Valley sides with Trump on flag burning punishment

On Twitter, Trump suggested Americans who burn the flag should be jailed or even lose their citizenship.

More than 200 people voted in the poll, with 55.3 percent supporting Trump and 44.7 percent opposing the president. But while many Americans may look down on burning the country’s flag, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a Texas case in 1989 that the burning of a U.S. flag was protected under the First Amendment.

A spokesperson for Trump said on CNN that he agreed with the president-elect’s stance on the issue.

“We’ll protect our First Amendment”, McCarthy said.

On Tuesday, Trump proposed that flag burning should be illegal, and violators should have their USA citizenship stripped, or face a year in jail.

Trump’s tweet also demonstrated an ability, which has continued beyond his campaign, to divert public attention from other issues of the day.

WASHINGTON ― Since Donald Trump helped him keep the reins of the Senate as majority leader, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) hasn’t stood up much to the president-elect.

His stance, which goes against a 1989 U.S. Supreme court decision, prompted some activists to call for the Flag Burning Challenge. Some people believe it’s the very type of act that the First Amendment was created to protect.

In 1990, demonstrators were again arrested for burning the flag and appealed to have their charges dropped.

In 2012, conservative justice Antonin Scalia explained the importance of differentiating between personal opinions and respect for the law. “I thought that that was infringement of freedom of speech. and I was hostile to the idea of American supremacy around the world”, he said.

“I think that although it’s protected by the First Amendment, it’s kind of an unintended deviation from it, like the founding fathers definitely did not intend for the desecration of our nation’s flag”, says Macon resident, Phillip Abshire. “Flag-burning should be illegal”, Miller said on CNN when asked about Trump’s tweet.