Author Topic: The First Amendment: Freedom of Speech, Religion, & Assembly  (Read 120957 times)


Crafty_Dog

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Unfgbelievable!!!

FEC votes 3-3 to punish FOX for having undercard debate!

ccp

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« Last Edit: August 15, 2016, 09:14:03 AM by Crafty_Dog »

Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: Liberal Censors lose again
« Reply #153 on: October 04, 2016, 06:54:15 AM »
There are no permanent victories in politics, but the U.S. Supreme Court came as close as we’ll get Monday by rejecting the request by Wisconsin prosecutors to resurrect their abusive, secret campaign against Governor Scott Walker’s political allies.

You may have thought this campaign against free speech had died in July 2015 when the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the probe was “unsupported in either reason or law” and later fired Special Prosecutor Francis Schmitz. But Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm couldn’t accept his humiliation, and he and his media allies ginned up a campaign to beseech the U.S. High Court to hear the case.

The effort included the not-so-coincidental recent leak of some 1,500 pages of documents to the Guardian purporting to show scandal when there was none. On cue, the cause was picked up by the herd of independent minds at the Brennan Center for Justice, the New Yorker and New York Times.

The appeal was a long shot because the case concerned a matter of Wisconsin law. But the relentless persistence of the left in trying to prosecute political speech shows what could happen if the U.S. Supreme Court gets a five-judge liberal majority. The progressive censors will gin up cases to overturn legal precedents like Citizens United and SpeechNow v. FEC that have made it harder for government to regulate who can join with allies to influence elections.

As for Mr. Chisholm’s Wisconsin targets, they can now stop paying defense lawyers. One of those targets, Wisconsin Club for Growth Director Eric O’Keefe, went on the record with us from our first editorial in November 2013 reporting on the dawn raids and intimidation tactics. He took a risk in doing so because state law then barred targets from even speaking about their predicament.

With the Wisconsin press in the pocket of prosecutors, we were happy to help Mr. O’Keefe and the other targets fight back. The resulting legal challenges shut the probe down, and the state legislature has since rewritten its John Doe law to make such abuses less likely. Sometimes the good guys still win.

ccp

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Free speech does not mean the right to get up any where
« Reply #154 on: October 12, 2016, 01:27:42 PM »

and anytime to say whatever you like.

"My right to free speech"

What ????

What has that got to do with singing the national anthem which is what you were hired to do?

No one has the right not to be fired from their job because in the middle of their job they get up and start grandstanding on company time their political views.

Add the NBA to the NFL to my no longer watch list:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/10/12/singer-takes-knee-performing-national-anthem-nba-game/

G M

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Re: Free speech does not mean the right to get up any where
« Reply #155 on: October 12, 2016, 08:08:01 PM »

and anytime to say whatever you like.

"My right to free speech"

What ????

What has that got to do with singing the national anthem which is what you were hired to do?

No one has the right not to be fired from their job because in the middle of their job they get up and start grandstanding on company time their political views.

Add the NBA to the NFL to my no longer watch list:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/10/12/singer-takes-knee-performing-national-anthem-nba-game/

I have taken a knee when it comes to the NFL. Never really watched the NBA anyway.

Crafty_Dog

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Nat Hentoff on the First Amendment
« Reply #156 on: January 08, 2017, 03:50:42 PM »


DougMacG

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Re: The First Amendment: Freedom of Speech, Religion, & Assembly
« Reply #158 on: September 14, 2017, 06:17:17 PM »

Crafty_Dog

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Sen. Feinstein wants government to determine who is a journalist?
« Reply #159 on: October 05, 2017, 05:13:14 AM »
http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/sen-feinstein-opposes-a-free-press/

I suppose the counter argument is that if there is a shield law, there must be a definition of whom it covers , ,  ,


Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: Wedding Cake baker goes to SCOTUS
« Reply #161 on: December 06, 2017, 08:41:26 AM »
In Wedding-Cake Case, Supreme Court Weighs Clash Between Gay Rights and Religious Views
Spotlight turns to Justice Anthony Kennedy as justices challenge both sides
Baker Jack Phillips working at Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colo., in this undated photo.
Baker Jack Phillips working at Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colo., in this undated photo. Photo: eric baradat/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
By Jess Bravin and
Brent Kendall
Updated Dec. 5, 2017 2:13 p.m. ET
812 COMMENTS

WASHINGTON—Supreme Court justices wrestled with competing visions of individual rights Tuesday, vigorously debating a legal collision between a baker whose Christian faith condemns same-sex marriage and a state law requiring him to sell wedding cakes without regard to sexual orientation.

