Category Archives: First Amendment

The Church of Scientology maintains the universe is 4 quadrillion years old and that most of mankinds problems are traceable to an imperialistic alien named Lord Xenu. Some 75 million years ago, Xenu won an intergalactic battle by stuffing thetans sort of like human souls into volcanos, on which Xenu then dropped hydrogen bombs. Millions of these immortal thetans later attached themselves to humans, causing humans to become sick, confused, depressed and insecure.

The goal of Scientology is to help humans to clear their bodies of thetans by devoting hundreds of thousands of dollars to cleansing processes developed by the religions founder, L. Ron Hubbard, who holds the record for the greatest number of books published by one author (1,064). His sacred science fiction works are stored in a nuclear-blast-proof vault below the surface of planet Earth.

Despite having only 25,000 American members by some counts, the Church of Scientologys liquid assets of $1 billion exceeded those of the Roman Catholic Church in 2013. But the Los Angeles-based Church of Scientology almost collapsed in the 1990s under a $1 billion bill from the Internal Revenue Service for unpaid taxes. The IRS finally restored the organizations tax-exempt church status in 1993 in exchange for the church halting a barrage of lawsuits it had filed against the agency, including 2,300 Freedom of Information Act suits.

Today, a big labor union is using a strategy against the Freedom Foundation similar to the strategy the Church of Scientology used to defeat the IRS. The Service Employees International Union has filed multiple expensive lawsuits against the Foundation, an SEIU detractor, in hope of defunding it. To SEIU, bleeding the Freedom Foundation dry is as good as a court order blocking the Foundations freedom of speech.

Freedom Foundation Managing Attorney Greg Overstreet told me in June that SEIU is running out of arguments. Consequently, theyve hit us with a barrage of frivolous lawsuits and campaign-finance complaints. In substance, theyre no different from cases weve always won before. But each one requires a response. [T]he unions arent filing these new cases with any expectation of winning. Their true objective is simply to overwhelm our capacity to defend ourselves and thereby bankrupt their most persistent and effective adversary. It wont work.

I hope Overstreet is right that SEIUs strategy wont work, even though the same strategy has brought the IRS and other Scientology detractors to their knees. In 1973, the church sued Paulette Cooper, author of The Scandal of Scientology, 19 times and falsified evidence to arrange her indictment by a grand jury for sending bomb threats.

One advantage the Freedom Foundation has that the IRS lacked is citizen appeal. Few private citizens have gone to bat for the IRS. But history is rich with people willing to risk a great deal to defend freedoms supposedly protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Many of the people who should start sticking up for the Freedom Foundation would gain by doing so. The Freedom Foundations only crime is informing people about existing law. In 2014s Harris v. Quinn, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled SEIU violated the First and Fourteenth Amendment rights of home health caregivers by automatically extorting agency fees which are essentially union dues paid by non-members from them.

In the wake of Harris, the Capital Research Center reported in May 2017, the Freedom Foundation launched an outreach program that employed dozens of paid canvassers who have gone door to door all across the state and into neighboring Oregon to inform health care providers of their right to opt out of paying dues or fees to SEIU.

The Foundations outreach efforts were successful. In response, however, SEIU has orchestrated a litany of frivolous lawsuits against the Foundation to stop it from speaking to workers, Freedom Foundation Litigation Counsel David Dewhirst told me in July. The unions have even convinced the Washington State Attorney General, Bob Ferguson, to pile on and prosecute the Foundation for not reporting as campaign expenditures its various pro bono legal services to citizens across the state.

Laborers are being scammed, but not by an intergalactic alien monster. The West Coast has its own labor lord, and it has government reinforcements.

Michael T. Hamilton (mhamilton@heartland.org, @MikeFreeMarket) is a research fellow and editor at The Heartland Institute. He drew facts about the Church of Scientology from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lawrence Wrights book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (2013), which HBO made into a documentary in 2015.

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Big labor bullies First Amendment with Scientology playbook - OCRegister

News & Observer

Does the campus free speech bill protect First Amendment rights or restrict them? News & Observer Call for the UNC-system Board of Governors to develop a policy preventing schools from shield[ing] individuals from speech protected by the First Amendment, including, without limitation, ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even ...

