And this was the first ... (re: post below, on SCOTUS/Obamacare ruling) ...
The
U.S. Supreme Court has pretty much kicked the First Amendment’s freedom of
speech clause to the curb – and you can blame one of the most conservative
voices for that, Justice Clarence Thomas.
In
a ruling just handed down Monday, the court found in Texas Department
of Motor Vehicles Board v. Texas Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans the government
does indeed have the authority to regulate political speech.
Yes,
that’s the ruling: The government can now legally regulate private citizens’
political speech.
The
justices should have glanced at the statements of one of their colleagues, Justice
Thurgood Marshall, who in 1972 made it clear: “Above all else,
the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression
because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content. To
permit the continued building of our politics and culture, and to assure
self-fulfillment for each individual, our people are guaranteed the right to
express any thought, free from government censorship. The essence of this
forbidden censorship is content control.”
Content
control, indeed. And content control on the part of the government toward the
free American citizen is what we now have.
The
court case began as a spat over what constituted a proper license plate in
Texas. The Sons of Confederate Veterans thought a little emblem of the rebel
flag to the left of the tag number would be OK – especially since the state’s
Department of Motor Vehicles Board regularly and with seeming abandon pretty
much approved all the other requests for specialty plates – roughly 350 of them.
But
the Texas DMV Board, to paraphrase, said, “No, Sons of Confederate Veterans,
your confederate flag is offensive.” So the two sides went to court. And the
Sons of Confederate Veterans argued what would seem to be the obvious: that the
government board was breaking First Amendment free speech provisions. One court
found in favor of the DMV Board; another, for the vet group. Enter the U.S.
Supreme Court.
In
an opinion written by Justice Stephen
Breyer,
the court’s conclusion was the government just “would not work” without having
the right to determine what constitutes rightful and proper free speech. He then
posed from left field: “How could a state government effectively develop
programs designed to encourage and provide vaccinations, if officials also had
to voice the perspective of those who oppose this type of immunization?”
Can
you say, whaaat?
But he clarifies: Allowing the
Confederate flag on the license plates could give the impression the Texas
government endorses the rebel emblem, Breyer said.
Sanity
seems to have made a brief appearance, on the wings of Justice Samuel
Alito
who wrote in his dissenting opinion: Dude, that’s just stupid. Referencing the
license plates in Texas that carry Dr. Pepper and NASCAR emblems, Alito asked,
“Would you really think that the sentiments reflected in these specialty plates
are the view of the State of Texas and not those of the owners of the cars?”
But
it was too late. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan
had already cast their constitutional caution to the wind and joined with
Breyer – and, in a shocker to a conservative’s core, so did Thomas. One can
only guess he had personal reasons and a personal vendetta against the rebel
flag, because constitutionally speaking – the ruling just bites.
Think
this is a license plate matter confined to Texas? Or maybe a cause for silently
applauding the court’s boldness in booting that much-hated Confederate flag?
Well,
it’s not. It’s a massive First Amendment ding. And now we’re already feeling tremors
elsewhere. Right after the Supreme Court released its horrific Texas ruling, a
federal judge in Manhattan issued one of his
own,
putting the halt on Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative to post
ads on city buses and subway cars of a menacing man with a masked face
alongside warnings about radical Islamists. The case of Geller versus the
Metropolitan Transportation Authority had traversed a similar path as the Sons
of Confederate Veterans – it led to a court fight about so-called offensive
speech, which led to a First Amendment win for Geller, which led to the MTA’s
sulky decision to quit posting any and all political ads.
Now
curiously, right after the Supreme Court decided government can in fact control
political speech, the same judge who previously found in Geller’s favor then
ruled that the MTA ban on all ads moots his earlier support of her cause based
on the First Amendment. That means she can’t put up her political ads after
all. As Geller’s attorney rightly raged: So the
government gets to break the First Amendment and then simply change its rules
to “avoid the consequences of its unlawful behavior?”
They’re
vowing to pursue the matter all the way to the Supreme Court. Let’s hope Thomas
has recovered his senses when they arrive.
No comments:
Post a Comment