The case was the first​ major dispute to reach the high court in the wake of its 2015 ruling extending same-sex marriage nationwide, forcing the justices to evaluate that decision’s impact on private parties who, typically for religious reasons, remain opposed to the practice. ​

While federal law doesn’t explicitly protect gay couples from discrimination, more than 20 states and hundreds of local jurisdictions outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation, much as they forbid bias against customers for reasons of race, sex, religion, disability and other attributes.

Neither side’s attorneys yielded ground during the arguments, which left little clear other than the court’s recognition that both Jack Phillips, the Lakewood, Colo., baker, and the Denver couple he refused to serve, Charlie Craig and David Mullins, have significant rights at stake.

In a nod to the complexity of the case, several justices challenged lawyers representing the side they were expected to sympathize with.
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Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Donald Trump appointee championed by conservatives, suggested that the administration’s argument favoring Mr. Phillips could open the door to wider discrimination. And liberal Justice Stephen Breyer voiced concern that Colorado had been too cavalier in its treatment of the vendor’s religious views.

But empathy rarely is enough to move justices off their ideological ground, leaving the spotlight on Justice Anthony Kennedy, the maverick conservative who embodies the legal conflict within the case.

Over the past two decades, Justice Kennedy has joined, and led, the court’s liberal wing in expanding gay rights, culminating in a 2015 decision extending same-sex marriage nationwide. But Justice Kennedy also has joined fellow conservatives in easing the strict separation of church and state that had been charted by precedents dating from the 1960s.

On Tuesday, he pressed both sides toward the uncomfortable extremes their arguments could portend.

The Trump administration joined the case on the side of the baker, and the U.S. solicitor general argued on his behalf at the court Tuesday. That marked another occasion when the administration has sided with social conservatives on a high-profile issue reversing a position taken by the Obama White House.

U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco, making his first argument as the Trump administration’s high-court advocate, suggested that regardless of antidiscrimination laws, the First Amendment’s free-speech guarantee should allow businesses to reject any customer seeking their product or services for “an expressive event like a marriage celebration to which they’re deeply opposed.”

“If you prevail, could the baker put a sign in his window, ‘We Do Not Bake Cakes for Gay Weddings’?” Justice Kennedy asked. “And would you not think that an affront to the gay community?”

“I would not minimize the dignity interests to Mr. Craig and Mr. Mullins one bit, but there are dignity interests on the other side here, too,” Mr. Francisco said.

When Frederick Yarger, the Colorado solicitor general, took the lectern, Justice Kennedy upbraided the state with equal force. “Counselor, tolerance is essential in a free society, and tolerance is most meaningful when it’s mutual,” he said. “It seems to me that the state in its position here has been neither tolerant nor respectful of Mr. Phillips’s religious beliefs.”

Where Justice Kennedy questioned Mr. Francisco over the possibility of a nationwide campaign pressuring bakers to refuse service to gay couples, he told Mr. Yarger that “accommodation is quite possible” because “other good bakery shops” presumably would welcome business from engaged couples of the same sex.

The dispute arose in 2012, when Messrs. Craig and Mullins came to Mr. Phillips’s Masterpiece Cakeshop, only to be turned away within moments of expressing their interest in a wedding cake. The couple filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Division, where an administrative law judge and then a seven-member commission found the bakery must offer wedding cakes to same-sex couples on the same terms as other customers.



Crafty_Dog

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Public Square
« Reply #164 on: March 23, 2018, 08:55:12 PM »
Looking for a good summary of "public square" doctrine -- seems relevant to the Google/FB stranglehold on the public square of cyberspace , , ,


Crafty_Dog

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POTH: Cake Maker wins on narrow grounds
« Reply #166 on: June 04, 2018, 08:00:04 AM »
Supreme Court Sides With Baker Who Turned Away Gay Couple
Image
Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, exits the Supreme Court in December.CreditZach Gibson for The New York Times

By Adam Liptak

    June 4, 2018

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court sided with a Colorado baker on Monday in a closely watched case pitting gay rights against claims of religious freedom.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in the 7-2 decision, relied on narrow grounds, saying a state commission had violated the Constitution’s protection of religious freedom in ruling against the baker, Jack Phillips, who had refused to create a custom wedding cake for a gay couple.

