Happy Monday all you lovely FRers!! As usual on Monday, today’s words are by Stephen L. Hall.
Having several topics of which I have been wanting to write, of course leftist stupidity leaps to take primacy in our usual Monday discourse. In particular, a certain foolish notion has seized the lustful imaginations of leftists across the country, and no I am not referring to a certain sexual internet proclivities.
I refer to the novel idea that the actions of President Trump in blocking people on his personal, rather than official, Twitter account is somehow illegal or even unconstitutional. There are a tremendous number of articles all over the internet on this topic appearing in just the last two weeks.
As far as I can tell, it started building steam almost immediately after Trump won the election and gathered momentum after he took office. The Twitter medium which allows him to speak directly to large numbers of people bypassing the media gatekeepers has come under increasing attack and those attacks appear increasing in desperation.
One article briefly addressed the issue from a fairly objective legal standpoint which appeared in Law Newz back on May 30th regarding the legality of Trump blocking Twitter users. “One could make the conclusion that because tweets are presidential records under the Presidential Records Act, Federal Records Act, and Freedom of Information Act, the public has the right to access these tweets and blocking a user would restrict this freedom.”
After discussing how Twitter actually works, the author quickly comes to the conclusion that: “While deleting tweets without properly archiving them might be problematic, simply blocking a user when your posts are still visible to the public does not appear to break the law.”
But this will not deter leftists in their windmill tilting, they will not be dissuaded, just as political lawyers will grasp at any straw to attack their political enemies. Unsurprisingly, this effort is being led out of Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute (KFAI), but seeing the same futility in the records acts, has devised a different angle from which to strike their enemy.
Like all “First Amendment” lawyers, they see everything as a First Amendment Constitutional case. As the saying goes, if the only tool in your box is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail.
As I usually do, in order to get the far, extreme, leftist perspective, I turn to CBS News which, true to form, is willing to go into detail about their position and argument with a completely unflinchingly leftist perspective.
They begin by asserting that Trump’s “tweets carry the stamp of government authority”, citing noted legal scholar Sean Spicer for this conclusion. Press Secretaries really know the intricacies of legal classifications, just think of the brilliant mind of Marie Harf. (And if anyone thinks I actually need a sarcasm tag for this paragraph, you will be taken out and shot.)
In KFAI’s letter to Trump they state their argument, “Blocking users from your Twitter account violates the First Amendment. When the government makes a space available to the public at large for the purpose of expressive activity, it creates a public forum from which it may not constitutionally exclude individuals on the basis of viewpoint.”
In particular parts, Tweeting at Trump, in his personal account @realDonaldTrump, not the @POTUS account, is 1) a public forum, 2) not only an engagement in free speech, but 3) such Tweeters are thus “petitioning the government”, therefore 4) blocking them “plays the role of government censor”.
Let us examine these in turn. First, is Twitter a “public forum”? The word forum comes to us from the Latin word for “the marketplace or public place of an ancient Roman city forming the center of judicial and public business”. Over time came more modern adaptation of that meaning, “a public meeting place for open discussion” and more recently “a medium (such as a newspaper or online service) of open discussion or expression of ideas”.
Public, of course in this context, pertains “of or relating to a government”. Ergo, as Twitter is not owned by the government, their assertion that it is a public forum must fail. If Twitter is a “public forum” then so must be the New York Times or CBS News; but they would limit it to only his account, only the President’s account becomes a public forum.
An essential part of the Rule of Law, is the second part, though most people focus upon the first that “No man is above the law” and neglect the second, “ and no man is beneath the law.” The President does not give up his liberties by being elected, that same law must apply to him as applies to everyone else. Is every government official’s Twitter account a public forum? If the President’s is a public forum, then your country commissioner’s account is a public forum.
Secondly, is every comment hurled at someone free speech? Freedom of Speech is that you have the right to say what you wish without the government stopping you from saying it. You do not have the right to be heard. No one has to actually listen to you. That is what is being demanded here, not the right to speak, but the right to ensure that those words find their intended audience. Blocking is no different in substance than a man tuning out his wife by turning off his hearing aid, she can speak as much as she likes, he is not stopping her.
Thirdly, they equate a quip at the Twitter feed to be the equal of a petition of the government for a redress of grievances, as stated in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. Oddly, this equates the President, the Executive, to the entire government. What happened to “call your Congressman”? The normal process to petition your government is to address your concerns first to the appropriate agencies, then to your representative if they are unresponsive.
Of course, if you have the ear of the President, why not go directly to the top, but does everyone have a right to that ear? More to the point, most of those people are not petitioning the President but merely complaining or grousing or even uttering vulgarities and vitriol.
So long as other avenues exist for “petitioning the government” then the Twits, I mean Tweeters, are not being deprived of their right to petition the government. What is a lawsuit but a petition for the redress of grievances? Thus, being a party to such a lawsuit, by definition, proves that you are allowed to petition the government, negating the argument of the petition by filing the petition itself.
Finally, is blocking someone censoring them? There is no question that Twitter censors people, often based on Twitter’s liberally biased political beliefs. Such censorship is legal because it is not the action of the government. But blocking someone is not deleting their comments, it is merely ignoring their comments and not commenting to them.
It is a major stretch of the imagination to pretend that someone ignoring you and not talking to you is censoring you. When that aforementioned wife, obviously miffed at being ignored, chooses to give her husband the silent treatment, he is not being censored by her because he may say whatever he wishes; he may be grateful for her silence but he is not silenced thereby.
Picture that ancient forum of a Roman town, wherein Consul Trump ignores the peon who waves to get is attention so that he may ask him a question. Has thus the peon been censored and silenced? If Consul Trump converses in a corner of the building with a few Senators and citizens, are those left out of the conversation denied their rights of speech?
Or a more modern version, suppose a live appearance in a city by the President in a town’s civic center. One person is denied a ticket to enter. Unconstitutionally denied access to the forum? A person in the audience who wished to ask a question. Unconstitutionally denied their petition to the government?
If these same actions in person are not unconstitutional, then how could one imagine that the same action would suddenly become unconstitutional because it was done electronically?
Finally, there is one observation that I would like to make to these First Amendment Constitutional Scholars, these wise and learned gentlemen so brilliant in their fashion to file federal lawsuits in their pursuit of the President for their estimation of his violating that very First Amendment upon which their entire professional careers are based.
The first words of the First Amendment are, “Congress shall make no law . . . .” The last time I checked, the President was not Congress. The last time I checked, the President does not make laws. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from making certain laws. It has nothing to do with the President whatsoever.
Have they ever bothered to actually read the First Amendment?
