CSotD: Same Old Burning Issue
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When politicians become desperate, they raise the flag.
It’s not the only symbol of our country, but the GOP is already deeply committed to mandatory motherhood and while they’re enforcing non-existent laws against hurling sandwiches, it apparently hasn’t occurred to them to declare throwing apple pies a form of treason.
And so here we go yet again in an attempt to outlaw flag-burning.
Note that burning the flag is the only disrespect considered for legal action. Whatever the Flag Code says, you can still hang the flag from your car, wear it as clothing, display it flat on a football field, leave it out in the rain, fly it in the dark and use it in advertising. You can even hug it and kiss it.
Just don’t light it on fire.
I’ll give Dear Leader this much: He recognizes that the Supreme Court has repeatedly declared flag-burning a form of “expressive conduct” protected by the First Amendment, and he even appears to realize that it’s up to Congress to pass laws and that his executive orders are not the same thing.
He still seems a little shaky on how the First Amendment applies to fighting words and so forth, but, according to his latest Executive Order, he has a cunning back-up plan to get around the Constitution’s protection of expressive conduct:
In cases where the Department of Justice or another executive department or agency (agency) determines that an instance of American Flag desecration may violate an applicable State or local law, such as open burning restrictions, disorderly conduct laws, or destruction of property laws, the agency shall refer the matter to the appropriate State or local authority for potential action.
He’s apparently convinced that you can send someone to jail for a year for violating a local open-burning law. He might be correct, but he’d save us all a lot of trouble by torching the Epstein files on the White House lawn and then pardoning himself for not having a fire permit.
The flag-huggers gave it a shot in 1995, six years after SCOTUS had decided Texas v Johnson, and it fell flat.
They had a plan to get around the whole Bill of Rights problem, but ran into another problem, which was that, while an admittedly substantial group consider the flag an object of secular veneration, those familiar with history and the law hold the First Amendment to be a higher priority.
So 1995’s attempted Constitutional amendment cleared the House but stalled in the Senate.
They rolled it out again a decade later, for what Mike Keefe suggested was the same reason Dear Leader is rolling it out today.
And they got more or less the same reception. A narrow majority of citizens supported the idea, but, again, it failed to get approval in the Senate.
What to do? What to do?
Of course: Wait another decade until Dear Leader is in the White House and make it part of his early package of proposals.
Again, the idea got the same reception from progressive cartoonists.
And it turned out that there were even conservative cartoonists who cared more about the Bill of Rights than about the national pennant.
The proposal again went nowhere, but now, by yompin’ jiminy, it’s back, and it’s not 1995 or 2006 or even 2016 anymore, and although previous courts have repeatedly upheld the First Amendment, there’s a new team down at the Supreme Court.
It’s hard to predict how this crew might rule on it today, given that they seem more like a weathervane than a compass.
The issue is a collision of two performative idiocies: One a group in power, seeking to reinforce their power and determined to evade the Bill of Rights, the other a group out of power, determined to demonstrate their appetite for freedom, but destined more to infuriate than persuade.
In 2006, Garry Trudeau summed up this clash of cynical, needless repression on one side and tactical ineptness on the other, with an added swipe at the ratings-chasers who turn insignificant sideshows into Major News:
It was funny then, but that was nearly 20 years ago, and things have changed.
Performative gestures still have a place in both camps, but the effort to stamp out public dissension has now been ramped up to a level that makes it seem as if we were living in a different country, though, in that parallel version, it is the demonstrators, rather than the authorities, who hide their faces behind masks.
(Toggle CC for translation)
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