Thankfully, Jay Inslee's Unconstitutional Bill To Criminalize Political Speech Dies In The Washington Senate
from the don't-criminalize-free-speech dept
Over the last few years, it's been depressing to see politicians from both major political parties attacking free speech. As we noted last month, Washington state governor Jay Inslee last month started pushing a bill that would criminalize political speech. He kept insisting that it was okay under the 1st Amendment because he got a heavily biased constitutional lawyer, Larry Tribe, to basically shrug and say "maybe it could be constitutional?" But the bill was clearly problematic -- and would lead to nonstop nonsense lawsuits against political candidates.
Thankfully, cooler heads have prevailed in the Washington Senate and the bill has died. The bill's main sponsor is still insisting that it would survive 1st Amendment scrutiny, but also recognized that it just didn't have enough political support:
State Sen. David Frockt (D), who sponsored the bill, said, "We have to respect that the bill in its current form did not have enough support to advance despite the care we took in its drafting through our consultation with leading First Amendment scholars."
Inslee, for his part, still insists something must be done:
After the bill was defeated on Tuesday, Inslee said in a statement, "We all still have a responsibility to act against this Big Lie ... we must continue to explore ways to fight the dangerous deceptions politicians are still promoting about our elections."
And, look, I don't disagree that the Big Lie about the 2020 election is a problem. But you don't solve problems by censoring 1st Amendment protected speech. That never ends well. At all.
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Filed Under: 1st amendment, election misinformation, free speech, jay inslee, lies, misinformation, political speech, washington
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Here's hoping...
...that EARN IT and the stampede of similar atrocious unconstitutional legislation in the federal legislature dies as well.
I'm not too optimistic, though...
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Larry Tribe
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Re: Larry Tribe
A quick search gives me things like this:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170424/01483737214/stop-it-trumps-lawyers-did-not-say-th at-protestors-have-no-first-amendment-right-to-dissent.shtml
I'm not sure of the current details but that suggests to me that something did change in recent years,
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Re: Larry Tribe
During the Trump era, he fell in with a weird bunch, and seemed to have lost the plot: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/larry-tribe-why
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Stopping lying politician? Well, yeah, that's what elections are for... in theory.
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It seems like Bills that go up for vote need to go through a simple judicial review to determine if they are a legal dumpster fire, like this one and can just be flushed.
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Ah yes...
The Big Lie...
Which one?
Trump colluded with Russia and needed a 3 year investigation that turned up nothing?
That someone who was ODing on meth died at the hands of cops?
That the Hunter Biden laptop story wasn't real and that the media was 100% fair and honest?
That someone other than Ashleii Babbit (who was killed by an ACAB) was killed in D.C. on Jan. 6th?
Come on. Tell me. Because there's that and many, many more that have been pushed out.
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Re: Ah yes...
OK. It's this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie#Trump's_false_claim_of_a_stolen_election
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