RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/constitution-free-speech-clause-supreme-court-interpretation/

A too-broad interpretation of the Constitution’s free-speech clause protects things that have nothing to do with speech and makes other clauses superfluous.

Editor’s Note: The following is the seventh in a series of articles in which Mr. Yoo and Mr. Phillips lay out a course of constitutional restoration, pointing out areas where the Supreme Court has driven the Constitution off its rails and the ways the current Court can put it back on track. The first entry is available here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, the fifth here, and the sixth here.

Earlier this year, the Defense Department limited the right of the transgendered to serve in the military. Three federal courts blocked the policy for infringing the constitutional rights of the transgender individuals. One of the judges relied on the same clause of the Constitution as the cake maker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay marriage. The Supreme Court has invoked that same clause to defend the right to burn the American flag, dance in the nude, and make unlimited campaign contributions.

What is this constitutional catch-all? The free-speech clause.

The Supreme Court’s current law of free speech will perplex the ordinary American. After all, changing sex, making a cake, burning the flag, dancing nude, and contributing money have little in common, least of all speech.

The imperialistic expansion of free speech would not just surprise most 21st-century Americans; it would also make little sense to the 18th-century Americans who ratified the First Amendment. They would find it astounding that the courts have not just read speech to include many forms of conduct, but also have failed to establish any objective test for what constitutes speech. The Supreme Court appears to apply the perpetually malleable standard that emerged when it has sought to identify obscenity: It knows it when it sees it.

When the Court agrees that something is speech, however, it gives it the highest of protections known to constitutional law. The Court allows government to restrict the time, place, and manner of speech, as long as the state does not discriminate based on its content or the speaker. But if government tries to regulate content or discriminate between speakers, it must demonstrate that the law is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest. Observers once thought that this “strict scrutiny” test was “strict in theory, fatal in fact” because no law could survive it.

The Original Meaning
The Court’s failure to apply a consistent test for conduct-as-speech is not really the problem. Rather, the problem is that its First Amendment standards are judicial inventions. The Court’s definition of speech is unmoored from the Constitution’s text and original understanding, which should set the only lodestar for the Roberts Court, now up to full conservative strength with the addition of Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/california-coastal-elites-poor-immigrants-fleeing-middle-class/

Insulated coastal elites, impoverished immigrants, and a fleeing middle class

California ranks first among the states in the percentage of residents over 25 who have never finished the ninth grade— 9.7 percent of California residents, or about 4 million Californians. It also rates 49th in the number of state residents who never graduated from high school — or about 18 percent of the current population.

In other words, about 7 million Californians do not possess a high-school diploma, about equal to the size of the nine counties of California’s Bay Area, roughly from Napa to Silicon Valley. In some sense, inside California, there is a shadow state consisting of high-school dropouts that’s larger than 38 other U.S. states.

Yet California also is home to some of the most highly educated municipalities in the United States. In fact, Palo Alto claims that 40 percent of its city population has an M.A, degree or higher, making it No. 1 among American cities with a population above 50,000.

In the same ranking of wealthiest communities, two other California municipalities, nearby Cupertino and Mountain View, were also in the top ten. How can a single state be calibrated as both so educated and so uneducated?

In many global ratings of world research universities, California has four universities (Cal Tech, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UCLA) in the top 20 — more than any other single nation except the United States itself. Yet the 23-campus California State University system — the largest university in the world — has a student body in which about 20 percent are not proficient in English. The remediation rate (unable to meet minimum college admittance standards in math and English) of incoming freshmen was about 35 percent — at least until such gradations, along with required remedial education, were recently considered archaic, offensive, or worse, and thus scrapped.