“The neutral and respectful consideration to which Phillips was entitled was compromised here,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “The Civil Rights Commission’s treatment of his case has some elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs that motivated his objection.”

The decision, which turned on the commission’s asserted hostility to religion, left open the possibility that other cases raising similar issues could be decided differently.

“The outcome of cases like this in other circumstances must await further elaboration in the courts,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “all in the context of recognizing that these disputes must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market.”

The case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, No. 16-111, arose from a brief encounter in 2012, when David Mullins and Charlie Craig visited Mr. Phillips’s bakery, Masterpiece Cakeshop, in Lakewood, Colo. The two men were going to be married in Massachusetts, and they were looking for a wedding cake for a reception in Colorado.

Mr. Phillips turned them down, saying he would not use his talents to convey a message of support for same-sex marriage at odds with his religious faith. Mr. Mullins and Mr. Craig said they were humiliated by Mr. Phillips’s refusal to serve them, and they filed a complaint with Colorado’s civil rights commission, saying that Mr. Phillips had violated a state law barring discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Mr. Mullins and Mr. Craig won before the Colorado civil rights commission and in the state courts.

The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that Mr. Phillips’s free speech rights had not been violated, noting that the couple had not discussed the cake’s design before Mr. Phillips turned them down. The court added that people seeing the cake would not understand Mr. Phillips to be making a statement and that he remained free to say what he liked about same-sex marriage in other settings.

Gay rights groups argued that same-sex couples are entitled to equal treatment from businesses open to the public. A ruling for Mr. Phillips, they said, would undermine the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling guaranteeing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, marking the unions of gay couples second-class marriages unworthy of legal protection.

Religious groups responded that the government should not force people to violate their principles in order to make a living. The Supreme Court has long recognized a First Amendment right not to be forced to speak, they said. In 1977, for instance, the court ruled that New Hampshire could not require people to display license plates bearing the state’s motto, “Live Free or Die.”

DougMacG

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Re: POTH: Cake Maker wins on narrow grounds
« Reply #167 on: June 04, 2018, 08:25:31 AM »
With emphasis on "narrow grounds".

"the government should not force people to violate their principles in order to make a living"

Amen.  However...  the government forces all day long to violate our principles!

The Supreme Court got one right.  Narrow grounds is also right.  Justice Kennedy exercised his opportunity to leave his mark and balance his checkered record.  I hope he feels a sense of completion and closure and heads off into the sunset of living, retired Justices of the Supreme Court with Stevens, Souter and Sandra Day O'Connor.  )


« Last Edit: June 04, 2018, 08:32:19 AM by DougMacG »












Crafty_Dog

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The Censorship Party
« Reply #180 on: February 25, 2021, 07:44:12 PM »

The Censorship Party
House Democrats use a hearing to target conservative media.
By The Editorial Board
Feb. 25, 2021 6:46 pm ET




Imagine if a pair of Donald Trump’s allies in Congress had sent a letter to cable company CEOs in 2017 blasting CNN and other progressive media outlets and asking why their content is still broadcast. Then imagine that a GOP-run committee in Congress staged a hearing on the societal menace of fake news and the need for government and business to rein in the hostile press.

The media would have treated that as a five-alarm political fire, an existential threat to a free press, the First Amendment and political norms, and a step toward authoritarian rule. “Democracy dies in darkness,” and all that. Yet that’s exactly what Democrats in Congress did this week, targeting conservative media outlets, but the media reaction has been silence or approval.



On Monday Democrats Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney sent letters pressing 12 cable and tech CEOs to drop contracts with right-of-center media outlets including Fox News. Two days later the Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing about “disinformation and extremism” in conservative media. The only notable extremism on display was the majority party’s appetite for regulating and policing the free press.

Rep. Mike Doyle, chair of the subcommittee on communications and technology, declared in opening remarks that “it is the responsibility of this subcommittee to hold these institutions”—meaning press outlets he doesn’t like—“to a higher standard.” He said later that “more free speech just isn’t winning the day over the kind of speech that we’re concerned about.”



Democrats chose witnesses to lay the rhetorical foundation for press restrictions. One was Kristin Urquiza, whose father died of coronavirus and who spoke at the Democratic convention against Donald Trump. She said “the media didn’t pull the trigger” in her father’s death, “but they drove the getaway car,” because he watched and listened to news that downplayed the virus.


