JOHN BRUMMETT Advertisement

When it all goes nuts like this, I like to offer one of those columns providing a glimpse of my e-mail exchanges with treasured readers.

Let us stipulate, as always, that I paraphrase and synthesize to enhance flow and context while preserving essence and space.

Remember, too, that I will always win arguments conducted in this space.

Reader: Comrade Brummettowski -- I call BS.

You say Blanche Lincoln is in the middle on health care and hasn't decided on anything. Since you obviously have her ear, then you know full well she intends to vote with Comrade Hussein Obama.

And, oh, yeah, bless her heart. She only gets hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary and benefits from the taxpayers, including better health insurance than they're offering any of us, and then here you come to try to make us feel sorry for her because a few voters wanted to come to one of her closed meetings.

Bleep you, you blankety-blank.

Me: I don't know how you could say she's going to vote with Obama when we don't know from one day to the next whether Obama would vote with Obama.

Yes, I sometimes speak with her, but usually with the phone held away from my ear because I tire of her verbose affinity for insider jargon. But one thing she says that I find compelling is this: If we got everyone who is eligible for Medicaid actually on Medicaid, and everyone who is eligible for children's insurance actually on children's insurance, and then if we would have some kind of default program to steer uninsured people into when they came to the emergency room, well, I suspect I'm getting into too much pragmatic detail here and too far from the angry name-calling you mistake for political thought.

You probably agree with that goofy Dick Armey that mandatory membership in government programs is tyranny.

Meeting with constituents of an opposing political persuasion is overrated. Yeah, I said it. Feel free to quote me there in Bella Vista. It's just an excuse for people to shout and mindlessly defend turf. That's what talk radio and cable television news are for. Dialogue is only productive if someone is listening, and no one does that anymore.

Free speech is great. I'm all for it, of course. But just remember this: When speech is free, words can come cheap.

Give me a senator who spends her time studying the issues rather than getting screamed at by a bunch of name-calling blowhards.

There's only one political meeting that counts, and that's Election Day. Just go vote. Express yourself by the power of the ballot.

Reader: Blanche caught in the middle? What nonsense. She's going to vote with the insurance industry and her corporate masters, like always.

Me: I need to introduce you to a guy who calls me Comrade Brummettowski.

Reader: Vic Snyder said on Fox just now that he doesn't even know what a health care co-operative is. Someone needs to tell him it's just government health insurance by another name. Or maybe we shouldn't tell him. If we can keep him ignorant, maybe he'd actually vote against this Marxist plot.

Me: What in the world was Vic doing on Fox? Is he that desperate these days to get out of the house and away from those screaming kids?

Where do you live? Are you served by a rural electric co-operative? Are you a Marxist?

Thank you for demonstrating vividly how it is that pragmatic compromise cannot work on this issue for Democrats. They back away from a single-payer system for a public option, and you call the public option a Trojan horse for single-payer. So they back away from a public option for nonprofit co-operatives, and you call the co-operatives the same Marxism by a different name.

I'm beginning to think they should go back to single-payer and cram it down your throat, since it's all the same to you.

Reader: Forgive my feeble-mindedness, but ... what is health care reform? How much will it cost? Who will pay?

Me: Don't know yet. A lot. Probably the next couple of generations.

John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.

WASHINGTON -- It began with the proliferation of campus "speech codes" ostensibly designed to promote civility but frequently used to enforce political conformity. The new censorship accelerated with the McCain-Feingold legislation that licenses government regulation of the quantity, timing and content of speech in political campaigns.

Now the attack on First Amendment speech protections has taken an audacious new turn, illustrated by a case being pondered by a Texas judge. He is being asked to collaborate in the suppression of a book, and even of expressions of approval of the book.

The book arises from an abuse of the power of eminent domain by the city of Freeport, Texas, but the story really begins in Connecticut. There, in 2000, New London's city government condemned the property of middle-class homeowners in an unblighted neighborhood for the purpose of getting the property into the hands of commercial interests that would pay more taxes. In 2005, in the Kelo case, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld, 5-4, New London's rapaciousness as a constitutional taking of property for what the Fifth Amendment calls a "public use." Rapacious people around the country salivated.

When Kelo was decided, H. Walker Royall, a Dallas developer, already had designs on some property that for more than a decade has belonged to the Gore family shrimping business in coastal Freeport. In 2003, Royall signed an agreement with that city's government to build a yacht marina, hotel and condominiums using property the city would seize by eminent domain.

The day after the Supreme Court made its Kelo mistake, Freeport intensified its pressure against the Gores, whose stout resistance caught the gimlet eye of Carla Main. An experienced journalist (former associate editor of The National Law Journal, she has written for The Wall Street Journal, National Review and numerous other publications), Main has recounted the case in her book "Bulldozed: 'Kelo,' Eminent Domain and the American Lust for Land." Her thesis is that many "takings" of property for economic development are taking a terrible toll on the rights of everyday Americans.

In October 2008, Royall sued Main and her publisher (Encounter Books), seeking monetary damages and a ban on further production and distribution of the book. He also sued the Galveston newspaper that reviewed the book and the reviewer. A judge dismissed, on jurisdictional grounds, Royall's suit against Richard Epstein, professor of law at the University of Chicago and New York University, whose offense was a dust-jacket endorsement of the book as a report on an "unholy alliance" between government and a private interest.

Royall's suit charging Main with defamation is, her lawyers document, riddled with mischaracterizations of what Main writes and about whom she writes it, and ignores long-established criteria of defamation law, which holds that a statement is not actionable as defamatory if the speaker obviously is expressing a subjective view or an interpretation, theory, conjecture or surmise.

Indeed, so slapdash are Royall's accusations against Main that his suit seems to reflect nothing more substantial than his dislike of her opinions and those of people she accurately quotes. It seems intended to chill commentary on eminent domain abuse by exposing commentators to the steep costs of deflecting even frivolous litigation.

The Institute for Justice -- an Arlington, Va.-based public-interest group that represented the victims of eminent domain in New London; it also is assisting the Gores -- identifies a national trend of attempted intimidation by litigation. For example, in Clarksville, Tenn., the institute successfully defended a group of property owners sued for $500,000 by a city councilman and a business interest claiming injury by a newspaper advertisement objecting to their eminent domain plans. In Renton, Wash., two developers sued a woman for statements she made while resisting a blight designation of her property, including, for example, that one of the developers is "a haughty and proud Pharisee."

The Supreme Court is blameworthy for two entangled abuses. It diluted property rights in the Kelo case and it weakened freedom of speech by not overturning McCain-Feingold. Fortunately, in an unusual Sept. 9 session, the court will hear, for a second time, oral arguments in a case arising from that law's speech restrictions.

The court should be cognizant of the attacks on property rights that its Kelo decision incited. And on Sept. 9 it should remember the increasing resort to restrictions of speech. McCain-Feingold is both a symptom and an encouragement of such restrictions.

DISCLOSURE: The author is a member of the board of the MacArthur Foundation, which provides some funding for the Institute for Justice.

George Will's e-mail address is georgewill(at)washpost.com.

(c) 2009, Washington Post Writers Group