Nonetheless, the tendency of governments to violate civil liberties to prevent "ambush marketing" at big sporting events is quite disturbing.
(Even the most ardent defender of the Supreme Court's commercial speech jurisprudence -- which is in my mind largely mistaken -- would have a hard, hard time finding against a private citizen for political commentary of that nature.)
Huh?
The commercial speech argument is that folks who gather together for commercial activity have the same free speech rights as other folks in other circumstances. That argument doesn't imply anything about stopping other people from saying things.
Here's the difference. The commercial speech argument says that any company can say "nike sucks", that the govt can not impose anti-disparagment rules. It doesn't say that Nike can insist that other folks not say "nike sucks".
I'd like to say that I don't understand how anyone can confuse the two, but we do have lots of folks who think that their free speech rights are being violated when someone else criticizes them. (If you're one of those folks, you're wrong. Your right to speak does not restrict my right to speak.)
However, it is unlikely that that action would be in the mainstream of constitutional interpretation in the US, and it is vanishingly unlikely it would be upheld if the commercial speech was also political, such as if the speech self-referentially criticized the government.
This is a statement of opinion: non-withstanding the well-established body of case law, I believe that the Supreme Court is wrong and that commercial speech has and deserves full protection under the First Amendment.
I did misstate your position, but I still don't see how that position was in what you wrote.
I think the argument is simpler, it is that "Congress shall make no law" actually means Congress shall make no law.
If people don't like what the 1st says, they should propose a new amendment, not try to pretend they can ignore what it currently says.
That ship sailed a long time ago.
One interesting thing about 1st amendment interpretation is that actual political speech (which pretty much everyone agrees was the point of the 1st amendment) is significantly more restricted than pornography even though pornography's"lack of restrictions" is justified on the basis that it is political speech....
I'd support them if the proposal was to take people using their properties for commercial advertising to court to find out is they were allowed to remove it (I suspect they would be told they cant... but you never know).
But unilateral rights? jeez.