Rep. Eshoo bristled at Republican concerns about government officials investigating broadcast media with the aim of deplatforming disfavored networks. “I call them lies,” she said of the content described by Ms. Urquiza. “I don’t know what you call them. You call that the open market, something that’s competitive?” Rep. Marc Veasey said he saw a tension between “the freedom of speech versus other peoples’ safety.”

Chairman Rep. Frank Pallone generously conceded that the First Amendment protects speech that is “controversial” but distinguished “misinformation that causes public harm.” Apparently Mr. Pallone wants someone, perhaps the government, to determine what constitutes public harm and when speech causes it. Would two years of false Democratic narratives about Russian collusion with Mr. Trump qualify as public harm? How about apologias for riots in the streets last summer?

Progressives seem to believe that they are in a position to dictate the terms of what is acceptable speech in a more controlled media environment. As committee witness Emily Bell of Columbia Journalism School put it, “there has to be a will among the political elite and the media elite and the technology elite to actually do the right thing, as it were.” That means tightening speech restrictions. To borrow another progressive cliche, this is a dog whistle for tech companies and other businesses to censor or block conservatives if government can’t.

This thinking is dangerous at any time, but especially so now as the Democratic Party runs both Congress and the executive branch with the power to punish companies that don’t oblige. The danger is worse since most of the media are abdicating their role as defenders of the free press because they aren’t the political targets. The First Amendment dies in media darkness.

Crafty_Dog

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Strassel: Just Asking
« Reply #181 on: February 26, 2021, 03:58:35 AM »
‘Just Asking’ for Censorship
Democrats expand their effort to shut down speech by targeting newsrooms.

By Kimberley A. Strassel
Feb. 25, 2021 6:27 pm

The Democratic House majority this week put on a bold demonstration of its newest governing strategy—one it continues to perfect. Call it the “Just Asking” tactic.

The exhibit took place at Wednesday’s House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing on “disinformation and extremism in the media.” While lawmakers have spent years fretting over “disinformation” on social media, this was the first time they used a hearing to accuse news outlets of deliberately fomenting it.


The precursor to the hearing was a revealing letter sent Monday by two California Democrats, Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney. The duo demanded the CEOs of a dozen cable, satellite and broadband providers explain what “response” they intended to take to the “right-wing media ecosystem” that is spreading “lies” and “disinformation” that enable “insurrection” and provokes “non-compliance with public health guidelines.” Specifically they asked each CEO: “Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax and OANN . . .? If so, why?”

Just asking.


When Republican members of the committee and outside groups shouted censorship, Ms. Eshoo shrugged. “The First Amendment, my friends, starts with four words: Congress shall make no laws,” and she, Anna Eshoo, had no intention of enacting a law to shut down conservatives. She was merely asking “strong, important questions”—i.e., whether private regulated companies understand that (if they know what’s good for them) they’ll do the dirty work for her, thereby saving her the hassle of complying with the Constitution. She was just asking.

And why wouldn’t she? It’s been working so well for Democrats in other areas. Left-wing activists and politicians spent four years “just asking” social media companies what they intended to do about “disinformation”—today’s code word for conservative ideas. An emboldened left-leaning Silicon Valley is now happily doing Democrats’ bidding, censoring like mad. Twitter, Facebook and others are banning prominent conservatives from their platforms. Twitter locked the account of a newspaper (the New York Post) for the sin of accurately reporting unflattering news about the Democratic presidential nominee’s son. Google and Apple dropped Parler from their app stores. Amazon this week jumped into the virtual book-burning business, purging “When Harry Became Sally” by Ryan T. Anderson, a three-year-old book that addresses tough questions about gender identity.


“Right now, the greatest threat to free speech in this country is not any law passed by the government—the First Amendment stands as a bulwark,” says Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr. “The threat comes in the form of legislating by letterhead. Politicians have realized that they can silence the speech of those with different political viewpoints by public bullying.”

What was new this week was Democrats’ brazenness: their shocking and open targeting of news organizations. The left has long worked to shut down speech with which it disagrees, but officials in the past did it with more subterfuge. It came via legislation for “campaign finance reform,” or via their successful effort to push the IRS to target conservative nonprofits; or via Sen. Dick Durbin’s campaign to pressure companies out of funding free-market nonprofits. Liberal activists have honed intimidation campaigns, threatening boycotts and other actions against companies that advertise on disfavored platforms or donate to right-leaning groups.

