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Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has filed a brief with 23 other states urging the court to deny Special Prosecutor Jack Smiths request for an unconstitutional gag order on President Donald Trump. The gag order is claimed to violate the First Amendment by restricting President Trumps ability to speak freely during the election season and denying Americans the right to hear open debate from presidential candidates. The order would also prevent Trump from criticizing the raid on his Mar-a-Lago home.

Missouri has long been a champion of free speech. A gag order on President Trump violates not only his First Amendment right to speak but Americans right to hear from a presidential candidate in the height of election season, said Attorney General Bailey. I will always use every tool at my disposal to defend our right to free speech, the bedrock of our great nation.

This brief is the latest in a series of actions Attorney General Bailey has taken to combat the legal challenges against President Trump:

Joining Missouri in filing the brief are the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

The full amicus brief can be readhere.

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Missouri AG joins 23 states to defend Trump's First Amendment rights - kttn

Attorneys for the plaintiffs challenging an Alabama law restricting absentee voter assistance argued in a Monday filing that they were likely to succeed because the assistance is covered under the First Amendment.

The Monday filing was in response to the states arguments that a preliminary injunction against the law should not be granted.

In the 31-page filing, attorneys for the plaintiffs wrote that they are substantially likely to succeed on the merits of their speech and association claims. They wrote that assistance is covered under the First Amendment and that the states testimonies were not convincing. They said that the bill would fail under First Amendment scrutiny.

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A message was left with representatives for some of the plaintiffs, including the ACLU of Alabama. A message was also left for the Attorney Generals office.

The Alabama Legislature this spring passed a law that criminalized some forms of absentee ballot application assistance. Civil rights groups, including the ACLU of Alabama, filed a lawsuit in April, saying the law amounts to voter suppression.

The state argued in its response that absentee ballot application assistance did not amount to speech.

In their filing on Monday, plaintiffs argued the new law is unconstitutionally vague and unconstitutionally overbroad.

Defendants arguments only underscore SB 1s fatal deficiencies: in both their motion to dismiss and opposition brief here, the filing said. Defendants can only attempt to explain the scope and meaning of SB 1 by inferring words and meaning that do not exist anywhere in the statute or conjuring their own definitions from thin air.

The lawyers wrote they are likely to succeed on a claim over Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act Section 208. According to the Department of Justice website, the section deals with voters who need assistance due to blindness, disability or an inability to read or write and allows them to be assisted by someone of their choice, with some exceptions such as an employer. They wrote that the section deals with assistance for blind, disabled, and low-literacy voters, as well as their claim under Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

They also wrote that plaintiffs will suffer harm without relief, the balance of equities and public interest require a preliminary injunction and is necessary for complete relief under Article III.

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Voting assistance covered by First Amendment, say plaintiffs in absentee ballot case Alabama Reflector - Alabama Reflector

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Six West Virginia schools were notified Thursday that policies in their student handbooks may violate students First Amendment rights by requiring them to participate in certain activities like standing for flag-raising ceremonies and the Pledge of Allegiance and removing hats for the national anthem, among other things.

The notice which was sent as a letter to the schools came from the West Virginia arm of the American Civil Liberties Union on the 81st anniversary of the landmark legal case West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. In 1949, The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in that case that students cannot be forced or compelled to salute a flag or recite the Pledge in schools. Policies that direct otherwise, according to the case, are a clear violation of the students freedom of speech.

The Constitution affords protection for Americans to freely express our beliefs and ideas. That protection expands beyond written and spoken word; it extends to symbolic speech as well, ACLU-WV Legal Director Aubrey Sparks wrote in the letter. One powerful way that people can express themselves is by choosing to remain silent when everyone else is agreeing, or remaining sitting when everyone else stands. Barnette codified that right. Students still have that right in schools today.

Staff from the ACLU, according to a news release, reviewed student handbooks for all schools in the state to ensure their policies were compliant with the rulings in Barnette.

Schools that received the letters due to having policies in violation of the law are: Calhoun Middle/High School, Riverside High School in Kanawha County, Summers County Comprehensive High School, Richwood High School in Nicholas County, Sissonville Middle School in Kanawha County and John Adams Middle School, also in Kanawha County.

The policies in the student handbook vary school by school.

Riverside High, for example, directs that students must rise and remove hats during the national anthem and flag ceremonies held during extracurricular activities.

At Sissonville and John Adams middle schools, the handbooks state that students must stand for the Pledge of Allegiance during class. If they dont recite the Pledge, they must remain silent.

The letters sent Thursday urge leaders at the listed schools to review their policies with consideration of the Barnette ruling and amend them if needed to ensure that they meet constitutional obligations.

Schools are often the first places that students learn about their civic obligations, their constitutional rights, and the importance of being brave enough to engage in speech thats not always popular, Sparks wrote in the letter. The First Amendment exists to safeguard the diversity of thought and expression, which are essential components of a thriving democratic society. Protecting free speech in public schools is paramount, something that was determined by the Supreme Court in West Virginia v. Barnette eighty-one years ago.

West Virginia Watch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com. Follow West Virginia Watch on Facebook and X.

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ACLU Urges Six WV Schools to Review Student Policies Violating First Amendment - The 74

Over the past three years, state legislatures have introduced and passed hundreds of laws restricting speech on race and racism in public schools. Broadly classified as Anti-CRT laws, these bills aim to ban lessons derived from the tenets of critical race theory, which posits that race is a social construct embedded in legal systems and policies, creating systemic inequalities that should be evaluated to correct past and present racial injustices. The laws impose broad and often vague prohibitions on speech, mostly without reference to critical race theory.