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Does the campus free speech bill protect First Amendment rights or restrict them? - News & Observer

We've been covering a recent First Amendment lawsuit targeting President Donald Trumpa novel legal argumentin which Twitter users claim their constitutional rights were violated because the commander-in-chief blocked them from his personal @realDonaldTrump Twitter handle.

To be sure, it's a digital-age-basedconstitutional theory about social media rights in a day and age when politicians, from the president on down, are using their private accounts to discuss public affairs.

Now there's some legal precedent on the matter. It comes from a federal judge in Virginia who said that a local politician had violated the First Amendment rights of a constituent because the politician briefly banned the constituent from the politician'spersonal Facebook account.

"The suppression of critical commentary regarding elected officials is the quintessential form of viewpoint discrimination against which the First Amendment guards," US District Judge James Cacheris wrote Tuesday in a suit brought by a constituent against Phyllis Randall, the chairwoman of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors in Virginia.

The judge didn't issue any punishment against Randall, as the Facebook ban for constituent Brian Davison only lasted about 12 hours. That said, the judge noted Randall committed "a cardinal sin under the First Amendment" by barring the constituent who posted about county corruption. What's more, the judge pointed out from the first sentence of the ruling that "this case raises important questions about the constitutional limitations applicable to social media accounts maintained by elected officials."

Randall's Facebook page, the judge ruled, "operates as a forum for speech under the First Amendment to the US Constitution."

This suit, at its most basic level, is nearly identical to the one lodged against Trump two weeks ago. Like the Virginia suit, the lawsuit against Trump names the chief executive's private account, which Trump uses on an almost daily basis as his political mouthpiece to the world.

"The @realDonaldTrump [Twitter] account is a kind of digital town hall in which the president and his aides use the tweet function to communicate news and information to the public, and members of the public use the reply function to respond to the president and his aides and exchange views with one another," according to the lawsuit (PDF) filed in New York federal court.

The Trump suit was brought by a handful of Twitter users Trump blocked after they posted critical comments. The lawsuit, to which Trump has yet to respond in court, seeks a ruling that the president's actions were unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, Judge Cacheris noted that Randall still had the right to moderate Facebook comments and that it's not always unconstitutional to block commenters.

"Finally, government officials have at least a reasonably strong interest in moderating discussion on their Facebook pages in an expeditious manner. By permitting a commenter to repeatedly post inappropriate content pending a review process, a government official could easily fail to preserve their online forum for its intended purpose," the judge wrote.

What's more, the judge said that allowing online speakers to hijack or filibuster online conversations would "impinge on the First Amendment rights" of other forum participants.

"Given the prevalence of online 'trolls,' this is no mere hypothetical risk," the judge said.

Judge Cacherishad recently tossed a similar lawsuit from Davison, a software consultant. In that suit, Davisonclaimed his First Amendment rights were breached because a prosecutor had removed hiscomments from the prosecutor's official Facebook page. The judge noted that the deletion of the comments was acceptable because they were "clearly off-topic" comments.

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Politicians' social media pages can be 1st Amendment forums, judge says - Ars Technica

Dear Editor:

Re LETTER: Ill take separation of church and state, by Eileen D. Minogue, July 20, 2017: I recently read an article by Roman Catholic Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, which I found most enlightening, including the following paragraphs:

The First Amendment, which places freedom of religion as number one, protects the churches from intrusion by the government, not the government from religion.

[Alexis de] Tocqueville asked himself how a country so vast, so diverse, so open to everybody, so bold, under a constitution so daring and unprecedented could ever survive. His answer? Because the American people are religious!

Id like to hope our country has not strayed so far that its people no longer profess what early Americans professed in their Pledge of Allegiance one nation, under God.

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Those who object have the freedom to eliminate what they feel objectionable, but not impose their views on the majority.

Joan Saehloff

Port Ewen, N.Y.

Editors note: The Pledge of Allegiance was adopted by Congress in 1942. The words under God were added to the pledge in 1954.

