BONG HITS 4 FREE SPEECH

Supremes' Disturbing 1st Amendment Rulings

THE U.S. SUPREME Court's schizophrenic rulings on First Amendment
issues this week reflect a troubling trend by the Roberts Court.

Most notably, the court has gutted the McCain-Feingold prohibitions
against corporations and unions who would bankroll anti-candidate ads
that are thinly disguised as issues ads. McCain-Feingold prohibits
corporations or unions from financing ads that target specific
candidates in the weeks just before an election.

The ruling defangs the bill's enforcement provisions by finding that
its restrictions illegally curtail free speech rights guaranteed by
the First Amendment.

Those restrictions, the court said, amount to censorship of political
views unless the ads urged a vote for or against a specific candidate.

But the court took a much more narrow view of First Amendment
protections in a ruling handed down the same day. They upheld a
principal's right to punish an Alaska high school student for what
the principal felt was a message promoting drug use. The student was
suspended after unfurling a sign that read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" at an
off-campus but school-related event.

Chief Justice John Roberts had it both ways in the two unrelated
rulings. In the McCain-Feingold case, he wrote, a political ad can't
be censored unless it is "susceptible of no reasonable interpretation
other than as an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate."

"Where the First Amendment is implicated," Roberts wrote, "the tie
goes to the speaker not the censor."

But in the Alaska high school ruling, Roberts did not even
acknowledge that there was a free-speech issue. The case, Roberts
wrote "hardly justifies sounding the First Amendment bugle."

What does?

Well, it depends, it seems, on whose ideological ox is being gored.
Free speech is to be protected at all cost if it preserves a popular
position. But if it could mean defending some smart-assed high school
kid, free speech becomes a non-issue.

There's the rub. Instead of taking a vantage point above the fray,
the court has come down from its perch to back positions more
consistent with current conservative politics than with strict,
principled interpretations of the Constitution.

That's a troubling trend. When its rulings appear more transactional
than transcendent, respect for the nation's highest court must suffer.