In her paper (E)racing Speech in School, Francesca Procaccini, Assistant Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School, offers a First Amendment analysis of Anti-CRT laws. She finds that while the First Amendment may not protect teachers or parents opposed to such laws, it will often protect students rights to receive the information that Anti-CRT laws seek to chill.

The deeper and more provocative insight of these conclusions is that they rest on the same sound constitutional reasoning: that the First Amendment works to protect democratic governance and good citizenship, Procaccini writes.

Limits on Free Speech for Teachers

To protect democratic governance, the First Amendment permits reasonable regulations on speech of public-school teachers when speaking in their capacity as government employees. Without the authority to dictate what teachers teach, the task of public education would be inconsistent, arbitrary, and idiosyncratic, not to mention void of meaningful democratic oversight and accountability, she writes.

In the two-pronged test used to govern the free speech rights of teachers, courts must weigh whether the teacher is speaking as a citizen on a matter of public concern, and if so, is there no reasonable justification for treating that teachers speech rights differently from other citizens. In the case of teaching critical race theory (or not) as part of a schools designated curriculum, it is clear teachers dont satisfy either prong, she writes.

Limits on Free Speech for Parents

Generally, parents do not have a right under the free speech clause of the First Amendment to determine what their children hear or learn, writes Procaccini.

This lack of protection serves two purposes: 1) it ensures that no single parents has the power to veto school assessments or curricula, and 2) it enhances a childs protection to develop beyond the confines of their parents views and teachings, which is integral to the First Amendments protection of individual enlightenment, the paper explains. While the Supreme Court has not explicitly defined childrens speech rights as such, Procaccini points out that it has relied on children as future citizens to reject parental speech rights.

Students First Amendment Rights

The right to receive information is inherent in the First Amendments protection of political participation and democratic self-government, the paper argues. It is at its most salient when the government attempts to withhold or manipulate the free flow of information between citizens and where there is informational dependence between the speaker and listener.

In situations where a power asymmetry exists between the speaker and listener, the right to receive information is extremely important for democratic decision-making. This holds true in the teacher-student relationship. When the information at hand involves an education that is sensitive to issues of structural racism in our society, the paper states, it can factor into how children make informed choices. The Supreme Court has explicitly made this connection in Ambach v. Norwick.

Procaccini argues that this right to receive information in public school educations means the state may not prohibit the teaching and classroom discussion of information that is integral to learning to participate as an informed citizen in a pluralistic democracy, with exceptions for legitimate pedagogical concerns like age, demography, and resources. She uses this argument to craft the anti-orthodoxy rule, which holds that laws that prohibit all classroom instruction of age-appropriate critical race theory topics in public schools violate students First Amendment right to receive information.

Ensuring against the imposition of a state-sponsored political orthodoxy is integral to protecting the ability of citizens to meaningfully participate in democratic self-governance, the paper concludes. it is integral to their having the baseline knowledge, information, and communicative avenues to make informed political, economic, and social choices that shape our communities.

(E)Racing Speech in School is published in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.

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Do Anti-CRT Laws Violate the First Amendment? - Vanderbilt Law

THE INDISPENSABLE RIGHT: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, by Jonathan Turley

Conservative voices are being silenced. We know this because conservative voices are telling us so, insistently, on social media and cable news programs, in speeches by Supreme Court justices and on the grounds of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse. Casual observation might suggest otherwise as does the data but it has become an article of faith on the right that conservative viewpoints are being systematically suppressed, even criminalized.

It is true that many college campuses are inhospitable, at best, to speakers including students who challenge progressive beliefs. The conservative indictment, however, is more sweeping than that. In The Indispensable Right, the law professor and Fox News commentator Jonathan Turley lays out the charges unsparingly, accusing the political left of amassing academic, corporate and government forces in a campaign to cripple the First Amendment. The censors have the upper hand, he argues: Rioters are tarred as insurrectionists, unorthodox opinions are expunged from social media, medical experts are pilloried for questioning Covid protocols. This, he intones, is the moment we have long feared would come.

The end of days, by Turleys accounting, was foretold at the start. The framers established the freedom of speech in absolute terms and then the original sin corrupted it by equating dissent with incitement in the Sedition Act of 1798, passed by Federalists in Congress and signed by John Adams.

Turley is hardly alone in depicting the act as a vindictive, partisan instrument or Thomas Jefferson as an inconstant champion of the free press. (A few prosecutions of the most eminent offenders would have a wholesome effect, he mused to an ally in 1803.) Neither is Turley the first to deplore the crackdowns on disloyal speech during times of national crisis, real or imagined.

Where he diverges from the consensus, and sharply, is in his portrayal of more than two centuries of free speech doctrine as a virtually unbroken betrayal of first principles. Free speech demands bright lines, Turley proclaims. In their place we have trade-offs and concessions.

The tests and distinctions of First Amendment law the heightened protection of political speech relative to low-value forms of expression like obscenity; the balancing of free speech with other interests like privacy or public safety are anathema to Turley. He views these as a cynical game, rationales for repression. The First Amendment, he says, is objective in its meaning and defines speech as he does: as an instrument of self-actualization. Free speech is not about perfecting democracy, he writes, it is about perfecting ourselves.

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Book Review: The Indispensable Right, by Jonathan Turley - The New York Times