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Posts tagged ‘Rep. Jamie Raskin’

Democrats Cry Foul as Anti-Free Speech Allies Turn Against Them


By: Johathan Turley | April 8, 2024

Read more at https://jonathanturley.org/2024/04/08/devouring-their-own-democrats-cry-foul-as-anti-free-speech-allies-turn-against-them/

Below is my column in The Hill on the recent disruptions of events featuring leading Democrats from President Joe Biden to Rep. Jamie Raskin. After years of supporting the censoring and blacklisting of others, these politicians are now being targeted by the very anti-free speech movement that they once fostered. Hillary Clinton last week became the latest Democrat targeted by protesters in a visit to her alma mater, Wellesley College.

Here is the column:

You are “killing people,” President Biden told social media companies a couple of years ago. He sought to shame executives into censoring more Americans. Biden has lashed out at disinformation by anti-vaxxers, “election deniers” and others. This month, those words were thrown back at Biden himself as a “genocide denier” by protesters who have labeled him “Genocide Joe” over his support for Israel.

After years of supporting censorship and blacklisting of people with opposing views, politicians and academics are finding themselves the subjects of the very anti-free speech tactics that they helped foster.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), for example, has been a leading figure in Congress opposing efforts to curtail massive censorship programs coordinated by the Biden administration. While opposing the investigation into past federal censorship efforts, Raskin continues to push social media companies to increase the censorship and silencing of Americans. Last December, Raskin sent a letter on behalf of other Democrats on the powerful House Oversight Committee demanding even more censorship, not only on election fraud, COVID or climate change, but also on abortion.

“We are troubled by the rapid spread of abortion misinformation and disinformation on your company’s social media platform,” he wrote, “and the threat this development poses to safe abortion access in the United States.”

When journalists and even other members testified in favor of free speech, Democrats attacked them as “Putin lovers” and fellow travelers supporting “insurrectionists.” Last week, however, the left turned on Raskin. He was giving a lecture titled “Democracy, Autocracy and the Threat to Reason in the 21st Century.” According to the Maryland Reporter, the protesters accused Raskin of being “complicit in genocide.” After efforts to resume his remarks, University of Maryland President Darryll Pines finally ended the event early.

Pines then pulled a Raskin. While mildly criticizing the students for their lack of “civility,” he defended their disruption of Raskin’s remarks as if a heckler’s veto were free speech. “What you saw play out actually was democracy and free speech and academic freedom,” he said. “From our perspective as a university, these are the difficult conversations that we should be having.”

There was, of course, no real conversation because this was not the exercise but the denial of free speech. The protesters were engaging in “deplatforming,” which is common on our campuses, where students and faculty organize to prevent others from hearing opposing views.

So, after years of Raskin encouraging the censorship of others, the mob finally came for him. The yawning response of the university was not unlike his own past response to journalists, professors and dissents who have come before his committee.

The only “difficult” aspect of this conversation is for university figures like Pines who are called upon to defend the free speech rights of speakers or faculty. They need to show the courage and principle required to uphold the free speech commitment of higher education, even at the risk of being targeted themselves. That includes the sanctioning of students who prevent others from hearing opposing views in classrooms and event forums. These students have every right to protest outside such spaces, but higher education is premised on the free exchange of ideas. There is really no further “conversation” needed, just a letter of suspension or expulsion for those who deprive others of their rights.

Deplatforming is the rage on our campuses. Universities often use it to cancel events for conservatives or controversial speakers. Often officials will sit idly by, refusing to remove protesters or deter disruptions. And that can lead to self-help measures by others.

Last week, Walter Isaacson, former CEO of CNN and the Aspen Institute, was accused of assaulting a Tulane student protester, Rory MacDonald, during an event held off campus. Isaacson, 72, who teaches at Tulane, was attending the university-sponsored event and had had enough when MacDonald became the eighth protester to stop the event. He stood up and shoved MacDonald into the hall.

MacDonald insisted that he and his fellow protesters were merely “peacefully interrupting” the event to stop others from speaking. He displayed slight scratch marks and is quoted as expressing a fear of returning to campus after the incident. Protests have been held on campus to have Isaacson fired.

I have long criticized the growing anti-free speech movement in higher education. Yet these students have been taught for years that “speech is violence” and harmful. They have also been told by figures such as Pines that silencing others is an act of free speech. Academics and deans have said that there is no free speech protection for offensive or “disingenuous” speech. In one instance, former CUNY Law Dean Mary Lu Bilek insisted that disrupting a speech on free speech is itself free speech.

Even schools that purportedly forbid such interruptions rarely punish students who engage in them. For example, students disrupted a Northwestern class due to a guest speaker from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (after the class had heard from an undocumented immigrant). The university let the protesters into the room after they promised not to disrupt the class. They proceeded to stop the class and then gave interviews to the media proudly disclosing their names and celebrating the cancellation. Northwestern did nothing beyond express “disappointment.”

At Stanford, law students prevented a federal judge from speaking. When the judge asked for law school officials present to intervene, former Stanford DEI Dean Tirien Steinbach stepped forward and attacked the conservative judge for triggering the students by sharing his views. After a national outcry, Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Law School Dean Jenny Martinez issued a joint apology that notably did not include punishment for a single student.

These schools are enablers of the anti-free speech movement as much as figures like Raskin.

