Conservative Review | Hey, media! Blocked by Trump? Follow him here Conservative Review A lawsuit was filed last week by the Knight First Amendment Institution, arguing that Trump's Twitter feed is a public forum. Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza is a commentator in a social justice magazine, an employee of the Center for American Progress ... |
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Hey, media! Blocked by Trump? Follow him here - Conservative Review
A federal appeals court has issued a ruling favorable to citizen reporters.
There were two cases in the mix. The first involved Amanda Geraci, who monitors police in Philadelphia at protests or demonstrations, and records them.
Rutherford Institutefounder John Whitehead, a civil liberties attorney, describes a 2012 incident.
She attended a protest at a fracking convention in Philadelphia when she saw police arrest one of the protesters, he tells OnewNewNow. Amanda moved to a spot where she could better observe and videotape the incident."
That's when a police officer grabbed her and threw her against a pillar, preventing her from filming the arrest.
In a second incident, Temple University student Richard Fields recorded 20 police officers outside a house where a party was being held. He was arrested and handcuffed, and his belongings were confiscated.A criminal charge was later dropped.
The cases finally made their way to a federal appeals court.
The 3rd Circuit Court of Appealsdeclaredthat the right to record police is not limited," reports Whitehead, "and noted that other courts had affirmed the First Amendment right to collect information on government activities. So you can record the police."
He says it's a good First Amendment ruling since it allows the public to record authorities as long as the act doesn't impede an investigation.
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Whitehead: First Amendment won in court - One News Now - OneNewsNow
Don Jr. Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
As shoe after shoe after shoe keeps dropping about the Trump Tower meeting Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort had with a Russian lawyer and other questionable intermediaries, there has been a quiet but significant effort by prominent legal minds to defend, or at least be skeptical of, the whole affair. The thrust of these counterarguments is that the main characters did nothing wrong because the law simply doesnt penalize anything that happened at the meeting.
The defenses run the gamut: The Trump team couldnt have broken campaign-finance laws because seeking and receiving damning materials on a political adversary is what campaigns do all the time, so federal law doesnt apply. Or, if the law does reach what transpired at the meeting, the promised dirt on Hillary Clinton isnt the type of in-kind contribution or thing of value that federal law forbids foreign nationals from making. Or, if the damaging information does count as an illegal campaign contribution from a foreign national, the penalties would only be civil in nature which means Robert Mueller, the Russia special counsel, cant just prosecute Trump Jr. or his associates over what happened at that fateful June 2016 gathering.
By far the most intriguing of all these defenses is the suggestion, advanced by First Amendment expert and UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, that Trump Jr. and crew were merely exercising their constitutional right to solicit and receive a campaign boost from Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin-linked attorney who requested the meeting. And that she may also have been acting within her rights to share the Clinton dirt with Trumps inner circle. As if theres somehow a free-standing, free-speech right to exchange opposition research, no matter the nationality of the source. And the Constitution would suffer if we criminalize these acts.
Volokhs arguments and hypotheticals are thoughtful, compelling even: If the Clinton campaign heard that Mar-a-Lago was employing illegal immigrants in Florida and staffers went down to interview the workers, that would be a crime, he writes as one of his examples. A Slovakian student temporarily in the U.S., he writes in another, would similarly be forbidden from sharing potentially explosive information about Trumps dealings in her home country. These and other scenarios are meant to illustrate how the federal ban on foreign nationals making election-related contributions including anything of value to a campaign, which would encompass the Clinton dirt would sweep far too broadly. And when a ban lends itself to such a substantially broad reading, Volokh explains, that means the ban itself is unconstitutional on its face.
But Adav Noti, an attorney with Campaign Legal Center, isnt convinced. His organization filed a complaint on Thursday with the Federal Election Commission and the Department of Justice alleging that the Trump campaign effectively solicited an illegal campaign contribution by procuring the incriminating Clinton evidence from Veselnitskaya. Noti told me in an interview that most of the hypos Volokh laid out in his article arent covered by the statute because the law already contains an exception for volunteer services to a campaign information that is offered voluntarily and that you otherwise cant ascribe value to.
But opposition research by a person flying in from Moscow at no cost to the campaign that the campaign actively sought can indeed be very valuable. And, if its part of a larger, coordinated effort by a foreign power to sway an American election, a scheme to obtain it would be largely distinguishable from, say, undocumented workers dishing to the Clinton camp for free on shoddy working conditions at a Trump property.
