I’d also add that, regarding the stuff on political speech in particular, we have a legal history of Congress refusing to budge specifically on First Amendment matters involving foreign restriction of speech of Americans.
British libel law is far more favorable to plaintiffs than American libel law, due in part to the First Amendment in the US. So what a number of plaintiffs who kept being unable to sue someone over libel in the US tried doing was “libel tourism” – taking their case to a foreign jurisdiction and finding an angle to try to claim that jurisdiction applied and then trying to get judgements there and then to get the US to enforce it in the US.
Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It is a book written by counterterrorism researcher Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, director of the American Center for Democracy and the Economic Warfare Institute. It was published by Bonus Books of Los Angeles, California in August 2003.
The book became the subject of international legal controversy when the Saudi businessman Khalid bin Mahfouz and his sons, Abdulrahman and Sultan, alleged in the book to be terrorist financiers, sued the author for libel in London. Although the book was not published in the United Kingdom, the lawsuit was made possible when 23 copies were purchased in England via online booksellers, and a chapter of the book was published for a short time on ABC TV’s website. Ehrenfeld refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the British courts and did not appear to defend the suit. The High Court of Justice ruled against her by default. The court ordered her and her publisher to pay £10,000 in damages to each of the three plaintiffs, with an additional £80,000 costs for a total of £110,000. Further distribution of the book from the United States was also prohibited with a previous injunction being continued.[3] Ehrenfeld was also ordered to publish a correction and apology, but had no intention of complying.[4][5]
The Securing the Protection of our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage (SPEECH) Act is a 2010 federal statutory law in the United States that makes foreign libel judgments unenforceable in U.S. courts, unless either the foreign legislation applied offers at least as much protection as the U.S. First Amendment (concerning freedom of speech), or the defendant would have been found liable even if the case had been heard under U.S. law.
The Act was passed unanimously in both the House of Representatives and the Senate (as H.R. 2765) before being signed by President Obama on August 10, 2010.