Thursday, June 27, 2019

FIRE’s 1st Amendment Challenge to Rutgers Offers a Classic Lesson in Democracy vs. Republicanism

In Rutgers trampled the constitution by letting students vote to defund the newspaper, group says [New Jersey Star-Ledger, 6/4/19], NJ.com’s Adam Clark reported for the New Jersey Star-Ledger:

Rutgers University should restore funding to its student newspaper after it violated the constitution by allowing students who don’t like what the paper publishes to vote to defund it, a First Amendment group claims.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) on Monday called for Rutgers to restore more than $500,000 to The Daily Targum, which lost its student fee funding through a referendum last month.

That referendum violated the constitution because it let students decide how public money is spent based entirely on whether they agree with what a student group does, said Adam Goldstein, a program officer at FIRE, a non-profit free speech advocacy group.

Students, including a conservative group that dismissed The Daily Targum as “fake news,” aren’t legally allowed to defund a public university newspaper just because they don’t agree with the content, he said.

The fact that The Daily Targum, and probably other campus newspapers, is publicly funded in a public university complicates the issue. If a majority doesn’t want to fund it, they shouldn’t have to. On the other hand, the minority that contributes to the public funding shouldn’t be forbidden from doing so. Rescinding the funding thus violates the minority’s rights. In a privatized setting, where campus newspapers are privately funded, any individual can refuse to fund the paper by not subscribing, leaving others free to subscribe.

That said, I think there’s a broader political philosophy lesson here. It is that broader context that I chose to focus on when I posted these comments:

Though public funding muddles the issue, this episode highlights the anti-liberty nature of democracy.  

Every individual possesses certain inalienable fundamental rights. These rights include but are not limited to freedom of speech, which underpins press freedom. Inalienable means no person’s rights can ever be subject to a vote. That is the basis for the American constitutional republic, of which the democratic process is an important but limited part.

The Rutgers case is an easily observable example of democracy, with free speech rights directly rescinded by vote. Much more insidious is the attacks on free speech through indirect democracy, with voters electing politicians to covertly attack free speech rights. Catchphrases used to justify or sneak in free speech limitations include "dark money"; "new neutrality"; "fake news"; "hate speech"; "campaign finance reform"; “corruption of our democracy”; "offensive content"; "election manipulation"; "harmful online content"; "social media addiction" [aka "internet addiction", et al]; "dehumanizing speech"; “extremism”; “political bias”.

In a republic, politicians are forbidden to violate individual rights, even though elected. Democracy is limited by constitutional limits on government power, such as we have with the First Amendment. Let’s hope FIRE is successful in rolling back this bit of democratic tyranny at Rutgers. And let’s hope the First Amendment continues to protect us from the broader political attacks on free speech that permeate our media and culture.

Politicians of all stripes are always itching to democratically stifle our rights. Don’t let them. We must remember that freedom is not the right to vote. Freedom is the right to live your life regardless of anyone else's vote.

Related Reading:










No comments: