April 24, 2024

In the News

Denver Gazette: Colorado Republicans say House Democratic leaders gave them list of words they can't say in immigration debates

By Marissa Ventrelli

.....Colorado Republicans are accusing Democratic leaders of censorship, saying the latter have provided them with a list of words they are prohibited from using during floor debates.

More specifically, Republicans claimed they were told not to say specific words, including "illegal alien," during debates on immigration...

It's not the first time that Democrats have been accused of curtailing someone's speech around controversial subjects. 

Earlier this month, the Institute for Free Speech filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of Gays Against Groomers and the Rocky Mountain Women’s Network to prohibit Colorado lawmakers from enforcing speaker restrictions against using “misgendering” and “deadnaming” language when referring to transgender individuals.

Supreme Court

ACLU: The Supreme Court Declined a Protestors' Rights Case. Here's What You Need to Know.

By Urooba Abid and Vera Eidelman

.....The Supreme Court recently declined to hear a case, Mckesson v. Doe, that could have affirmed that the First Amendment protects protest organizers from being held liable for illegal actions committed by others present that organizers did not direct or intend. The high court’s decision to not hear the case at this time left in place an opinion by the Fifth Circuit, which covers Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, that said a protest organizer could be liable for the independent, violent actions of others based on nothing more than a showing of negligence.

Across the country, many people have expressed concern about how the Supreme Court’s decision not to review, or hear, the case at this stage could impact the right to protest. The ACLU, which asked the court to take up the case, breaks down what the court’s denial of review means.

The Courts

New York Times: National Enquirer’s Help for Trump Broke Norms Even in the Tabloid World

By Jim Rutenberg

.....The National Enquirer was more than a friendly media outlet for Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. It was a powerful, national political weapon that was thrust into the service of a single candidate, in violation of campaign finance law.

The tabloid’s former publisher, David Pecker, testified nonchalantly on Tuesday about how the tabloid operated in tandem with the Trump campaign, “catching and killing” potentially damaging stories and running elaborate and false hit pieces on Mr. Trump’s opponents. But its practices were unusual even in the wild supermarket tabloid news game.

People United for Privacy: Disclosure Turns ‘Friends of the Court’ Into Suspects

By Brian Hawkins

.....The Judicial Conference of the United States’ Advisory Committee on Appellate Rules recently approved a new set of proposed rules for public comment requiring certain filers of amicus briefs to disclose their donors in the text of the brief.

The latest version of the proposal would require amicus filers in federal court to disclose any contributions over $100 that are specifically earmarked toward “preparing, drafting, or submitting” a friend-of-the-court brief. However, amicus filers would not be required to disclose earmarked contributions from members of its own organization, unless that member joined within the preceding twelve months. Current rules already require amicus filers to disclose if a party to the case contributed to the brief, a requirement that remains unchanged.

Biden Administration

Washington Post: Biden signs bill that could ban TikTok, a strike years in the making

By Cristiano Lima-Strong

.....President Biden announced Wednesday he has signed legislation to ban or force a sale of TikTok, just hours after Congress dealt the video-sharing platform’s Chinese ownership a historic rebuke following years of failed attempts to tackle the app’s alleged national security risks.

The Senate approved the measure 79 to 18 late Tuesday as part of a sprawling package offering aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, with the House having passed it Saturday. Biden confirmed that he signed the bill into law during a White House address on Wednesday, though he did not directly address the language targeting TikTok.

Free Expression

Wall Street Journal: Defining Free Speech Down on Campus

By The Editorial Board

.....Universities are supposed to be places where students and faculty can debate politics and other subjects without fear or censure. As the anti-Israel protests spread at Columbia, Yale, Harvard, New York University and elsewhere, however, progressives are claiming that any restriction on the protesters is a violation of free speech.

That isn’t true, and it’s important to understand why. Under its “state action doctrine,” the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment applies to government actions toward citizens. It doesn’t apply to private citizens or institutions except in rare instances when they are acting as government agents.

As University of California, Berkeley law school dean and ardent liberal Erwin Chemerinsky explained recently to anti-Israel students who wanted to protest on his lawn, his property is “not a forum for free speech.”

New York Times: I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice.

By John McWhorter

.....I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans, or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza War would view them that way, in fact. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible? …

Today’s protesters don’t hate Israel’s government any more than yesterday’s hated South Africa’s. But they have pursued their goals with a markedly different tenor — in part because of the single-mindedness of antiracist academic culture and in part because of the influence of iPhones and social media, which inherently encourage a more heightened degree of performance.