June 30, 2017 at 2:02 p.m.
The GOP tries to hammer free speech again
The GOP tries to hammer free speech again
The Democrats aren't much better, but they are right on the latest GOP attempt to muzzle Wisconsin, this one aimed at college students, in what is egregiously called the Campus Free Speech Act.
Why is it that when politicians attach a name to legislation, it usually means exactly the opposite of what the legislation will actually accomplish, like, you know, the Affordable Care Act?
Anyway, there's a lot of problems with this bill, whose authors say it will clamp down on those who "interfere with free expression" on college campuses.
The first is that it is overly broad, and much of it is gibberish. It orders the UW-System to codify in policy that students and faculty "have the freedom to discuss any problem that presents itself, as the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution permits and within the limits of reasonable viewpoint-neutral and content-neutral restrictions on time, place, and manner of expression that are consistent with this section and that are necessary to achieve a significant institutional interest..."
Say what? That statement is free speech only in the sense that it is free of any reasonable meaning.
The larger problem, of course, is that the law is unconstitutional on its face. To wit, it would allow the sanctioning - including expulsion - of anyone who engages in "violent, abusive, indecent, profane, boisterous, obscene, unreasonably loud, or other disorderly conduct that interferes with the free expression of others."
The problem is, to "interfere with" means to take part or intervene in an activity without invitation or necessity, and that's not unconstitutional. A heckler who disrupts a speech for a minute or so is certainly interfering with the speaker's speech, but that heckler is not violating the speaker's First Amendment right to give the speech (or, as the case may be, the constitutional rights of the students to hear the speech).
Simply put, while no one has the right to deprive of us our First Amendment rights, people do have their own First Amendment rights to express their displeasure at whatever we are saying, and temporary interference is one way to do it.
Free speech advocates and First Amendment experts have long recognized this distinction. For example, noted civil liberties attorney Alan Dershowitz routinely decries the suppression of free speech on college campuses, but he draws the line at civil protest.
"Freedom of speech does permit the right of audience members to express views different from a speaker, so long as they obey reasonable rules and do not prevent the speaker from expressing his or her views," Dershowitz wrote in The Huffington Post. "Reasonable rules include permitting the holding of signs, so long as they do not block anyone's view, the handing out of leaflets, an opportunity to ask questions at the end of the talk and sporadic and non-recurrent booing or shouting of brief comments."
It's the latter conduct this law targets, and Republicans have admitted it.
Indeed, the one example they cited over and over in testimony for this legislation was Ben Shapiro's visit to Wisconsin, a speech that protesters interrupted for about five minutes, after which Shapiro finished his talk.
Shapiro's First Amendment rights were not denied, and so the speech of the protesters was also constitutionally protected. And yet this proposed legislation would have those students booted out of school.
The Fourteenth Amendment prohibits states from passing any law that would infringe upon the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens. That is what this bill does. It does not pass constitutional muster.
To be sure, the Left's assault on free speech on college campuses is disturbing. It is ground zero in the overall attack on the First Amendment. Frankly, the Left today is deliberately using millennials to lead an attack on free speech, because they are too young and too coddled to know that censorship is good only so long as you are the censor.
But passing a law that is at its core also anti-free speech does not defeat this movement of suppression. It helps the cause along by justifying censorship. With such a law, no one will learn that free speech is vital, only that it is vital to learn how to be the censor who can pass such laws.
If lawmakers want to truly protect free speech, they need to pass a law that demands criminal prosecution of those who systematically deny others their right to speak, or to listen to a speaker, not merely interferes with that right. And such a law needs to apply everywhere, not just on college campuses.
That's just the way it is in California. There in 2010, the state prosecuted 11 students for so disrupting a speech by the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. that he could not continue. In this case, the First Amendment rights of those who invited him and wanted to hear him were violated, and the disruptive students, members of the Muslim Student Union, were properly prosecuted and convicted (they have appealed) under a state law prohibiting the censorship of a public speech by disruption.
If the Legislature wants to pass that law, they should do so, but, again, it needs to apply everywhere, otherwise the GOP appears to be targeting geographic places where, in general, GOP views are not popular.
Unfortunately, this Republican Party likely does not have any interest in a true free-speech protection law because, given various statements made by legislators supporting the bill, they really are trying to suppress campus speech.
For example, the bill's author, Rep. Jesse Kremer, said the legislation would "create a behavioral shift on campus."
Since when do Republicans support social-engineering bills designed to "nudge" people toward certain government-approved behaviors? That was a hallmark of the Obama administration and his fellow Chicago professor, Cass Sunstein, the idea that if the sociocultural environment could be modified -by rule or law, by incentive or disincentive - people could be influenced to act in more desirable ways.
Yikes!
Of course, with this bill, Kremer wouldn't be nudging so much as hammering, but the principle is the same - the government knows what's best, buddy, and we're going to get you to behave accordingly, one way or another.
Then there's Rep. Dale Murphy, who says free speech includes the right to not be silenced - "not by the state, not by the state university, not by a mob, and not by an individual."
But that's exactly what he wants the state to do - to silence students, whether it be a five-minute demonstration or a simple one-second 'Boo.'
There are other disturbing nuggets in the bill. For starters, it would force the UW System to establish a Council on Free Expression.
How very Soviet-sounding of them. While the ostensible task of this council would be to identify barriers to free expression, it is much more likely, being a government bureaucracy, to be a barrier to free expression.
It would also require freshmen to undergo "free expression" orientation. So now the Republicans are into indoctrination, the very thing they decry?
Such "orientation" reminds us too much of other programs students are forced to attend on campuses these days, such as workshops on white privilege and other nonsense.
At the end of the day, if Republicans would just get government out of the way - as they are fond of saying but never really doing - we'd all be a lot better off. Oh, and they should get themselves out of our way, too.
The bill is in the Senate, which should suppress its obnoxious language forever.
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