Congress’s engagement this week is an acknowledgment of the limits of that activist effort. As Angelo Carusone, president of the left-wing outfit Media Matters keeps noting, activists have discovered that their campaign against Fox’s advertisers isn’t enough, since Fox gets much of its revenue from subscription fees. So the only way to kill it off is to bully cable companies into dropping the network. Activists began a grassroots effort to do that last year but haven’t made headway. Enter Ms. Eshoo and Mr. McNerney. (Disclosure: Fox’s and the Journal’s parent companies share common ownership, and I am a Fox News contributor.)


Democrats may have a harder time bending these providers to their demands than they did Big Tech. Carriage decisions are governed by contract law; disappearing a cable channel isn’t as easy as disappearing a Twitter account. And customers would likely revolt, with financial implications for providers.

There’s also growing political risk from the other side. The GOP finally understands what is happening and is beginning to counter it. Gov. Rick DeSantis’s vow to protect Florida’s citizens from Big Tech overreach is a shot across the censors’ bows. There’s also this week’s letter to cable providers from West Virginia’s Republican Attorney General Patrick Morrisey urging them to think “very carefully” about how they respond to Democratic pressure, given any wide deplatforming of conservative channels could very easily raise questions of “collusive, coordinated and anticompetitive behavior.”

But don’t doubt that Democrats will escalate their overt demands that companies act as their political enforcers, outsourcing the censorship the Constitution forbids. And don’t buy the excuse that this is “oversight.” As law professor Jonathan Turley told Ms. Eshoo at the hearing: “Making a statement and putting a question mark at the end of it doesn’t change the import of the statement.” This isn’t just asking. It’s an order.


Crafty_Dog

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Crafty_Dog

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« Last Edit: July 12, 2021, 04:59:27 AM by Crafty_Dog »

Crafty_Dog

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WT: Lawsuit against "actual malice" standard
« Reply #188 on: December 13, 2021, 04:41:59 AM »
Ministry suing over ‘hate group’ listing, urges Supreme Court to revisit ‘malice’

BY MARK A. KELLNER THE WASHINGTON TIMES

An evangelical Christian ministry is asking the Supreme Court to take up its 4-year-old defamation lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center, arguing that the “actual malice” standard established in the court’s landmark New York Times v. Sullivan case should be tossed.

D. James Kennedy Ministries, the namesake of the late pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, sued the SPLC in 2017 after the Birmingham, Alabama-based organization designated the media ministry as a “hate group.”

The ministry says it is far from a hate group and preaches biblical messages, including the tenet that marriage was created to be between a man and a woman.

Lower courts, citing the 1964 actualmalice standard set in Sullivan, have rejected the ministry’s claims. The Sullivan decision states that public figures must prove such malice for a defamation case to proceed.

D. James Kennedy Ministries says it’s time for that standard to be changed. It notes that several current justices have questioned the ruling.

“We think the importance of this case rests on the fact that the Southern

Poverty Law Center’s approach of creating their own definition of what constitutes a ‘hate group’ is in itself, a denial of due process,” ministry President Frank Wright said in a telephone interview. “The malice standard is literally unprovable. You can’t look into the soul of someone and say that you’ve seen that they did this act with malice.”

Attorneys for the ministry said in the court filing that the Sullivan decision creates “a more-often-than-not insurmountable bar for a public figure to plead and prove a defamation claim” that goes against “the correct, original understanding of the First Amendment.”

In New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court ruled in 1964 that “actual malice” is established when a defendant knowingly makes a defamatory statement that is false or makes the statement with a reckless disregard to its accuracy. The decision was made in the appeal of the case in which L.B. Sullivan, the police commissioner of Montgomery, Alabama, successfully sued The Times over an error-filled ad in 1960 that criticized the police force for mistreating civil rights protesters.

Republican-appointed Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch have written that it’s time for the Supreme Court to revisit Sullivan. Also taking the position were Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. “when he was working within the government” and Obamaappointed Justice Elena Kagan when she was a law professor, said attorney David Gibbs III, whose National Center for Life & Liberty represents D. James Kennedy Ministries.

“I believe our case is a perfect opportunity for them to make a decision. … We believe that being called a hate group is absolutely contrary to both what we are and the teaching of the Bible and the doctrines of the church and the ministry,” Mr. Gibbs said.

