Student Free Speech and Ability to Bring RICO against Government Agents Before the High Court

Free Speech and Ability to Bring RICO against Government Agents Before the High Court

Samuel Alito, the champion of free speech in school?  Why?

The case of a high school student (at the time) who exhibited a 14'  banner saying "Bongs for Jesus" has reached the Supreme Court, along with a case in which a rancher says he was harassed by federal agents with the aim of getting him to allow a public easement on his property for free instead of for fair market value.  The rancher wants to sue individual agents for their excesses and invoke the RICO clause, as I understand the case.

In the case of the former high schooler, who's banner was taken, and who was given a 10 days suspension seems to have struck a cord in Samuel Alito that sounded strange.  He feels all kinds of political free speech should be allowed in school.  Now, granting that Justice Alito is most likely not one of the president's old drug using buddies, then what is the cause of this?

The WP points out that expanded free speech rights on campus could allow more  proselytizing by Christians on campus.  Given -- as we saw in protests this weekend -- that "free speech" can include threatening a man holding a child, and throwing curses and generalized death threats at one's opponents, one wonders if wide ranging free speech is that good on campus. 

On the other hand, of course, a block on free speech in school could hamper getting political facts to students in the years just before,  they are accosted by military recruiters wanting them to sign away their lives. 

But the worst thing is that free speech that is allowed seems to be that which favors the Bush administration these days.  If anti-war protesters had used as many threats, curses, and phyiscal violence as the pro-war thugs in last weekend's action in the nation's capital they would have been condemned widely and put in jail.

Our old friend Kenneth Starr is working the side of the school against free speech in this case, though he is a strong proponent of corporate free speech which means they should be allowed to lie their guts out in any way they want.  So that privacy policy they said they had.....

BTW our Chief Justice asks (according to an excerpt at the Washington Post):

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. seemed to indicate that maybe student free speech could end at the schoolhouse gate. "I mean, why is it that the classroom ought to be a forum for political debate simply because the students want to put that on their agenda?" he asked.

Okay guy.  Go back to my statements above about students being accosted by military recruiters out to pack them in as cannon fodder.  Should students be deprived of the ability to judge the political scene for themselves when they will soon be asked to make a decision that might cost them their lives, without free speech on political subjects?  The whole idea is ludicrous!  Depriving students of free political speech would be the worst condition possible since the time when the minimum drafting age was 18, but the minimum voting age was 21!

But when you have an under qualified crony of the president as Chief Justice that's the kind of thinking you can see the kind of thinking we will  get.

The case of the Wyoming rancher, Harvey Frank Robbins, (formerly from Alabama according to the WP article)  is very upsetting as we have a case of  harrassment to "save taxpayers money" so that BLM doesn't have to pay for easement rights to a road across Mr. Robbins ranch.  The details of the harassment seem terrible, but the case is about whether the rancher can sue individuals agents for their crude and abusive tactics.

And again the Chief Justice weighs in with similarly crude talk:

What Robbins calls extortion, Roberts said, might also be called "trying to save the taxpayers money and getting the type of reciprocal agreement with this landowner that they have got with thousands of others."

It doesn't look good for rancher Robbins, nor for the US with a Supreme Court Chief Justice that thinks these tactics are okay as long as they "save the taxpayers money".

Please see link above for all the details that the Post offers on these cases. 

tags: supreme court  justice  free speech  interior department  bush  bush administration  

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