FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED MARCH 28, 2000 THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz Playing to the galleries
The United States Senate is scheduled to vote today whether to send to the states for ratification a new Constitutional Amendment.
Up until that run of madness in the second decade of th 1900s, the body politic had demonstrated a wise reluctance to use amendments to impose hare-brained "reforms."
And when the nation did make the mistake of trying to impose social reform through this "short-cut," the mistake was repealed with relative alacrity, ending alcohol Prohibition in 1933 after a brief if bloody 14-year demonstration of the futility of such gestures.
(Though, now that the federal government can again rely on the steady income stream of the liquor excise, aren't we about 70 years behind in repealing the companion (start ital)Sixteenth(end ital) Amendment?)
Anyway: Are we in need of further Constitutional amendments, today?
A term-limits amendment fell 69 votes short of passage in the House in 1997. Now confronted with two unimpressive presidential candidates, (start ital)both(end ital) heirs to our hereditary governing plutocracy, three quarters of the states might judge that one worth another try.
Though it would be unique, the senate could also forward to the states a purely advisory amendment, pointing out that -- while a further amendment was required to overrule the Ninth Amendment's guarantee of the unenumerated right to buy and consume alcohol in 1919 -- no such amendment has ever been ratified, pertaining to "drugs."
Finally, if the Senate wanted to come up with an Amendment both popular and useful, it could either repeal outright or clarify that the aforementioned Sixteenth Amendment authorized only indirect excises on interest -- not on wages.
But no, the Senate will not deal with any such substantive restoration of our liberties today. Instead, the senators contemplate endorsing an amendment to ban ... flag burning.
This recycled election year barrel-thumper dates back to two Supreme Court decisions in 1989 and 1990, in which a narrow 5-4 majority struck down a Texas flag desecration statute, after a member of the "Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade" was convicted of burning an American flag.
What ever happened to the RCYB? Do we care? Assuming the roup ever had enough members to fill a phone booth, it's better than even odds most are now Little League coaches with 401(k) plans.
Equally significant is that one also has to go back nearly that far to find anyone (start ital)committing(end ital) political flag burning -- the heyday of this particular form of protest having passed with the fall of Saigon.
Many who support this amendment -- including veterans who lost buddies fighting under the Stars and Stripes -- are motivated by sincere patriotic feeling. But this is one case where skeptics like Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, top Senate Democrat, have it right. "It's our view that defending the Constitution is far more important," Daschle says.
The contention that flag burning (or "desecration," as the amendment would have it) is not an act of political speech, just won't hold water.
Suppose the amendment is enacted, whereupon an elderly school custodian takes down his tattered and faded example of Old Glory, carries it to the basement, and soberly destoys the worn old banner in the school furnace.
Would he be charged with a crime? Of course not. That's the proper and recommended way to dispose of an old flag.
So it's not the physical act of burning a flag that would be banned, but only the political content of flag burning, as an act of protest.
That is to say: only the part protected by the First Amendment.
Yes, flag burning is an act designed to express -- and generate -- outrage. Shall we also now outlaw handicapped veterans throwing their medals back over the White House fence? Is it really so unthinkable that our federal police might do something under the red-white-and-blue to which an appropriate response might (start ital)be(end ital) an expression of outrage? Anyone feel like saluting the flag which the strutting ATF and FBI gleefully raised over the smoldering crematorium of Waco, back in April of '93?
It now appears Nevada Democratic Sen. Richard Bryan may try to avoid voting for this unnecessary piece of constitutionl overkill by joining with Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in proposing a lesser statutory alternative, establishing jail terms and fines for damaging a flag.
But that's only slightly less bad than the course favored by Sen. Harry Reid (also D-Nev.), which is to cynically curry favor with zealots who cannot see the damage such a constitutional amendment would do to the very freedoms for which many of them fought.
Sen. Reid is expected to simply vote thumbs-up, thus knocking away a small part of the undergirding of the First Amendment.
Once we've gone that far, what other "outrages" shall we ban by popular acclamation? Shall the senators next curry favor by voting to outlaw, tax, or otherwise regulate some of our more "dangerous" churches? Newspapers? Internet sites?
They say everything gets easier the second time.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers" is available by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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