Mr. Wright, a veteran of Christian broadcasting and a former president of the Washington-based National Religious Broadcasters trade group, said he hopes a Supreme Court consideration of the ministry’s case will lead to a more equitable standard for defamation cases.

“In a system of laws like ours, there ought to be a remedy for those who rampantly, willfully, deliberately try to destroy those with whom they disagree,” he said. “That’s a public statement made by the president of the SPLC, [who] said, ‘We’d like to destroy every group listed on our hate map.’” A spokeswoman for the Southern Poverty Law Center did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

D. James Kennedy Ministries and the Coral Ridge church received threats after the SPLC designation. The church had to spend “probably hundreds of thousands of dollars” on enhanced security, Mr. Wright said. The broadcast ministry is a separate corporation from Coral Ridge, he said, but the groups share a campus.

“We’ve had to remove all signage. The church has had to pay for a police officer to be posted at the church every day,” Mr. Wright said.

He said Coral Ridge operates a 900-student Christian academy across the street from the church campus and is concerned that the SPLC designation could attract “perhaps unstable minds” who would want to harm the facility or its people.

That concern is not without precedent. In August 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins II shot a security guard at the Washington headquarters of the conservative Family Research Council. Corkins said he was influenced by the SPLC’s designation of the Family Research Council as a “hate group.” A federal judge sentenced Corkins to 25 years in prison

Crafty_Dog

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This seems rather glib to me , , ,
« Reply #189 on: December 27, 2021, 08:04:29 AM »
Government Can’t Censor the Truth About Judges
A well-intentioned bill to protect their privacy and safety runs afoul of the First Amendment.
By Thomas Berry
Dec. 26, 2021 4:57 pm ET


Can the government censor you for tweeting happy birthday to a judge? The Senate Judiciary Committee recently voted 21-0 to advance a bill that would allow exactly that. If it is enacted, every American could face mandatory take-down orders for posting basic facts online about federal judges, including birth dates, spouses’ jobs and the colleges attended by their children. Because the bill stifles access to relevant information about public officials and arbitrarily limits its restrictions to the internet but not other media, it would violate the First Amendment.

The impetus for the proposed legislation was a tragic event: the murder last year of Daniel Anderl, son of Judge Esther Salas, at their home. Here’s how the Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act would work. If you post “covered information” about a federal judge online, that judge (or a designated federal official) can send you a written request to take it down. If you don’t comply within 72 hours, the judge can sue you. If you lose, you have to take down the information and pay the judge’s legal fees and court costs.

The bill’s “covered information” includes facts often found in public directories, like the judge’s home phone number and address. It includes biographical details such as “full date of birth,” identification of minor children, and any school or employer of immediate family. The bill would thus allow significant government censorship of truthful speech about federal judges.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly struck down laws that prohibit the publication of sensitive but true personal information. In Smith v. Daily Mail (1979), the court explained that “state action to punish the publication of truthful information seldom can satisfy constitutional standards.” In Florida Star v. B.J.F. (1989), the court held that punishments for publishing lawfully obtained truthful information may be imposed “only when narrowly tailored to a state interest of the highest order.”


To escape the force of these precedents, the bill provides an exception for covered information that “is relevant to and displayed as part of a news story, commentary, editorial, or other speech on a matter of public concern.” Because the Supreme Court’s precedents dealt with “truthful information about a matter of public significance,” defenders of the bill argue that this exception saves its constitutionality. It doesn’t.


Federal judges are public figures. Truthful information about them can facilitate speech on matters of public concern, even when that truthful information is not itself posted as part of a commentary or news story. The Wall Street Journal recently published an investigative report revealing dozens of judicial conflict-of-interest violations. The investigation looked at the stock held not only by judges, but also by their spouses and minor children. If online encyclopedias and databases were no longer allowed to publish the employers of a judge’s family or even the names of a judge’s children, such investigations would be seriously hampered.

Loss of access to truthful information about public officials can mean loss of the ability to produce news and commentary. The bill’s limited exception for information “relevant to and displayed as part of” a news or commentary article doesn’t sufficiently address that fundamental problem.

Nor is the bill “narrowly tailored.” It applies only to information published on the internet, not in print, television or radio. That underinclusiveness is fatal. As the justices wrote in Florida Star, “when a State attempts the extraordinary measure of punishing truthful publication in the name of privacy, it must demonstrate its commitment to advancing this interest by applying its prohibition evenhandedly, to the smalltime disseminator as well as the media giant.”