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LETTER: First Amendment is a one-way protection for religion - The Daily Freeman

Dear Editor: There have been issues on campuses across the U.S. on free speech. As the argument of hate speech versus free speech continues, many speculate that public campuses have liberal biases. This is due to disproportionate numbers of conservative speakers getting rejected to speak on campuses compared to liberal speakers. A CNN article titled War on campus: The escalating battle over college free speech suggests that these speculations are true: The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education maintains an incomprehensive database of more than 300 attempts to disinvite campus speakers since 2000. About three-quarters of the attempts involved pressure from liberals.

In Wisconsin, GOP representatives have responded to these issues by proposing free speech policies on the UW System. These policies are suggested as precautionary, threatening future speech disrupters with suspension and/or expulsion. But such policies are criticized as damaging the rights of those who oppose the views of speakers and minorities.

The relationship between Americas future leaders and the United States First Amendment must continually be closely observed.

Currently on the Press Freedom Index, the United States is ranked at the 43rd position. Obamas onslaught on whistleblowers and Trumps attempts to thwart press coverage are listed as problems that contribute to the United States position.

Media conglomerates are an obstacle to press freedom. A statistic from morriscreative.com shows that in 2012, six media companies owned 90 percent of American media, compared to 50 companies that owned 90 percent of American media back in 1983.

These attacks on freedom of speech and press threaten one of our most sacred rights. People should care more about free speech.

Michael Flores

Madison

Send your letter to the editor to tctvoice@madison.com. Include your full name, hometown and phone number. Your name and town will be published. The phone number is for verification purposes only. Please keep your letter to 250 words or less.

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Michael Flores: Attacks on our First Amendment need more attention - Madison.com

Last month, Digital Music News reported on a controversial court ruling against Google. The Canadian Supreme Court ordered the search giant to remove specific piracy links not just in Canada, but worldwide. Now, Google has fought back, this time in a California courtroom.

In 2014, a Canadian court ruled that Google would have to remove a Canadian firm from its search results. Through Equusteks ex-employees, Datalink Technologies illegally sold their competitors products. Employees would set-up sites indexed on Google to sell the goods, sharing a strong percentage with Datalink.

After losing the initial court battle in British Columbia, Google filed, and subsequently lost, multiple appeals. Last month, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled against the search giant. It determined that Google was a determinative player in harming Equusteek.

The high court ruled that the search giant would have to de-index links from its search engine worldwide.

Now, Google has fought back. The search giant filed an injunction on Monday with the US District Court for Northern California. Digital Music News has obtained the documents.

Google filed the injunction to prevent enforcement of the Canadian ruling in the United States. It believes that the Canadian Supreme Court has compelled the search engine to wrongfully censor its information.

The Canadian trial court recognized that Google is an innocent bystander to the case. Nevertheless, it issued a novel worldwide order against Google, restricting what information an American company can provide to people inside of the United States and around the world.

Lawyers for the company claim that the court singled out Google, while leaving other search engines alone. They claim that people can still find links to the infringing sites through Yahoo and Bing.

In the complaint, lawyers for the company claim that Google is not the internet. It doesnt have the power to take down sites, as the ruling would suggest. Yet, the Canadian Supreme Court only found the search engine liable, leaving alone other websites.

Google is not the internet. The vast majority of internet websites are hosted by and operated through service providers other than Google. The entities with the technical ability to remove websites or content from the internet altogether are the websites owners, operators, registrars, and hostsnot Google.

Lawyers for the company laid out three causes of action.

In the first, the First Amendment protects search engine results. The complaint reads,

Enforcing the Canadian ruling in the United States would violate the companys First Amendment rights. The Canadian ruling, claims Google, furthers no compelling interest (nor a substantial interest). The existence of Datalinks search engine results remain a matter of public record.

Equustek has filed a claim only against the search engine; it has yet to file claims against Bing and Yahoo. It also hasnt gone after third-party websites that prominently display the infringing links, including social media and press websites. Equustek also hasnt filed a claim to stop the sale of Datalink products on Amazon.

For the second cause of action, Google cites the Communications Decency Act. This act provides clear legal immunity to providers of computer services for content on their services created by others. The Communications Decency Act reads,

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

Equusteks initial filing is grounded in Canadian trade secret law, not US federal intellectual property or trade secret laws. Therefore, it cant enforce the order against Google in the United States. Once again, enforcement of the ruling will cause the search giant irreparable injury absent injunctive relief.

