Mediaboss Marketing

The Bill of Rights surely ranks as one of the most difficult documents for us, as Americans, to contend with.

Theres enough in that list of 10 rights to make each of us a little uncomfortable, depending on your political persuasion.

Me? I get hung up on the Second Amendment. I dislike guns and I have seen how much damage they can unleash on families and communities. Just ask the parents at Sandy Hook.

But its there and like it or not we, as a community, have to follow the law as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court no matter how wrong-headed we think the opinion is. If I respect the Constitution, I respect the rule of law.

Then theres the Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful searches of your property and person. It provides great protection for me and my family if the police come pounding on my door and want to search my house without a warrant.

But it also means that even if my neighbor is the nastiest drug dealer in the city, the police cannot crash through their door without cause or a warrant. And if the police dont play by the rules? The evidence might get tossed out of court and that nasty drug dealer goes free.

Then theres the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, which led to the high court establishing the Miranda warning. You hear that in every TV cop show and again, if the police dont read defendants their rights at the time of arrest, a criminals statement just might get thrown out of court, even if it means a guilty person goes free.

Uncomfortable. But the law.

Perhaps the most vexing of all the amendments in the Bill of Rights is the first one you know, the one about free speech, a free press, freedom to worship or not, and the right to assemble.

I personally hope to never have to listen to the likes of white supremacist Richard Spencer talking about making white privilege great again as he did recently at Auburn University in Alabama. But as long as he wasnt inciting violence yes, there are restrictions that can be placed on speech he had a right to speak.

It should have been the same with Ann Coulter in Berkeley, Calif., where her speech was stopped because of a threat of violence. Whether you agree with her is beside the point. She and her followers have a right to free speech just as those who disagree with her have a right to protest peacefully.

That pesky First Amendment.

Indianas legislators showed this past legislative session that while they may love First Amendment protections for themselves, when it comes to high school journalists not so much. After pressure from principals, superintendents and the Department of Education, they refused to extend First Amendment protections to high school journalists and their advisers.

Order and control trumped the First Amendment.

Whats most disheartening about the failure of this piece of legislation is the way it undermines a real opportunity for students to learn from first-hand experience how the Constitution works.

What better civics education is there than to learn about our constitutionally protected freedoms than by living them?

Will there be mistakes? Yes, of course. Thats the price of a free press. And just as there are limits on speech there are limits on the press you deliberately print falsehoods and you can get sued.

Should that fear of students running amuck with their pens and notebooks override the chance to let them live the values we claim to extol in the Constitution? No, it shouldnt.

Some of our lawmakers would be much more comfortable allowing guns in school for protection, of course than would want a free and open student press.

Yes, the First Amendment is pesky and hard. And just because something is hard doesnt mean we quash it. Thats not how our democracy works.

Janet Williams is editor of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. She can be reached at jwilliams4@franklincollege.edu.

Read the original here:
WILLIAMS: Living the First Amendment is hard work | Opinion ... - Evening News and Tribune

Forbes

Department Of Labor's Fiduciary Rule Is Vulnerable On First Amendment Grounds Forbes Promulgated in April 2016, the Department of Labor's (DOL) highly controversial Fiduciary Rule drastically expands the universe of retirement investment advisors and employees who are deemed to be fiduciaries under federal law. Abandoning 40 years of ... Fiduciary Rule Violates First Amendment, Law Firm Argues ...Bloomberg BNA Financial Advisor IQ - Fiduciary Rule Slammed as First Amendment ...Financial Advisor IQ (registration) all 13 news articles »

See the rest here:
Department Of Labor's Fiduciary Rule Is Vulnerable On First Amendment Grounds - Forbes

A reporter in West Virginia was arrested Tuesday night for literally doing his job.

Dan Heyman, a veteran reporter with Public News Service, was covering a visit to the state capitol by Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and senior Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway. As they walked through the building, Heyman pressed the two on whether domestic violence would be considered a preexisting condition under the American Health Care Act passed by the House last week.

Suddenly, he was pulled aside by Capitol police, handcuffed, and hauled off to jail. He was charged with a misdemeanor for willful disruption of governmental processes and only released when his employer posted a $5,000 bond. He is still awaiting a preliminary hearing.

At some point I think they decided I was just too persistent in asking this question and trying to do my job, and they arrested me, Heyman said after he was released.

A criminal complaint alleges that Heyman was causing a disturbance by yelling questions. What it doesnt note was that Heyman was actually targeted for reporting on matters critical to the public interest not in a closed meeting or the inside of a working office, but in the hallways of a government building.

The law under which Heyman was charged can carry a fine of up to $100 and a jail sentence of up to six months.

At a time of eroding trust in our government institutions, an independent free press is more critical than ever to ensure that the people running our country are held to account. This makes Heymans arrest all the more distressing.