Applying this principle, a federal court in 2017 preliminarily enjoined a California privacy law that similarly limited its restrictions to the internet. Remarkably, Sens. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), Ted Cruz (R., Texas), and Alex Padilla (D., Calif.) at the committee hearing for the federal bill praised it as explicitly modeled on California’s law, without even mentioning that adverse decision.

If passed, a federal “judicial privacy” law would likely suffer the same fate as the many similar state laws that have been struck down by the courts. Securing the safety of the federal judiciary is a worthy goal, but it’s one that can be achieved without banning truthful speech.

Mr. Berry is a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and managing editor of the Cato Supreme Court Review.


Crafty_Dog

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Ira Glasser and Bill Maher
« Reply #191 on: February 04, 2022, 05:01:29 AM »


Crafty_Dog

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ET: Jeffrey Tucker: Back to the Sedition Act of 1798
« Reply #193 on: May 03, 2022, 10:48:14 AM »


Back to the Sedition Act of 1798
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Jeffrey A. Tucker
 May 2, 2022 Updated: May 2, 2022biggersmaller Print
Commentary

For years we were told that social media is privately owned so its curation cannot be called censorship; it’s just management. Then we found out that they were working hand-in-glove with government, so the problem became murkier.

Now the next step is in place: the federal government has created Disinformation Governance Board operating out of the mega-bureaucracy Department of Homeland Security and headed by an ideological fanatic who loves lockdowns and loathes free speech.

Will the office be political? That’s the whole point. We know this from U.S. history.

The U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1789, complete with a first amendment to guarantee the right of free speech. You might think that would be the end of the story. In fact, only nine years later, the very idea of free speech got its first test with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.

For all the tendencies these days to celebrate (or condemn) the Framers’ devotion to human liberty, there were always splits and splits within them. It proved too tempting for even many among them to use violence to crush dissent with brazen attacks on free speech.

Under the guise of stopping enemies and shoring up the authority of the federal government, the Sedition Act in particular said:

And be it farther enacted, That if any person shall write, print, utter or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition within the United States, or to excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the President of the United States, done in pursuance of any such law, or of the powers in him vested by the constitution of the United States, or to resist, oppose, or defeat any such law or act, or to aid, encourage or abet any hostile designs of any foreign nation against United States, their people or government, then such person, being thereof convicted before any court of the United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years.

Two years in prison for criticizing the president? It happened. It was the law. You might have thought that such an action would be impossible given how fresh were the words of the First Amendment. But the impulse of people in power to crack down and stop the free flow of ideas is endemic to statecraft.

Do you notice that the law does not make it illegal to criticize the Vice President? That’s because he was Thomas Jefferson, the biggest critic of the Federalists.

The law also provoked public fury that ended up in a surprise victory for Jefferson as president in 1800. The laws were allowed to expire. And the anti-Federalists who were more friendly to trade and limits on government came to power while the centralists and speech controllers were held at bay for another 60 years, until the new challenge came. Then another and another. A new Sedition Act was imposed in 1918 during wartime and so on it goes.

Under this 1798 law today, probably most of social media would be illegal. Most books on politics would not be published at all. And yet it happened anyway. And yes, people were prosecuted, almost entirely the newspapers opposed to the ruling party (attacks on free speech are always a partisan matter).

Most of us were raised to believe that free speech is one of the most settled principles of law and public policy. We have recoiled at censorships of the past. We acknowledge the freedom to speak as an essential human right. We are taught the legend and lore of the struggle for it in all our years in school.

And all of this is fine… until it is actually exercised, as it is today, thanks to the mass distribution of communication technology. We are finally getting what we always wanted—the universal right and opportunity to reach the universe of humanity in an instant with thoughts of our own choosing.

And it turns out lots of people don’t like it.

It’s utterly bizarre but true that vast numbers have lost the conviction that freedom for all is better than the attempt to control. We once believed that freedom creates conditions under which truth stands a chance to emerge from the clamor, while the attempt to control ends up politicizing what we are and are not permitted to hear. Yes, freedom does not guarantee any particular result, but it does give good results a fighting chance while reinforcing other important things like human rights.

These days, that’s not good enough for some people.

