It's also worth adding that this wording makes it extend beyond the US borders. If the US Constitution granted rights to individuals, it would only apply to individuals under the US Constitution. Instead, it makes a blanket assumption that the freedom of speech exists, and that while other governments may restrict it, Congress may not. For example, overseas funding for HIV/AIDS may not be conditional on recipients having a strict anti-prostitution policy, as that would violate the free speech of the recipients[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_for_International_Devel....

It is also worth repeating, from time to time, the Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

We're torturing and holding people without charges for decades and even their entire lifetimes. We routinely ignore every single amendment and clause of the constitution when it's convenient for the government. I think what the constitution says is irrelevant at this point. The government will do what it wants irrespective of the constitution. The only dissonance here is that some people still insist on calling the US a free, democratic country. Not sure it ever really was in its history, but it sure as hell isn't now. It would help us all if we stopped this delusion.

That’s a separate ball of wax, but we do hold people captured in war in fairly inhumane conditions. I don’t agree with this policy, but it’s important to understand where the lines are being drawn.

It’s also important to remember that military tribunals are not nor have they ever been Article III courts, nor do the same standards apply in the case of war that would apply in civil or criminal cases.

Sure, but we've been at war now for 19 years or so at least (2001, possibly longer). If the time of war is every single day, then there is no time of war and the government is just using that as an excuse to justify its inhumanity. In fact, if you want to name years we haven't been at war since WWII, you're not going to get many years. But I see what you're getting at: when we're at war, the constitution is suspended. I just go a tiny step further and say the constitution has been permanently suspended. There is no difference between those positions currently, considering we are in a permanent state of war and have been so for almost two decades.

> if Congress can’t pass a law, then a President can’t enforce it because it doesn’t constitutionally exist

Yet federal health workers can be legally bound to secrecy.

The Bill of Rights is in natural conflict with itself. My rights restrict your freedoms and vice versa. This is a complicated dance that has been extensively litigated.

Federal health workers are civil servants. The restrictions on their rights are of an employer-employee variety, or of a contractural variety. Nobody put a gun to their head and told them to enter the civil service, and they can choose to leave it.

Again, go read the Bill of Rights. They are restrictions on the national government’s ability to legislate or take certain actions against you, not a grant of rights doled out to satisfy you. “You have the freedom to speak and of the press, etc.” is far less powerful and meaningful than “Congress shall make no law...”

> The restrictions on their rights are of an employer-employee variety

An arrangement defined and described by laws Congress wrote. Laws which restrict the free speech of Americans.

I agree that the negative rights of the American Constitution are far superior to the positive-rights philosophy of e.g. the UN Declaration on Human Rights, which is unenforceable ambiguous. But these rights are balanced against each other in a complex way.

It is entirely within the scope of a government to enact restrictions on the people acting on behalf of the government with government power. This is less of a contradiction than you seem to think it is. In fact, it is the point of the Constitution to restrict the government!

Even so, Congress still doesn’t have the power to prevent government employees from speaking out politically, or choosing their own church or choosing not to participate in church, or from operating a printing press that criticizes Congress, or from publishing a blog criticizing the Senators from their home State. The restrictions upon government employees are entirely within the scope of their service to the government, and no further.

Or to put it another way, since Congress shall pass no law restricting the establishment of a religion, they can’t mandate civil servants in the Department of Agriculture attend a Catholic Church while those in the Department of Justice must be of a Protestant persuasion.

> It is entirely within the scope of a government to enact restrictions on the people acting on behalf of the government with government power

HIPAA restricts what non-government people can say.

You’ve made a solid observation, and I don’t have a solid response off hand.

It’s entirely possible the penalties applied by HIPAA could fall within the boundaries of what is and what isn’t Constitutional, but it’s also possible it is unconstitutional, and unconstitutional laws get struck down all the time when they’re thoroughly challenged, but in our legal system, they have to be challenged first, meaning someone has to make the case.

Most of the HIPAA restrictions can be waived by the patient, i.e. you can contract around it, so it's really more about contractual defaults and consent than censorship.

But that's obviously still a slippery slope. You get the same sort of scenario with classified documents which are at the same time evidence of government misconduct. Everyone with access to the documents agreed not to disclose them, which means there is no one who can reveal the misconduct to the public without violating that agreement.

That's one right (speech) weighed vs another (privacy)

They can't choose tobe exempt from laws criminalizing the disclosure of classified documents. It is substantially more than just an employer relationship.

It's fascinatingly broad...how can Congress make a law, for instance, restricting someone reading aloud top secret classified documents? I suppose they had their own hand-wringing with it, since they shortly after passed the sedition act, which was also let to expire.

Sorry, but you are wrong. But that's ok, its a common misconception about constitutional law. The first amendment does carry those restrictions, but it is not the only law affecting those rights. Specifically, the "privileges and immunities" clause from the 14th amendment has extended the 1st amendment to apply to the rights of citizens and has been interpreted as such by the Supreme Court in various cases.

JA is not a US Citizen, and I admit I do not know where that lands him constitutionally speaking.

But the moment he's tried in a US court or lands in the US presumably he has those rights.

We don't treat tourists under a different Constitution or deny them 1st amendment rights.

Does he? This depends on extradition and not necessarily the 1st amendment.

The extradition request was for normal federal charges where the first amendment pretty clearly applies.

The Privileges and Immunities clause isn’t relevant to this discussion, but you’re welcome to make your case that it is.

When I tried to find out what "Privileges and Immunities" meant, IIRC, the Supreme Court had, within a few years after passage of the 14th amendment, defined it narrowly to include the right to travel from place to place, the right to sail the navigable waters of the U.S., and not much else. Has that changed?

Can you cite what case law backs up that reading?

Here is an example paper: https://www.krusch.com/real/14th.html

None of that really applies to this situation. It was that originally it wasn't clear if the 1st amendment applied to state governments as well, but the interpretations of that pre 14th amendment were that the state governments could restrict what the first amendment guarantees, and post 14th amendment state governments can't restrict the 1st amendment for citizens.

Assange is being charged with civilian, federal charges, so the citizens only interpretation doesn't really apply.