Bob Bauer, an election-law expert who has written extensively on the campaign-finance implications of Trumps flirtations with Russia, acknowledged in a Friday post on the blog Just Security how the federal ban on foreign-national contributions might run into First Amendment problems if the right facts come along. But were not dealing with those facts right now. In his view, everything that has come out from the Trump campaign vis--vis Russia is an entirely different animal. A court would likely go out of its way to uphold the law in a case where, as alleged against the Trump campaign, a candidate and his organization enters into a systematic understanding with a foreign government to assist its bid to win the presidency, Bauer wrote.
In other words, what weve seen so far in the recent onslaught of revelations about Trump Jr. and his wish to get an assist from Russia is analogous to the kind of conduct that courts have already said falls outside the scope of the First Amendment. In Bluman v. FEC, a case Noti litigated and won, a three-judge district court reaffirmed the principle that prohibiting foreign nationals from spending money in the electoral process is perfectly consistent with our constitutional ideals. The court said:
It is fundamental to the definition of our national political community that foreign citizens do not have a constitutional right to participate in, and thus may be excluded from, activities of democratic self-government. It follows, therefore, that the United States has a compelling interest for purposes of First Amendment analysis in limiting the participation of foreign citizens in activities of American democratic self-government, and in thereby preventing foreign influence over the U.S. political process.
That was written by U.S. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative the Trump administration has been eyeing for a promotion to the Supreme Court. The high court, for its part, didnt even bother hearing an appeal over the case; it just affirmed the ruling summarily with no dissenting opinions. All of which suggests that other judges would follow suit if presented with the Trump Tower scenario: a meeting where no actual money may have changed hands, but where something more nefarious, coordinated, and potentially criminal may have taken place. Theres yet more to come.
Courts have a way of salvaging perfectly constitutional laws if they have to, limiting their analysis to the specific fact patterns before them. Since the documented Russian connections to the Trump campaign is unlike anything this country has seen, its easy to see how the First Amendment wouldnt stand as an obstacle if it were shown that there was a coordinated attempt to strike at the core of American self-government.
A scorecard on how far Trump has advanced Russian interests (whether knowingly or unknowingly), from easing sanctions to Syria.
The rise and meaning of an ubiquitous term of abuse.
The Trump administration gets Orwellian in its efforts to repeal Obamacare.
The agency wasnt even protecting the presidents son at the time.
Its unusual for a new president to be this widely disliked.
The courts have already been pretty consistent on this issue of foreign citizens not being able to participate in Americas self-government.
McCain is expected to recover, but the same cant be said for the GOPs haphazard efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare.
And, yes, hes going to write about his experience dealing with Trump.
Looks like the Trump campaign thought there was something in that nothingburger.
And yet, it still might pass in the next few days.
The new plan would dramatically expand where and when the government could target immigrants for deportations which bypass immigration courts.
Voters are worried about his voter-fraud commissions attempt to gather information on them.
Shes totally open, the future president clearly says to the young pop singer in 2013. But what else?
Most of Trumps Christian right allies dont bother to take his own slight religious pretensions very seriously. A new book apparently will.
Trump may be pushed by a lawsuit to keep his 2016 promise to kill DACA and deport Dreamers or they could become a pawn for nativists in Congress.
One golfer said his attendance would be a debacle, but Trump doesnt care.
At this point it would take a strange coincidence for hacking not to have been discussed.
He ordered the government not to enforce the seemingly arbitrary restrictions on which relatives can enter the country.
Soon Republican centrists will have to decide if big insurance losses due to Medicaid cuts are okay after all.
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Knocking Down the Best Argument in Defense of Trump Jr. - NYMag - New York Magazine
When Rowan County commissioners opened their meeting with a prayer specific to one religion, and a call that those in attendance join them in that prayer, said Meno, that violates the First Amendment to the Constitution. (Photo credit: WLOS staff)
County commissioners across western North Carolina are reviewing an appeals court decision that ruled that Rowan County Commissioners are in violation of the Constitution for opening their commission meetings with Christian prayer and a request for those attending the meeting to participate in the invocation.
The court ruling stated that the commissioners delivered only Christian prayer, and veered from time to time into overt proselytization."
Mike Meno, spokesman for the ACLU of North Carolina, spoke on behalf of the organization that played a role in the lawsuit brought to the court.
When Rowan County commissioners opened their meeting with a prayer specific to one religion, and a call that those in attendance join them in that prayer, said Meno, that violates the First Amendment to the Constitution.
