In response to Citizens United, the Democratic party has attempted something truly remarkable and flatly insane: the repeal of the First Amendment. Every Democrat in the Senate, under Harry Reid’s bilious leadership, voted to repeal the First Amendment. They assure us that whatever diminished protection remains for free speech will protect journalists and the like while allowing for the regulation of corporations, but this runs into the problem just described: American law makes no distinction between corporations whose literary output is journalism and those whose literary output is political advocacy subject to regulation. And, indeed, such a distinction would be impossible to make. The Washington Post produces first-rate journalism, but its op-ed page contains plain political advocacy of precisely the sort that the government sought to censor in the Citizens United case. And in terms of corporate expenditures, it costs a great deal more to put out the Washington Post’s Sunday edition than it does to make a low-budget advocacy film like Hillary: The Movie. A proper press set-up can cost more than $100 million; a copy of Apple’s Final Cut Pro X is only $300.

Even if there were a straightforward way to distinguish journalism from other kinds of communication, other problems remain. For one, doing that would amount to licensing journalists and their publications, which presents First Amendment problems of its own and is obviously undesirable for a hundred other reasons. Another problem is that the First Amendment is intended to protect many kinds of speech, not just journalism. In fact, the First Amendment is intended to protect political advocacy full stop.

Democrats are intent on empowering themselves to suppress advocacy that they find distasteful or disagreeable. They might call these efforts a fraud case, as in the laughable persecution of Exxon and free-market think tanks critical of progressives’ preferred global-warming policies; they might call these efforts “campaign-finance reform,” as in their attempt to censor a film critical of Mrs. Clinton. They might, like CNN’s dotty Chris Cuomo, insist that there exists a category of so-called hate speech that exists outside of First Amendment protections, never mind that it is repugnant speech that constitutional safeguards are there to protect, anodyne speech needing no such security.