originalist position against itself, so to speak. Their arguments are often baffling to those unprepared for them, but they are easily beaten with a little preparation.

In its recent ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court struck down yet another provision of federal campaign finance law as a violation of the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee.

This time it was the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act’s limitation on the aggregate amount of contributions — presently $123,200 — that a donor may contribute to all candidates or party committees in one election cycle.

The framers of the Constitution established the First Amendment primarily to protect political speech, so the McCutcheon decision was a victory for free speech rights, as the framers intended.

Clearly the folks at CREDO Mobile aren’t at all happy with the idea of incorporated entities engaging in politics and public policy debates – a threat to democracy, and all that.

Yesterday, a “Senior Organizer” for the “Public Citizen’s Democracy Is For People Campaign” named Aquene Freechild commended the morally and fiscally bankrupt state of Illinois for becoming the 14th state…

There has never been an “official journalism guild” that enjoys specified protection under the Constitution, nor should there ever be one.

President Barack Obama’s contraception mandate has caused consternation among religious entities and employers. But most Americans probably aren’t aware this mandate extends all the way into the home, fundamentally altering…

One would be hard-pressed to find a better example of Liberal Fascism than the move by liberal politicians to ban Chick-fil-A from their jurisdictions because of the owner’s opinion on gay…