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Court decision: Rowan County Commissioners violated First ... - WLOS - WLOS
The city of Seattle has just embarked on an unprecedented experiment in campaign-finance reform that forces property owners, through a new property tax, to sponsor the campaign contributions of other city residents. The city attracted nationwide attention in 2015 when it passed the first democracy voucher program, which is just now under way. The Pacific Legal Foundation, representing two property owners subject to the tax, has sued the city, arguing that the First Amendment forbids the city from compelling property owners to fund viewpoints they oppose.
At the start of this year, Seattle began mailing out four $25 vouchers to registered voters. Non-voters and even non-citizens can receive vouchers, too, upon request to the city. The vouchers can be used for only one purpose: campaign contributions for local elected office.
The idea is to give everyone a voice in politics but at whose expense? Heralding the arrival of the vouchers, The Stranger a left-leaning Seattle paper published a gleeful article: How to Get Your Free Money from Seattles New Public Campaign Financing System. It sported an image of money falling from the sky into the hands of waiting voters.
But that money doesnt rain down from above; it comes from the pockets of property owners, who are designated as the cash cows for other peoples political opinions.
This compelled subsidy for political donations violates the First Amendment. Freedom of speech embodies not only the right to speak, but also its corollary: the right not to speak. This includes the right to refrain from funding the speech of another person. After all, money talks, and when your money goes to promote a cause you dont believe in, youre the victim of political ventriloquism. The U.S. Supreme Court has called this a bedrock principle of the First Amendment that, except perhaps in the rarest of circumstances, no person in this country may be compelled to subsidize speech by a third party that he or she does not wish to support. This speech tax, by forcing Seattle property owners to support the political views of their neighbors, tramples upon this bedrock principle.
The Supreme Court has upheld neutral public campaign funding in the past, but the democracy-voucher program is an altogether different beast. Since voucher recipients decide which candidates get this money based on their political preferences, the speech tax undermines dissenting views and entrenches popular ones. Unlike neutral public campaign-funding schemes, the voucher program smacks of partisan inequality. As the money flows according to the preferences of Seattle residents, candidates who subscribe to the dominant political view will receive the most largesse. Minority candidates will get outfunded. This does not cultivate the equality of ideas that the democracy-voucher program purports to champion quite the opposite, in fact.
Even worse, the property owners compelled to pay for these political donations will tend to be among the crowd with minority viewpoints. Take, for instance, a major political issue in Seattle: rental housing. Seattle is a city of tenants; 54 percent of Seattle households rent. Seattle politicians have catered to this major constituency through recent measures like a renters commission, caps on move-in fees, and the mayors recent proposal to prevent landlords from rejecting renters because of a criminal history. For the most part, these measures clash with landlords political and economic interests.
Yet landlords and other property owners must now foot the bill for political speech that favor these kinds of measures. Take Jon Grants campaign for city council. Grant, the former director of the Tenants Union of Washington State, is a committed tenant advocate. If elected, hell pursue policies such as tenant collective-bargaining rights and rent control that will further undermine landlords interests. Grant has received $129,000 in voucher money, doubtless from many renter constituents. But landlords and other property owners are the real, involuntary source of that money; theyre forced to fund a candidacy at odds with their rights and basic interests.
We shouldnt shrug off this problem just because we might like the viewpoints favored by the vouchers, or because we cant work up sympathy for property owners. Reserving freedom of speech for popular views would obliterate the core purpose of the First Amendment to shelter the dissident. Yet the speech tax forces the dissident to power the megaphone of the majority.
It gets worse. Plenty of mom-and-pop landlords who rent out Seattle property live in surrounding King County. They have a stake in Seattle politics, but as non-residents, they cant receive vouchers themselves. A landlord who has owned a house in Seattle for 20 years cant get vouchers, yet she must pay for the campaign contributions of a University of Washington freshman who moved into the city last month.
We treasure the First Amendment because it upholds human dignity the power to shape our identity by what we believe and express. That dignity is sullied by a government that forces its people to serve as unwilling vessels for beliefs that repel them. As Thomas Jefferson said, To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical. The supporters of the voucher program want to force property owners to underwrite partisan political donations in the name of democracy. I dont think that word means what they think that word means.
Ethan Blevins is an attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation, representing the challengers to Seattles democracy-voucher program.
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Seattle's 'Democracy Voucher' Plan: Coercive and Unfair | National ... - National Review