For years, academics supported such mobs or remained silent as their colleagues were cancelled or fired. Now they are suddenly discovering the value of free speech as the mob comes for them.

Censorship and blacklisting create an insatiable appetite. While Democrats fostered such efforts to silence conservatives and dissenters on vaccines, climate change, abortion, transgenderism and other issues, they now find themselves pursued by the very mobs that they once led. Just two years ago, Biden was celebrated for denouncing social media executives as “killers” for allowing free speech. Now he, Raskin, and others are accused of killing others with “Zionist disinformation.”

It is an epiphany that often comes too late. During the French Revolution, journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan remarked that “like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.”

Jonathan Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at the George Washington University Law School.

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Raskin and the Agents of Chaos: Democrats Prepare to Resume Disqualification Efforts in Congress


By: Jonathan Turley | March 5, 2024

Read more at https://jonathanturley.org/2024/03/05/raskin-and-the-agents-of-chaos-democrats-prepare-to-resume-disqualification-efforts-in-congress/

Calling it “one on a huge list of priorities,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) announced that he will be reintroducing a prior bill with Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Eric Swalwell to disqualify not just Trump but a large number of Republicans from taking office. The alternative, it appears, is unthinkable: allowing the public to choose their next president and representatives in Congress. It appears that the last thing Democrats want is for the unanimous decision to actually lead to an outbreak of democracy. Where the Court expressly warned of “chaos” in elections, Raskin and others appear eager to be agents of chaos in Congress.

Soon after the decision, Raskin went on the air at CNN to assure people that he and his colleagues would not stand by and allow the right to vote be restored to citizens in the upcoming election. He pledged to offer a prior bill that would declare Jan. 6 an “insurrection” and that those involved “engaged in insurrection.”

I previously wrote about these “ballot cleansing” efforts because it would not just disqualify Trump but potentially dozens of sitting Republican members of Congress. Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) sought to bar 126 members of Congress under the same theory. Similar legislation offered by Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) to disqualify members got 63 co-sponsors, all Democrats.

Raskin’s participation in this effort is crushingly ironic. In 2016, he sought to block certification of the 2016 election under the very same law as violent protests were occurring before the inauguration. The prior bills were sweeping and included members who did not engage in any violent acts (no member has been charged with such violence or even incitement) but merely opposed certification.

Raskin recently offered a particularly Orwellian argument for the disqualification of Trump and his colleagues in Congress: “If you think about it, of all of the forms of disqualification that we have, the one that disqualifies people for engaging in insurrection is the most democratic because it’s the one where people choose themselves to be disqualified.” In other words, preventing voters from voting is “the most democratic” because these people choose to oppose certification . . . as he did in 2016.

After the ruling, Raskin added the curious claim that the justices “didn’t exactly disagree with [the disqualification theory]. They just said that they’re not the ones to figure it out. It’s not going to be a matter for judicial resolution under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, but it’s up to Congress to enforce it.”

That was sharply different from the pre-decision Raskin who insisted that there was no real question legally and that the case before the justices was “their opportunity to behave like real Supreme Court justices.”

Well, they did act as “real Supreme Court justices” by unanimously opposing what the Court described as the “chaos” that would unfold with such state disqualification efforts.  Raskin, however, is seeking a new avenue for chaos through Congress.

Raskin’s statement is also bizarre in claiming that somehow the justices agreed with him and the others pushing disqualification. No one, not even the Trump team, questioned that Congress could act to bar people from office. It is expressly stated in the Constitution. It is not an “argument” but a fact.

Of course, the Democrats would need to craft the legislation correctly to satisfy the standard and secure the support of both houses. Neither appears likely at this point.

However, Raskin is succeeding in one respect. He and his colleagues have bulldozed any moral high ground after January 6th. Most of us condemned the riot on that day as a desecration of our constitutional process. Yet, the Democrats have responded with the most anti-democratic efforts to prevent voters from exercising their rights in the upcoming election. For these members, citizens cannot be trusted with this power as Trump tops national polls as the leading choice for the presidency.  It is the political version of the Big Gulp law, voters like consumers have to be protected against their own unhealthy choices.

Raskin has continued to accuse the nine justices of being cowards in not supporting ballot cleansing. He told CNN that the court “doesn’t like the ultimate and inescapable implications of just enforcing the Constitution, as written.” In other words, all nine justices, including the three liberals justices, are disregarding clear constitutional mandates to protect Trump. It is the same delusional view echoed by other liberals who were enraged by the decision. Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann declared that “the Supreme Court has betrayed democracy. Its members including Jackson, Kagan and Sotomayor have proved themselves inept at reading comprehension. And collectively the ‘court’ has shown itself to be corrupt and illegitimate. It must be dissolved.”

After all, nothing says democracy like ballot cleansing and dissolving courts before a national election.

With the resumption of efforts to disqualify Republicans from running on ballots, Raskin and his colleagues seem to be channeling the spirit of former Mayor Dick Daley in the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.

With allegations of abuse by the police in cracking down on protests, Daley declared “the policeman isn’t there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder.” With Democrats preparing to return to Chicago for their convention this year, Raskin and others appear to be responding to the Court that “the party isn’t there to create chaos, the party is there to preserve chaos.”

This column also ran on Fox.com.

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