Civil libertarians are coming out in opposition to Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Robert Brady’s proposal to make the use of violent language or symbols that could be construed as threatening to a federal official a crime.
Vincent Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, told The Daily Caller that there are laws that already protect against language that would endanger a public official.
“The law as currently written punishes people that attempt to assassinate public officials and the First Amendment permits punishment of advocacy directed at inciting or producing assassination or likely to produce assassination,” Warren said.
Where civil libertarians take pause is with the idea of prohibiting generalized or symbolic threats, which is what Brady has his sights on.
“The rhetoric is just ramped up so negatively, so high that we have got to shut this down,” Brady told CNN in an interview. “This is not a wake-up call, this is major alarms going off.”
Brady’s effort to civilize political rhetoric is noble, said Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, but placing further restrictions on free speech is no way to reach that end.
“I am all for efforts to tone down the rhetoric, I just think that an unconstitutional restriction on free speech is a clumsy way to do it,” Buttar said.
Emma Llanso, Equal Justice Works Fellow for the Center for Democracy and Technology, told TheDC that outlawing general threats was an extreme overreach.
“If he is looking at, as some news reports have talked about, threatening symbols along the lines of sending out campaign materials with cross hairs on a particular district, that is moving away from a true threat or something that is likely to incite violent action and much more into the realm of symbolic speech,” Llanso said. “I don’t think that is within the realm of what the government can and cannot enforce,” she said, noting that if Congress wanted to write a law restricting what is said in their own body, they were welcome to do so.
Instead, Warren says Congressmen should lead by example.
“I think Brady…[is] really missing the point because if the problem is violent rhetoric, by, for example, the Republican Party machine, then Republican Congresspeople are in the perfect position to stop this rhetoric by curtailing their leadership – in their websites, their campaign solicitations, and even in the media outlets that they rely on to get elected,” Warren said. “But they should not use this as an excuse to water down First Amendment protection.”
Brady has not singled out a single political party, but instead has set his sights solely on speech. Despite the concerns from civil libertarians, Brady appears unconcerned. CNN reports that when asked if he has support for his proposal, Brady asked, “Why would you be against it?”