What’s so striking about these debates is that censorship has never been less viable than it is today. Try to suppress access in one venue and it immediately pops up on another one. Make it clear that some ideas are not welcome here, and you inspire an invisible army of champions of that idea to build yet another venue. You can block, ban, and exclude through known technologies only to have the same pop up in another technology you didn’t know about.

And herein lies the brilliance of a decentralized and highly competitive system of information-sharing and distribution. Consider this: from the end of World War II through the Reagan presidency, there prevailed only three television networks. The government itself exercised the primary influence over the content. These networks began to think of themselves as public utilities, a ruling class, a protected elite, and they dispensed canons of the civic religion on a daily basis.

All of that was blown up in the 1990s. The cartel crumbled, creating an avalanche of speech that only grows in power today despite every attempt to crush it. Now the mainstream big media take up only a small percentage of people’s attention relative to the millions of other possible venues. Not even totalitarian regimes have successfully stopped it.

A certain group out there continues to believe that the free-wheeling world of information is the cause of the astonishing election results of 2016. Following 18 full months of dismissing and denouncing the eventual winner, while predicting the certainty of an outcome that did not happen, the public credibility of the old-line establishment news source hit new lows.

The revanchists in our midst still want to settle scores and are prepared to do that by shredding the First Amendment. The takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, not to mention the multiplicity of alternative venues threatens that scheme. Also it is very possible that the latest and most brazen attempts to shut down debate will lead to a public backlash as they did in 1800.

Mill was as correct about free speech as he was about pandemic controls. No authority can substitute for the activity, creativity, and adaptability of the human mind. We need systems that celebrate that, and not attempt surreptitious methods for imposing Orwellian-style thought control.

Ideas are more powerful than armies, and the urge to censor is an implicit recognition of that. Still, it didn’t work in 1798 and it surely cannot work in 2022.

From the Brownstone Institute

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Crafty_Dog

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Shurtleff v Boston
« Reply #194 on: May 03, 2022, 11:32:14 AM »
second

Say what you will about the current Supreme Court, and many critics are never happy, but the Roberts Court has been sonorous on religious liberty. The Justices provided another bell-ringer Monday in a 9-0 decision.

Hundreds of times, the city of Boston has let private groups hoist their flags for a few hours in the square outside City Hall. It denied zero requests until it refused an applicant asking to fly a Christian flag with a cross. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld its denial, saying Boston “engages in government speech when it raises a third-party flag,” and lifting a Christian banner “could signal the City’s embrace of that religion.”

That argument persuaded zero Justices, for good reason. The city had allowed its flagpole to host the gay pride flag, the flag of Ethiopia, and a flag of the Metro Credit Union. If that was all government speech, what message was Boston supposedly sending?

The majority opinion in the case, Shurtleff v. Boston, speaks for six Justices, three liberal and three conservative. Justice Stephen Breyer writes for the majority that Boston didn’t have a set policy on which flags to permit, and in practice it took all comers. The city employee handling applications said he typically never reviewed the flags. In effect, the pole was a public forum, and Justice Breyer says Boston unconstitutionally “discriminated based on religious viewpoint.”

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Three Justices agreed with that result but found its reasoning less than airtight. Justice Samuel Alito writes in a concurrence, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, that “government speech occurs if—but only if—a government purposefully expresses a message of its own through persons authorized to speak on its behalf.”

Even if Boston actively regulated which private flags could rise outside City Hall, it wouldn’t make them Boston’s speech. Whether a “reasonable” person would mistakenly attribute the flag to the city is also beside the point.

Justice Gorsuch digs into that last issue in a concurrence joined by Justice Thomas. The “reasonable observer” standard, he says, is rooted in the Court’s 1971 precedent of Lemon v. Kurtzman, which created a nebulous three-part test for disputes about the Constitution’s ban on the establishment of religion. The result, he adds, is that judges started to imagine how a “lazy,” “uninformed” and “irritable” onlooker might react to a flag or Christmas scene. “Just ask him,” Justice Gorsuch writes, “if he feels it ‘endorses’ religion. If so, game over.”

The Supreme Court hasn’t applied the Lemon test for “nearly two decades,” he says. Yet the First Circuit cited the precedent. “Our Constitution was not designed to erase religion from American life; it was designed to ensure ‘respect and tolerance,’” he concludes. “This Court long ago interred Lemon, and it is past time for local officials and lower courts to let it lie.”

Permanently pulping a rotten Lemon is a worthy goal, and we await the day the Court finds a chance to do it.



Crafty_Dog

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