For the third cause of action, the search giant claims that enforcement of the ruling trespasses on comity. Siding with Google, the Canadian Attorney General said that the order constitutes an impermissible exercise of extraterritorial enforcement jurisdiction. The Canadian Supreme Court disregarded this statement, however. Instead, it declared that the Internet has no bordersits natural habitat is global. By saying this, the high court justified its global injunction against the company.

Equusteks counsel argued on the same principle.

Google calls the Canadian order repugnant to US public policy surrounding the First Amendment. The First Amendment gives the search giant immunity against imposing liability. Once again calling the order repugnant, the company claims that the high court singled it out. It issued an order against an innocent non-party for the sake of convenience.

Continuing on, lawyers claim,

Canadian courts failed to extend proper comity to the United States. Thus, the United States does not need to defer the order.

Google requests that the US District Court rule the Canadian order unenforceable in the United States. It also wants the court to issue a ruling in Googles favor and against the defendants, Equustek. Finally, lawyers want the court to grant the company preliminary and permanent injunctive relief from further enforcement.

You can read the injunction below.

Image by Ed Uthman (CC by 2.0)

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Are Google Piracy Links Protected by the First Amendment? - Digital Music News

FrontPage Magazine

The Left's War on the First Amendment FrontPage Magazine Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism. Once upon a time there was a liberal media. Like most left-leaning institutions it ...

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The Left's War on the First Amendment - FrontPage Magazine

The Senate has blocked the first amendment to the bill to replace and repeal Obamacare.

Nine Republicans crossed party lines and voted against it.

The wide-ranging proposal by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell erased the law's tax penalties on people not buying insurance, and made cuts to Medicaid.

This came hours after the Senate voted to proceed with the debate on the Republican bill.

The vote was 51-50 after Vice President Mike Pence cast the tiebreaking vote.

Senator John McCain delivered a crucial vote in his first trip to the Senate floor since being diagnosed with brain cancer.

"I want to thank Senator John McCain, very brave man. He made a tough trip to get here and vote, so we want to thank Senator McCain and all of the Republicans. We passed it without one Democrat vote," said President Donald Trump.

"Lets trust each other. Let's return to regular order," McCain said. "We've been spinning our wheels on too many important issues because we keep trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle."

Meanwhile, Trump held a campaign-style rally, where he celebrated the vote to proceed.

He told the crowd we're now one step closer to ending what he calls the Obamacare nightmare.

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Senate blocks first amendment to bill to repeal and replace Affordable Care Act - NY1

President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress have laudably made passing tax reform real tax reform, not just shuffling money from one group to another a top priority. Now, however, some supply-side economics skeptics are open to the possibility of taxing free speech a constitutional right to fill Washingtons coffers.

As you read this, the Big Six are meeting to discuss which deductions to keep oreliminate, and Ways and Means Committee Chair Kevin Brady must quell these whispers of taxing advertising. Imposing such a levy would trample on our countrys liberty and values, setting a dangerous precedent for further constitutional breaches in the foreseeable future.

As substantial pay-forssuch as the border adjustment tax begin to fall out of the publics favor, some in Congress have begun to look at provisions from Dave Camps 2014 tax reform proposal as a blueprint for replacement. Camps proposal would have changed the tax treatment of advertising from a normal, 100 percent deductible business expense to one that is only 50 percent deductible, with the rest being amortized over the course of a decade.

Self-proclaimed liberty-loving conservatives whoare prepared to advocate for such a provision need to reflect on American history after all, what did we fight the American Revolution over?

Perhaps the biggest boiling point for the then-British colonists was the Stamp Act of 1765, which imposed an advertising levy of two shillings for every ad, among other printed material, no matter its circulation or cost. The provision was wildly unpopular so much so that the colonists engaged in mob violence to intimidate stamp-tax distributorsinto resigning, forcing the British Parliament to repeal it just a year later.

The principles and rallying cries that were brought on from the Stamp Act's introduction led to the colonists' rising in armed rebellion against their mother country a decade later.

