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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWho will enforce these 1st Amendment violations?
Sarah Huckabee, tRump, and now Mnuchin.
Mnuchin: NFL players 'can do free speech on their own time'
By KEVIN ROBILLARD 09/24/2017 10:06 AM EDT
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin backed President Donald Trump's days of attacks on NFL players, saying athletes "can do free speech on their own time."
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/24/nfl-players-mnuchin-trump-free-speech-243065
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Who will enforce these 1st Amendment violations? (Original Post)
SHRED
Sep 2017
OP
rock
(13,218 posts)1. There is, in general, no penalty for not obeying The Constitution
Sure, you could (in theory) be impeached, if we had a Congress that was little more than a cow turd.
leftstreet
(36,109 posts)2. From the guy who can't do private travel on his own dime
X_Digger
(18,585 posts)3. What violation would that be? Criticism?
Did someone in the government stop someone from speaking or protesting?
That would be a violation. Tweeting criticism? No, just no.
Igel
(35,320 posts)4. We don't like it.
It must be Constitutional.
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; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
All we have to do is reinterpret "Congress" to mean "the President" and "abridge" to mean "criticize" and make "freedom of speech" an absolute so that a judge can get up during a trial to campaign for a candidate, a teacher can get up to criticize whoever they like, and a preacher can order his parishioners to vote "in God's name" for the candidate of his (or in some cases her) choice ... all while mandating that nobody can dare utter a word of criticism against them.
Trump's breaking protocol. He's not the first to do it; he's doing it with utter abandon. But most only respect tradition when it gets them something, usually control over others. If it's in their way, these days the attitude is that tradition is old-fashioned and should be tossed in the dustbin. We'll make our own traditions, even if we make them on Sunday and discard them on Monday, and we have venerable "traditions" now that date back only 2-3 years.
(Where I work we had a "tradition" last year that we were to keep, except that we were told about this tradition for the first time the day before it was to be upheld. "We're keeping the tradition" meant "we're doing something completely new." By not doing it for the first time we were "breaking the tradition."