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December 17, 2006

Newt Needs First Amendment Lesson

Newt Gingrich needs a lesson in First Amendment law, and he needs it now. In responding to outrage over his comments a week ago on the need to reconsider the First Amendment, he is only digging his hole deeper. He acts as if he is being quite reasonable, and he does not hesitate to play to the right wing on the issue, in hopes that he will win their support for his presidential bid. His argument is that the threat of a terrorist attack that could wipe out a city is so serious that we must be willing to give up some of the breadth of the First Amendment – and that anyone who would disagree must be an evil leftist.

"Our friends at the 'ACLU left,' of course, were staggered at this concept," Gingrich told an audience of Republicans at a Christmas banquet. "How could we talk about anything less than 100 percent free speech? How could we consider in any way thinking about this issue?"

I know some here will be particularly outraged at his thoughts about free expression with regards to the six imams who were thrown off an American Airlines flight a couple of weeks ago. He used the incident to underscore his belief that the government can tell the difference between terrorists and non-terrorists in its effort to fight "threatening expression."

"Those six people should have been arrested and prosecuted for pretending to be terrorists," Gingrich said. "And the crew of the U.S. airplane should have been invited to the White House and congratulated for being correct in the protection of citizens." …"If you give me any signal in the age of terrorism that you're a terrorist, I'd say the burden of proof was on you," Gingrich said.

Here's the part where he is most off-base. Under the First Amendment, the government is not allowed to regulate speech differently based on who the speaker is OR what they are saying (with a few notable exceptions). Further, the burden of proof is never an easy thing to overcome, and speech is considered of such extreme importance in this country that in free speech cases, other than strictly commercial speech, the burden of proof is always on the government. Thus, if Newt wants to mess with the burden of proof or change the rules for "terrorists" and "terrorist speech," he would be doing so for everyone and for all speech, not just "terrorists."

This ought to be completely obvious to Newt, which is why I think his true motives are different than he is portraying. He is acting as if his suggestions are no big deal, joking that he "must have hit a nerve" and saying "the 1st Amendment is not a suicide pact." He says detractors, who are engaging in "knee-jerk hysteria," are refusing to acknowledge the real threats to this country and says even the words of terrorists are weapons (what ever happened to "words will never harm me"?). Last I heard, people in this country could say whatever they wished, and they were held accountable for the results of their speech. Rather than prosecute people for saying, "come join me in terrorism" we should conduct surveillance to find out whether actual recruitment, training, or planning are occurring.

Newt even goes so far in his deceitful rhetoric as to claim that we should be particularly afraid and willing to give up our free speech because two weeks ago Iranian President Ahmadinejad wrote a letter to us in which he "threatens to kill Americans in large numbers if we don't submit to his demands," something I certainly did not see anywhere in the letter. Did you? If Newt is willing to lie about something so easy to check out, why should we trust him with our most sacred right – the right to speak freely? I say we should hold him accountable for his abuse of free speech by squelching his presidential aspirations for good.

Posted by Becky at December 17, 2006 04:38 PM