The Continental Army won that war, and when they formed their new country they made sure to prevent the government from getting in the way of the freedom to advertise, as per the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

This is a law and precedent that has been abided by for centuries. Aside from some exceptions related to false and misleading content, the federal government has always respected the constitutional mandate to leave advertising alone. That's why the Supreme Court case Valentine v. Chrestensen (1942) was overturned the bench's declaration that "the Constitution imposes no restraint on the government as to the regulation of 'purely commercial advertising'" was 100 percent unconstitutional.

Now Congress wants to limit free speech by regulating the First Amendment one of our country's core founding principles as an excuse to extort more wealth from American businesses' pocketbooks? Camp's 50-50 proposal would treat advertising like an asset, such as a machine, instead of like an expense, such as research and salaries an unprecedented, unconstitutional move. (go to page 2 to continue reading)

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Republicans Toy with a Misguided Tax on the First Amendment ... - LifeZette

The Third Circuit recently joined the growing consensus of courts recognizing that the First Amendment protects the act of recording police officers conducting their official duties in public. In Fields v. City of Philadelphia, F.3d , 2017 WL 2884391 (3d Cir. July 7, 2017), two individuals brought claims against the City of Philadelphia and certain police officers for violating their First Amendment rights to record public police activity.

Amanda Geraci, a member of a police watchdog group, attended an anti-fracking protest at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in September 2012. When Geraci attempted to record the police arresting a protestor, an officer pushed her and pinned her to a pillar for over a minute, thus preventing her from observing or recording the arrest. Geraci did not interfere with any police activity. She was not arrested or cited.

In a consolidated case involving a similar issue, Richard Fields, a Temple University student, was on a public sidewalk when he observed police officers breaking up a house party in September 2013. The nearest police officer was 15 feet away from him. Using an iPhone, Fields took a photo of the incident. When Fields refused to obey an officers order for him to leave the area, the officer arrested and detained him, confiscated his phone, and opened several videos and photos on Fields phone. All charges against Fields were eventually dropped. According to Fields and Geraci, neither intended to share their recordingsthey merely wanted to record the police activity.

The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania dismissed the plaintiffs First Amendment claims. Although the existence of the First Amendment right to record police activity was not in dispute, the Courton its owndeclined to create a new First Amendment right for citizens to photograph officers when they have no expressive purpose such as challenging police actions.

The Third Circuit reversed, noting that the District Courts focus on expressive intent ignore[d] that the value of the recordings may not be immediately obvious. The First Amendment protects actual photos, videos, and recordings, and for this protection to have meaning the Amendment must also protect the act of creating the material. It reiterated that this case is not about people attempting to create art with police as their subjects. It is about recording police officers performing their official duties.

The Third Circuits reasoning is not novel. Several other circuit courts have reached the same conclusion. Traditionally, and as the text of the Constitution suggests, the First Amendments protections extend to speech, press, assembly, the right to petition, and religion. But recording police activity does not seem to fit squarely into any of these categories.

Without expressly relying on any of the five traditional First Amendment protections, the Court held that, subject to reasonable restrictions, the First Amendment protects the publics right of access to information about their officials public activities. At first blush, it appears that the Court has created a new First Amendment right of access to information. However, the Courts reasoning shows that the basis for this right is the freedom of press, and a recognition that in todays world, everyday citizens play a role in delivering the news.

The Court writes that to record is to see and hear more accurately. Recordings also facilitate discussion because of the ease in which they can be widely distributed via different forms of media. Accordingly, recording police activity in public falls squarely within the First Amendment right of access to information. As no doubt the press has the right, so does the public. The Court continues, [t]he publics creation of this content also complements the role of the news media. In addition to complementing the role of the traditional press, private recordings have improved professional reporting, as video content generated by witnesses and bystanders has become a common component of news programming.

Thus, Fields is a tacit recognition that in the age of electronics, the press is so much more than traditional broadcast news and newspapers. Today, everyone with a smartphone is essentially a member of the press and news stories are now just as likely to be broken by a blogger at her computer as a reporter at a major newspaper. Based on this expansive view of the press, the right to record police activity extends not only to the traditional press, but to the modern pressthat is, the public.

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First Amendment Protects Right to Record Police Activity, Third Circuit Holds - JD Supra (press release)