Category Archives: rights

Free Speech

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We got a good look at the Democratic Party’s view of free speech and press collusion during Tuesday’s debate between Democratic Party Vice Presidential candidate Senator Tim Kaine (VA) and Republican Party Vice Presidential candidate Governor (IN) Mike Pence.

Kaine was so disdainful of what Pence was saying, Kaine was so fearful of letting the audience in the hall and the wider audience watching on television that he kept trying to interrupt Pence in mid-sentence and constantly talked over Pence whenever the Pence started to say anything of which Kaine personally disapproved.  Kaine actually interrupted Pence some 70 times—nearly once per minute in the 90 minute debate.  And since the nominal structure of the debate had each of the two originally speaking roughly half the time, that means Kaine just was constantly trying to shout down Pence at every turn.

When Pence protested at one point, Kaine interrupted the objection in mid-sentence, asking “Isn’t this a discussion?”  Indeed, they were in the discussion part of the exchange on a question.  But what Kaine was carefully ignoring—it’s hard to believe he actually didn’t understand this—is that discussions also don’t involve one person constantly talking over the other—the participants actually discuss, not try to shout down each other.

This is the attitude and behavior toward our individual liberties, this is the level of integrity, we can expect from a Clinton administration.

How Does This Work?

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As one answer to San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel when our national anthem is playing before a football game instead of respecting our flag (which symbolizes his right to protest in this way), the General Manager of Krossroads Rock and Country Bar began using Kaepernick’s jersey—copies of which are available almost as ubiquitously as our flag—as a doormat at the establishment’s front entrance.

Naturally, the Left has gotten their collective panties in a twist over this. They’re calling this counterprotest

“racist” and…calling for a boycott of the bar. [One whiner objector] posted a picture of the taped-down jersey which has since been shared over 5,800 times on the social media platform.

Kaepernick can walk on our nation’s flag with his kneeling antics while our national anthem is playing, but it’s somehow not allowed to literally walk on his football jersey—which routinely is dragged through the mud in the course of those games in which Kaepernick is fortunate enough to play?

This is another example of the hypocrisy of the Left.

A Thought on JASTA

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JASTA is the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, passed overwhelmingly by each house of Congress and just vetoed by President Barack Obama (D).  The bill would allow the survivors of the 9/11 victims to sue in American courts the Saudi Arabian government and members of it over their alleged role in the terrorist attacks and to seek recompense for those participations.

Without commenting on the legitimacy such suits, or on the likelihood that enough Democrats will roll over for their leader to sustain his veto, I have this on an argument against the bill.

[I]f US citizens are allowed to take the Saudis into court, then foreign countries could do the same to the United States, its diplomats, and its service members.

Whether or not foreign countries “could do the same” to us is a matter of those nations’ domestic law, current or to-be-passed.

Thus: those nations already can “do the same” to us, without waiting for a JASTA suit, and it’s already been done.  This is a nakedly specious argument by Obama against the bill.

Yet Another Democrat’s Disregard for An Inconvenient Law

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Recall that Governor Terry McAuliffe (D, VA) granted en masse a restoral of the right to vote to some 200,000 convicted felons, and the Virginia Supreme Court said Virginia law didn’t allow that: any such restoral had to come only after individual, case by case evaluation of each felon separately from any other felons.

McAuliffe replied that he “cannot accept” the ruling. He called it a “political decision” that “reminded” him of Bush v Gore and that the justices were “scared” of the legislature. He has since acted on his defiance by restoring rights to some 13,000 felons who had already registered to vote when the state Supreme Court’s decision invalidated his executive order.

McAuliffe also is insisting that he’ll restore the vote to the remaining 200,000 before he’s out of the Governor’s mansion.

In addition to that contempt of—and for—Virginia’s Supreme Court, his charge that the Supremes were scared is nothing but an FDR-esque effort to intimidate those Justices to rule more…suitably…in future.

The Wall Street Journal put it succinctly at the above link:

McAuliffe has nullified the Virginia Constitution’s guidelines on felon voting simply because he dislikes those rules.

And

At stake is whether an executive can first rewrite the law in defiance of the legislature and then do what he wants anyway in defiance of a court.

This is the risk we run from a Clinton extension in 2017 of the Democrats’ rule over our nation.

Free Speech and Disruptions

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Do high school football fans have a constitutional right to display the American flag at games?

That question headlined Jacob Gershman’s piece in a recent Wall Street Journal law blog.  A North Carolina high school principal, Travelers Rest High School’s Lou Lavely, answered that question in the negative, justifying his ban of the American flag from the school’s home football games with the excuse that students had

used the US flag, in conjunction with verbal taunts, to target Hispanic members of the Berea community in a manner that was both unsportsmanlike and also a misuse of our flag[.]

Lavely’s move also was consistent with an earlier 9th Circuit ruling on the other side of the country that

a California high school didn’t infringe on the constitutional rights of white students who were told they couldn’t wear shirts displaying the American flag in an effort, the school said, to defuse a potential fight with Mexican students

a ruling that the Supreme Court then declined to review.

In the face of public outrage over the flag ban, Lavely reversed his position and “allowed” our flag to be displayed after all.  However, that doesn’t cure the misunderstanding, both by Lavely and our courts, underlying such bans of our flag or of shirts with our flag imprinted on them or of any other such display.

The misunderstanding is in the cause of disruptions and how to deal with those disruptions.

Banning the American flag because its display might cause disruption is wrong-headed.  The American flag, or displaying our flag—free speech generally—doesn’t cause disruptions.  The disrupters cause disruptions, and they’re the ones who need to be dealt with.

Full stop.

Update: Clarified a sentence to say what I actually meant rather than the opposite.  Also clarified a later paragraph.