What happened in West Virginia didnt happen in a vacuum. The president has been attempting to undermine the press on a regular basis and resists transparency at every turn. He has smeared the media as the enemy of the people. On the campaign trail, he revoked the credentials of some of the most prestigious news outlets in the country because he didnt like their coverage. Reporters have been the victims of physical violence and the target of mockery. Others have been arrested and charged with felonies for covering protests.

Against this backdrop, it should come as no surprise that a reporter was arrested for trying to ask a question to a member of Trumps cabinet. But it can never be accepted as normal.

In the 1971 Supreme Court ruling on the famous Pentagon Papers case, Justice Hugo Black wrote, The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. Indeed, when our public representatives whether the Trump administration or the West Virginia Capitol police forget that they work for us, we need journalists to remind them. Without a free press, public officials have a much easier time evading accountability, shielding misconduct, and pushing through dangerous policies without public scrutiny. Even Thomas Jefferson, who had a quarrelsome relationship with the press, knew that our liberty depends on the freedom of the press.

We need journalists to be able to challenge and question public officials, loudly and persistently. For the government to stand in the way is a frontal assault on the First Amendment and the functioning of our democracy. Those who dont want transparency in the literal halls of government have no business putting themselves in the political spotlight.

If our elected officials insist on continuing to violate one of our countrys core values, we will see them in court in defense of Dan Heyman and of any other journalist serving the publics right to know.

Read more:
Arresting a Reporter for Asking Questions Is an Unacceptable Assault on the First Amendment - ACLU (blog)

Last year, some students at Carmel High School were allowed to put up an anti-abortion sign. This year, a different group of students were told they could not hang a pro-abortion rights sign.

That is discrimination based on viewpoint, and that is a clear violation of the First Amendment. Naturally it's time to bring in the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana and take the school system to court, by God!

OF COURSE THE story is a tad more complicated than that, and the episode should serve as a warning for school districts inclined to stray from their mission under the false impression that they must accommodate every student demand for this or that "right."

A school is not a microcosm of the country, with students counted as citizens and school officials standing in for "the government." A school is a structured learning environment in which anything not aimed at imparting knowledge must be put aside. True, students don't leave their rights at the schoolhouse door, but the rights they have are not the same as a citizen's in dealing with government.

If schools choose to ignore that reality, they owe it to students to have very clear rules that are widely disseminated and understood. This is what Carmel failed to do.

The school at first took down the anti-abortion sign last year. But it put it back up for 10 days after the conservative legal group Liberty Counsel threatened legal action, arguing that the school had allowed other ideological messages on signs, including a donkey on a sign for a student club for Democrats and the use of a rainbow and the word pride on signs for a group supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students. The anti-abortion sign said "3,000 Lives Are Ended Each Day" and featured the word "abortion" changed to say "adoption."

THE SCHOOL SAYS groups may post signs only if they advertise group meetings. Lawyers for the school district say the new sign did not include the group's name or meeting details, which the sign last year did. But the ACLU, like the Liberty Counsel before, is citing all the previous ideological signs allowed.

Judge Tanya Walton Pratt of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana says the controversy over the new sign "opens a can of worms, doesn't it?"

Indeed, it does. And it's not the students who are at fault.

The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel

Go here to see the original:
EDITORIAL: Another fine First Amendment mess - Goshen News

President Trumps executive order on immigration was back in federal court on Monday. This time around, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in the Trump administrations appeal of a ruling that blocked the travel ban. Next Monday, the Ninth Circuit will hear a separate appeal related to the order.

The White House has maintained that a temporary ban on entry from six Muslim-majority countries is needed for national security reasons. Detractors say the ban is meant to target Muslims, and point to statements Trump made on the campaign trail last year calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States. Therefore, the argument goes, the executive order amounts to religious discrimination and violates the First Amendments Establishment Clause.

The 13-judge en banc panel of the Fourth Circuit appeared to take this argument seriously on Monday, with one judge asking if there was anything other than willful blindness that should prevent the court from considering Trumps comments.

Since this issue isnt going away any time soon, lets get something straight: the executive order does not violate the Establishment Clause, and in fact has nothing to do with the First Amendment. Simply put, theres no legal basis for courts to consider statements a politician made before taking office to ascertain his motives for subsequent policy decisions. Policies are either constitutional or unconstitutional on their merits, not because a liberal judge in Washington or Hawaii or Maryland thinks Trump is a bigot.

If the president wants to restrict immigration from certain countries for national security reasons, it is well within his constitutional power to do so. It might be bad policy, it might prove inconvenient for certain businesses and universities, it might even offend the prime minister of Canada, but its not religious discriminationand pointing to past statements to argue that it is sets a very dangerous precedent.

