Barack Hussein Obama’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, upper west side New Yorker Elena Kagan, in 1996, wrote an article for the University of Chicago Law Review entitled, “Private Speech, Public Purpose: The Role of Governmental Motive in First Amendment Doctrine.” Kagan argued that government has the right, even considering the First Amendment, to restrict free speech, when the government believes the speech is "harmful", as long as the restriction is done with good intentions.
The problem with these laws that restrict the First Amendment, such as campaign finance rules, are the words "good intentions." Whose good intentions is the question to be asked, and usually those are the intentions of government power and its liberal bureaucrats, who seek to expand government authority and restrict freedom of speech, and not the intent of the Founding Fathers of our constitution, who sought to eliminate rules against fundamental freedoms.
Kagan failed as a nominee to the Federal appeals court under the Clinton Administration, when Senator Orrin Hatch refused to even schedule a hearing on her nomination.
In October 2003, Kagan sent e-mail to students and faculty while she was Dean of Harvard Law School deploring that military recruiters had shown up on campus. It read, "This action causes me deep distress. I abhor the military’s discriminatory recruitment policy." She also wrote that it was "a profound wrong — a moral injustice of the first order."
Being against both strict construction of the First Amendment and military recruitment at Harvard in a time of war are not good positions for any judge to take, let alone a nominee for the Supreme Court. I suspect a lot more will be coming out about Elena. Republican candidates for U.S. Senate should be taking note of the developing confirmation of Kagan. If I were Barbara Boxer, I would find my support for the Kagan nomination an increasing distraction.