Trump suggests ‘consequences’ for any flag-burners

Social media was itself ablaze on Tuesday in response to Trump’s tweet, which suggested that burning the USA flag should be punishable by a year in jail or a revocation of citizenship. In 2005, she co-sponsored legislation to criminalize the desecration of the American flag, and in 2006, she enthusiastically supported another bill that would have done the same thing. In Los Angeles and Portland the demonstrations resulted in unrest with hundreds of people arrested.

In the early morning, he took to Twitter – his favorite platform for exercising his own right to freedom of expression – to proclaim that burning a USA flag should be punished by “perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!”

This, mind you, is the same Donald Trump who proposes treating the United States Constitution like his own personal toilet paper.

“We’ll protect our First Amendment”, McCarthy said. A decade ago, the Senate narrowly failed to approve a Constitutional amendment banning flag-burning, with now-Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell voting in opposition. The university then made a decision to stop flying the American flag at the campus, which also infuriated some members of the community. “You know, Scalia was actually the leading advocate of fag burning, not flag burning”, the openly gay politician joked, using a derogatory term for gay men. “In this country, we have a long history of protecting unpleasant speech”. Among those voting with the court majority in that case was the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February, and whom Trump has repeatedly cited as a model for the kind of justice he would appoint to the nation’s highest court.

Without a Supreme Court reversal, proponents of a flag-burning ban would have to enact a Constitutional Amendment, meaning two-thirds support from both houses of Congress and ratification by two-thirds of the states. The red flag was viewed as a symbol of communism. The decision also reaffirmed many previous cases that were decided on the basis that freedom of speech doesn’t simply apply to the spoken and written word.

The Flag Protection Act of 2005 would have banned “destroying or damaging a US flag with the primary goal and intent to incite or produce imminent violence or a breach of the peace”, punishable with a year in prison. Freedom of speech for anyone is freedom of speech for everyone. “A black American who wakes up to see a cross burning on the front lawn has every right to feel personally, and physically, threatened”.