Trump said a lot of things on the campaign trail, but as were discovering with each passing week, he doesnt always mean what he says. He said he would label China a currency manipulator, but no. He said NATO is obsolete, but now its not. He said he would build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, but now it looks like the wall might be delayed indefinitely. More than most politicians, Trumps campaign pronouncement should be taken with a hearty dose of salt.

But even if Trump really meant what he said about barring Muslims from the United States, it wouldnt matter from a legal standpoint. Consider the background of Trumps travel ban saga. The initial order, issued in January just one week into his presidency, was blocked on due process grounds. The White House withdrew that order and issued a new, softer order in March designed to address the due process complaints. But federal trial judges in Maryland and Hawaii immediately blocked that one, too, on the grounds that the legal challenges to the orderalleging it violates the First Amendment prohibition on religious discriminationwere likely to prevail.

As evidence, challengers cited Trumps campaign rhetoric about a Muslim ban. Their argument is straightforward enough: Trump said during his presidential campaign that he would ban Muslims, then issued an order temporarily banning entry from six Muslim-majority countries. Hence, Trump violated the Constitution.

But as Eugene Kontorovich noted at The Volokh Conspiracy back in February, theres absolutely no precedent for courts looking to a politicians statements from before he or she took office, let alone campaign promises, to establish any kind of impermissible motive.

Indeed, a brief examination of cases suggests the idea has been too wild to suggest. For example, the 10th Circuit has rejected the use of a district attorneys campaign statements against certain viewpoints to show that a prosecution he commenced a few days after office was bad faith or harassment. As the court explained, even looking at such statements would chill debate during campaign[s]. If campaign statements can be policed, the court concluded, it would in short undermine democracy: the political process for selecting prosecutors should reflect the publics judgment as to the proper enforcement of the criminal laws. Phelps v. Hamilton, 59 F.3d 1058, 1068 (10th Cir. 1995).

The reason for this should be fairly obvious: the purpose of campaign rhetoric is to get elected, not formulate policylet alone govern. A would-be president has no legal obligation to the Constitution before taking the oath of office; he is merely a private citizen. (Perhaps, as in Trumps case, a blowhard and a braggart with half-formed ideas, but a private citizen nonetheless.) Once a candidate wins office, he or she is sworn to uphold the duties of that office, not fulfill every promise uttered during the campaign.

This is especially true of the president, who sits atop a vast executive branch that formulates and enforces myriad policies pursuant to its various functions. To say that Trump cant exercise certain executive powers because of what he said last year, or 20 years ago, is tantamount to saying he cant really be president because he holds views the judiciary finds offensive. After all, surely some Americans voted for Trump precisely because he promised to ban Muslims. In appealing to those voters, are we to assume Trump forfeited some of his constitutional powers?

Thankfully, the absurdity of imputing policy motives to the entire executive branch based on Trumps campaign slogans was not lost on every federal judge who heard arguments about the travel ban. One of the judges on the Ninth Circuit, which upheld a stay on Trumps first executive order back in January but declined to address the Establishment Clause question, recognized the folly of suggesting Trumps campaign rhetoric amounts to a violation of the First Amendment.

In a dissent filed in March, Judge Alex Kozinski lambasted his fellow judges for going on an evidentiary snark hunt to prove Trump meant what he said on the campaign trail about banning Muslims.

This is folly. Candidates say many things on the campaign trail; they are often contradictory or inflammatory. No shortage of dark purpose can be found by sifting through the daily promises of a drowning candidate, when in truth the poor shlubs only intention is to get elected. No Supreme Court caseindeed no case anywhere that I am aware ofsweeps so widely in probing politicians for unconstitutional motives. And why stop with the campaign? Personal histories, public and private, can become a scavenger hunt for statements that a clever lawyer can characterize as proof of a -phobia or an -ism, with the prefix depending on the constitutional challenge of the day.

When two Ninth Circuit judges suggested it was inappropriate for Kozinski to address the establishment question because it was not before the court, Kozinski wrote that his colleagues effort to muzzle criticism of an egregiously wrong panel opinion betrays their insecurity about the opinions legal analysis.

If there is a First Amendment issue in the case, Kozinski argued, it was about Trumps own free speech protections, not the Establishment Clause. After all, relying on campaign speeches and slogans to prove discriminatory intent would abrogate political candidates right to engage in free speech. This path is strewn with danger, writes Kozinski, citing a 2014 Supreme Court case, McCutcheon v. FEC. It will chill campaign speech, despite the fact that our most basic free speech principles have their fullest and most urgent application precisely to the conduct of campaigns for political office.

In the coming weeks and months, were going to keep hearing about the constitutionality of Trumps travel ban. Dont be fooled. This has nothing to do with the Constitution and everything to do with deep-seated contempt for Trumpand not just Trump, but every American who thinks a temporary ban on immigration from certain countries might be a good idea.

Read more here:
Trump's Travel Ban Has Nothing To Do With The First Amendment - The Federalist