Washington – President Trump Signed an executive order Monday that attempts to punish people who burn the American flag, accusing those who display enmity and contempt the United States.
Mr. Trump has threatened to burn the flag for years. In 2016, he Written on social media Anyone who burns the American flag should lose his citizenship or face the time of jail. During the speech of 2024 Prior to the National Guard Association of the United States, the then candidate Trump said that he would work to pass a law that imprisons a criminal punishment on those who burn the US flag.
In the oval office comment on Monday, Mr. Trump alleged that burning the American flag “encourages riots” and said people who are prosecuted and convicted as a result of their instructions would have to face a year in jail.
The President said, “The people of this country do not want to see and spit our American flag burning.”
Trump’s executive order on flag burning
Title “Prosecution Burning of the American Flag,” by Mr. Trump executive Order The Attorney General does not direct the general to prosecute those who burn flags for the Act. Instead, it states that the Department of Justice should “bring cases against the acts of the American flag, which violate the applied, material-platform laws, while the first amendment causes unrelated damage to the expression to suit the first amendment.” Examples of those laws “violent crime; hatred crime, illegal discrimination against American citizens, or other violations of American civil rights, and crime against property and peace.”
The instructions accepted the 36 -year -old Supreme Court’s decision, which found that the flag burning has been given a protected speech, but says that “the waste of the American flag is organized in a way that is likely to incite the adjacent lawless action or there is an action for ‘fighting words’ which may not be entitled to equal protection under the earlier amendment.
In the order, the State Secretary, Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security have been directed to take action against foreign nationals, which are engaged in “American flag-circulation activity”, demanding their visa or residence permits, or demanding them to be removed from America.
The Executive Order of Attorney General, Mr. Trump states, “will strictly prosecute those who violate our laws that include the American flag, and the first amendment to the region can pursue litigation to clarify the scope of the first amendment exceptions.”
Bob Corn-Revere, the Chief Advocate of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said in response to Shri Trump’s executive order that the President did not have the power to change the first amendment.
“Burning the flag as a form of political opposition is preserved by the first amendment. It is nothing new. While people can be prosecuted to burn anything at the place where they are not allowed to set fire, the government cannot prosecute protected expressive activity – even though many Americans, including the President, find it aggressive and stimulating,” they said in a statement. “You don’t like to burn the flag. You can condemn it, debate it, or hoist your own flag even more. The beauty of the free speech is that you get to express your opinion, even if others don’t like what you have to say.”
Is the flag burning protected by the first amendment?
The President’s directive appears with the aim of reopening whether the flag burning is constitutionally protected speech. Whereas Mr. Trump believes that burning the American flag should be illegal and demanded unilateral target of people engaged in this conduct, Supreme Court Rumed in 1989 This act is the expressive conduct covered by the first amendment.
The 5–4 decision in the Landmark case Texas vs. Johnson originated from Gregory Lee Johnson’s punishment under a law in Texas, which stopped the impurity of a respectable object. In 1984, Johnson burnt an American flag outside the Dallas City Hall to protest against the policies of the then President Ronald Reagan. He was sentenced to one year jail and fined $ 2,000.
But the Supreme Court ruled that Johnson was convicted for the flag, inconsistent with the first amendment, as his flag formed the protected expressive conduct. The five-noy majority members were Justice Antonin Skalia and Anthony Kennedy, who often served as a swing vote after Justice Sandra Day O’Coner retired.
during a 2012 interview With CNN, a conservative stallwart, Scalia defended the High Court’s decision on burning the flag and reiterated that the Act is a form of expression.
“If I were a king, I would not allow people to roam to burn the American flag,” he said. “However, we have a first amendment that says that the right to free speech will not be abolished – and it is especially addressed for the government’s important speech. It was the main type of speech that the tyrannical wanted to suppress.”
Skalia told CNN that “burning a flag is a symbol that expresses an idea – I hate the government, the government is unjust, whatever it is.”
Referring to the 1989 verdict, Mr. Trump on Monday told reporters at the Oval office that the matter was decided by “very tragic court”.
A year after that decision, the Supreme Court ruled in the United States case. Ichman said that criminalization of a federal law flag burning was unconstitutional.
The Congress passed the law, which was known as the Flag Protection Act in 1989 in response to the High Court’s decision in Texas vs. Johnson. The law deliberately committed a crime for deliberately, malicious, physically distorted, burning or trampling the American flag, and violars suffered a fine of up to one year or up to a year in jail.
But in Another 5-4 decisionsIn a majority with Scalia and Kennedy again, the Supreme Court ruled that the cases of protesters burning the flag in violation of the Flag Protection Act were inconsistent with the earlier amendment.
Justice William Brainon wrote for the majority, “Pencing the waste of the flag very much thinning freedom that makes this symbol so reverence, and is revered.”
