Bong Hits for Bad Government
I love this topic. But these decisions suck. I will let Vijay explain why.
Interesting, I was on the home page of Yahoo News and nothing about the supreme court was there. But there was the important story of the Cameron Diaz’s purse and some breaking news about a judge’s pants. Thanks, media!
June 25th, 2007 18:41
I don’t really have anything thoughtful to add. I thought the taxpayer standing case was decided correctly. I think an advisory system of review (where legislation would be shipped to the Supreme Court for constitutional approval before it became law) might be a good way organize things. Unfortunately, that’s not the system we have. The good thing is there is any easy way around the standing problem: apply for federal funds as an atheist group and then challenge faith-based subsidies.
The Wisconsin Right to Life case is unfortunate and pretty much kills any serious efforts to enact campaign finance laws. It’s tough. There’s a few ways to approach the problem. You could conceive of the first amendment as a purely individual right. In which case corporations would really not be implicated by censorship laws. But I think conceiving of the first amendment as a pure individual right would preclude application to groups we really think should be protected under the first amendment (like the ACLU, for example). Once you conceive of the First amendment as something more than just a pure individual right, it’s hard to figure out a way to make it sensibly apply to noncorporations. And rights conception aside, most people (even Robert Bork) agree that the first amendment protects, if nothing else, political speech, which this clearly was. That said, I haven’t read the dissents in the case, so there might be some compelling way out that I haven’t thought of.
The student case is truly bizarre. What’s weird is how the Court can fetishize free speech in one case and completely disregard it in another. I understand that there’s a difference between an election and a classroom, but in the abstract the decisions come off as: the kind of free speech Justice Roberts likes is protected and the kind of free speech he doesn’t like is not.
Anyway, anyone who tries to convince you these decisions are incremental is full of shit. The student case will basically embolden public school administrators and it will be increasingly difficult to bring a constitutional challenge (if bong hits for jesus counts as drug advocacy, I don’t see how hard it will be for administrators to justify the most draconian regulations as aimed at rooting out drug advocacy on school grounds). The campaign cases, though narrow in ruling, are a real setback for mccain-feingold. And the taxpayer standing case, though correctly decided, basically kills the one narrow exception for Establishment Clause challenges. The Court has shifted to the right. But its rhetoric has been carefully deployed to conceal how significant that shift has been.
June 26th, 2007 13:58
Supreme Court Approved Substances for Jesus at boingboing.
June 27th, 2007 14:41
make your own “Booze and Pills 4 Jesus” banner!