The Editor's Desk

Several Supreme Court decisions came down today regarding First Amendment issues.

First, the court ruled unconstitutional certain restrictions on advocacy political advertisements prior to elections. The court ruled 5-4 that the guidelines restricting a timeframe prior to elections when the ads could run were too severe.

This goes down as a partial “W” for the First Amendment. The court didn’t throw out the entire McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, but does allow more freedom for interested parties to make their cases to the American people as elections approach. Now if the whole law, which favors incumbents in the guise of allegedly “cleaning up” politics, could get tossed out, that would be great.

In a more complicated decision, the First Amendment gets a small “L”in the case of a high school student and his “bong hits 4 Jesus” banner. You can probably guess what this case is about. Boy hangs up banner, gets in trouble. The school’s argument here was that he wasn’t saying anything of substance about drugs and the banner could be seen as advocating illegal behavior. The court agreed, but made it clear that the nature of the boy’s message mattered here. If it had made some sort of political statement about drug legalization or something to that effect, the decision might have gone otherwise.

While I understand the nature of the decision, I don’t expect that most school administrators will understand or care about the distinctions. I fully expect this decision to be pointed to when schools suppress actual political speech.

And in a ruling regarding the executive branch of the United States and the separation of church and state, I’m still not quite sure how to call it. The Supreme Court blocked a suit against the Bush Administration’s Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The plaintiffs argued (quite correctly, in my opinion) that the government was giving tax money to churches, a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. In a 5-4 ruling, the majority determined that the plaintiffs had “no standing” to argue damages in this situation.

My limited understanding of the court ruling (and I did actually read several pages of both sides here, but I’m not even capable of being a pretend Internet lawyer) was that the money spent was distributed at the discretion of the executive branch. The distribution of funds in this fashion could not be subjected to lawsuits in this fashion, or else it would open the executive branch up to lawsuits over every expense or decision. It falls upon the legislative branch (Congress) to set guidelines for executive branch expenditures if it chooses to do so.

I feel a little odd about the decision. I understand the logic they’re presenting, but if a branch of the government is violating the Establishment Clause, does it matter the circumstances? In this case, the Supreme Court narrowly ruled that it doesn’t have the power to tell the executive branch what it may or may not spend money on, even if it’s a violation.

Of course, from a libertarian perspective, if the government didn’t take tax dollars and redistribute them to charities against our will in the first place, we’d all be free to donate to whichever secular or religious charity suited us.