The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday handed a defeat to activists and other litigants whose extreme views motivate them to try to eliminate from public life almost every symbol and expression of religion. By a slim 5-4 margin, the Court in Salazar v. Buono reversed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and allowed an 8-foot cross in the Mojave Desert to continue to stand – at least for now. The cross is part of a national memorial for the over 300,000 American soldiers who died in World War …
Groucho Marx famously quipped to the Friar’s Club of Hollywood that he didn’t “want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.” On Monday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case where Groucho-like humility is nowhere in evidence. In CLS v. Martinez, what is at issue is the right of the Christian Legal Society (CLS) to establish and receive routine school recognition for a chapter that retains and applies a statement of faith to its officers and voting members. On the other …
Is the Federal Communications Commission building a case for government-subsidized news? It’s not hard to imagine that will be the outcome of the Commission’s “Future of Media” inquiry. The digital age has produced a “democratic shortfall,” according to one source cited in the inquiry’s public notice. Another scholar working on the project for the FCC has said that today’s media abundance calls for “public media entities” that will serve “as both a filter to reduce information overload and a megaphone to give voice to the unheard.” In other words, a …
On Friday, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck another blow towards restoring every American’s First Amendment right to engage in political speech. In SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, the court applied the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Citizens United to throw out another pernicious portion of the federal campaign finance law also known as McCain-Feingold. SpeechNow is an unincorporated association of individuals that wanted to run independent ads in the 2008 election that supported candidates for federal office that shared their views on the First Amendment …
All high school math teacher Bradley Johnson wanted to do was honor our nation’s history and religious heritage the same way he always had. For twenty five years, a red, white and blue-striped banner adorned his classroom walls with national maxims such as “In God We Trust,” “One Nation Under God, “ “God Bless America,” and “God Shed his Grace On Thee.” A second banner accompanied it, containing an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence, “All Men are Created Equal and They Are Endowed by Their Creator.” But displaying a …
What a difference a question makes. A couple of weeks ago, we exposed the biased and misleading questions behind a widely-cited Washington Post poll, which supposedly found broad, bipartisan support for legislative limits on speech following the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Citizens United case. The Center for Competitive Politics, however, has now released a poll with dramatically different findings. Based on much more accurate and objective questions, the Center’s findings reiterate our call for caution on the part of lawmakers, who appear ready to rush through legislative measures …
Continuing the wide-ranging assault on the Supreme Court’s First Amendment decision in the Citizens United case, The Washington Post claims that a poll the newspaper conducted in conjunction with ABC News shows that “Americans of both parties overwhelmingly oppose” the outcome. Cataloging the so-called “strong reservoir of bipartisan support,” the story suggests that already-promised legislative proposals aimed at curtailing the decision will be met with public accolades. But the Washington Post, and indeed virtually all of the critics of Citizens United, continue to recycle the same tired talking points, none …
The “First Principles” on which this country were founded are the principles that the Heritage Foundation works to advance everyday. In today’s landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision of Citizens United v. FEC, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court upheld some of the most important principles: the right to engage in free speech, particularly political speech, and the right to freely associate. It is no surprise that these rights are in the very first amendment in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. The Founders, who had fought a …
Does the Federal Communications Commission have a “speech czar”? That was the question before Julius Genachowski yesterday, as he testified for the first time before Congress as FCC chairman. At issue was the appointment of ex-journalist Mark Lloyd to be the agency’s “chief diversity officer,” a position quickly dubbed “the diversity czar,” or the “speech czar.” For weeks now, Lloyd has been a cause celebre on conservative talk radio and other media, where he has been portrayed as yet another in a long line of powerful and unaccountable Obama policy …
Whether the source is Gallup, Pew, Quinnipiac, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, the Washington Post, or even the New York Times; every recent poll on the issue shows that either pluralities or majorities of Americans have serious doubts about President Barack Obama’s health care plan. Reviewing the month’s polling data, Gallup’s Frank Newport sums it up: “The bottom line is a sense that, while Americans apparently favor some type of healthcare reform in the long term, they are in no hurry to see healthcare reform legislation passed in the short-term …
