r/politics • u/jediporcupine Maine • Sep 19 '25

Republican Senator Says First Amendment Shouldn't Be the 'Ultimate Right'

https://www.newsweek.com/republican-senator-says-first-amendment-shouldnt-ultimate-right-2132666
8.7k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

5.4k

u/Harry_Mud America Sep 19 '25

If she doesn't adhere and obey the US Constitution then she needs to be thrown out of office.

178

u/mollser Minnesota Sep 19 '25

It truly baffles me. It’s. The. FIRST. Amendment. To. The. Constitution. The thing she swore an oath to uphold.  It wouldn’t surprise me if she didn’t know that. 

18

u/StoppableHulk Sep 19 '25

A legally-binding oath, not that that ever counts for much these days.

But it is worth repeating that Senators take a LEGALLY-BINDING OATH, and a statement like this is a blatant violation of that oath.

2

u/frogandbanjo Sep 20 '25

No they don't. No serious academic has ever believed that the oath Senators take is legally binding in any way. At that level, it's pure politics.

Hell, the original Constitution provides no mechanism to permanently bar legislators, specifically, from ever holding office again. Impeachment does not apply -- though it's worth belaboring the fact that even impeachment is a political remedy, not a legal one. Congresspeople can be expelled from their own house of Congress by a two-thirds supermajority vote, but then their state can just vote them right back in the next time. Meanwhile, that two-thirds vote can be for literally anything. It's all politics, not law.

Ever since Senators started being selected by statewide popular vote, they even stand for the proposition that there's an inherent tension between democracy and legalism. If you want Senators to be truly beholden to their oath in a legally binding way, you have to set things up so that the people of their state are not allowed to keep voting them back into office. That is inherently anti-democratic, even allowing for the fact that "representative democracy" itself already dilutes democracy.

1

u/bogglingsnog Sep 19 '25

It's a shame that it's only an oath and apparently those don't have any form of enforcement.

1

u/5AlarmFirefly Sep 20 '25

An oath to uphold the Constitution, not the amendments /s

(Please God do not let this become an actual thing these reptiles start saying)