It's the Saturday Email Bag - Hillary, Free Speech and The UK Election

It's Saturday email bag time again. Your emails didn't focus on one topic -- they were spread among Hillary Clinton, the UK elections and the First Amendment. So, let's take a look at all three. ~~~~~ First, Hillary. Your comments were about her campaign -- is she doing the right thing to run for President and just how much does her husband Bill really influence her. Two difficult questions. It's obvious that I don't agree with her positions on key issues such as national security, policing, abortion and immigration, and her record at the State Department suggests that she would continue the Obama policies of rapprochement with Iran that I think are extremely dangerous. But, overall there are two other questions about Mrs. Clinton that I believe would make her a divisive President. First, she is seen by at least half of Americans as untrustworthy. This is the characteristic that - almost as much as his policies - has alienated President Obama from the American public at a time when both the US and the world need an open, trusted American President. Hillary doesn't qualify. And second, the question of Bill Clinton's role and influence would always be in the background, making us wonder just who is making the decisions. Again, I believe this would place an unavoidable barrier between the President and the American people that is unacceptable. So overall, I don't think Hillary Clinton should be running for President. ~~~~~ Your First Amendment comments were about why it protects people who seem to deliberately insult Islam. My answer is that democracies that function properly need what we call a "marketplace of ideas." Those ideas are often in opposition to each other. They are often insulting to one group or another. But to suppress what one individual citizen or group thinks and says because it's offensive to another group - or even to the majority - fundamentally damages and undercuts that marketplace of ideas that is critical to democratic society. An example of this was in the news this week. The US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York declared last Thursday that the National Security Agency program that sweeps up logs of Americans' phone calls is illegal. The decision represents the most significant setback yet for the long-running NSA surveillance operation. The court said the program "exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized" under the USA Patriot Act, which the government has maintained permits the massive data collection. "The statutes to which the government points have never been interpreted to authorize anything approaching the breadth of the sweeping surveillance at issue here," the three-judge panel wrote. "The sheer volume of information sought is staggering," the court said, extending to "every record that exists, and indeed to records that do not yet exist." The opinion sidestepped the constitutional question, other than to note that it raises "one of the most difficult issues in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence : the extent to which modern technology alters our traditional expectations of privacy." The Fourth Amendment protects Americans from unreasonable "search and seizure." The court didn't order an immediate cessation of the metadata collection because the Patriots Act is set to expire next month, and Congress is now debating an extension or replacement. So, the court said : "In light of the asserted national security interests at stake, we deem it prudent to pause to allow an opportunity for debate in Congress that may (or may not) profoundly alter the legal landscape." This is a major issue facing Congress -- the need to do everything possible to protect Americans from terrorists while, at the same time, not reducing their Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure procedures by the government. But, I think there is also a First Amendment question related to the NSA metadata program. There is a doctrine associated with the right to free speech called the "chilling effect" of almost any interference with that right. To explain it in broad terms-- if your neighbor is arrested and jailed for putting an offensive poster on his front lawn, that will have a chilling effect on your decision when you later think about putting your own poster on your front lawn. The government will have intimidated you into not exercising your First Amendment right to free speech. It is a common form of intimidation but the govennment routinely loses when a lawsuit is brought against it. The federal courts and the Supreme Court are always alert for chilling effects on free speech. The NSA metadata program has the chilling effect of making Americans think about whether and how the government might use their collected and stored phone calls and emails and other Internet messages -- so they will stop saying and posting what they want to because of the intimidation created by the NSA metadata collection program. To put it succinctly -- Suppression of one person's right to free speech is suppression of everyone's right to free speech. ~~~~~ Finally, the UK election result was a surprise to voters, pollsters and the media alike. The conventional wisdom before Thursday's election was that no party would have a majority and that it might be very difficult either for David Cameron to form a conservative coalition government or for Ed Miliband to form a leftist coalition government. The facts proved everyone wrong. Cameron has won a comfortable 10-seat majority. He was helped by the opposition -- the Labour Party normally wins mamy seats in Scotland but this time Miliband's Labour position was that it would not deal with the Scottish Nationalist Party, that wants to break away from the United Kingdon, to form a coalition. The SNP had its own agenda -- setting out to beat Labour's Scottish candidates. They took 56 of Scotland's 59 Parliament seats and thus badly reduced Labour's seats in Parliament. Meanwhile, the other significant party, the Liberal Democrats, lost 50 of their current 58 seats as punishmrnt from their members for forming a coalition with Cameron's Conservatives during the past five years. This left David Cameron free to pursue his party's agenda of finishing the work that they started in 2010 to forge an economic recovery in the UK after the 2008 Great Recession. It was a compelling set of facts -- the lowest unemployment rate and best GDP in the EU. A well-deserved win for David Cameron and the Conservative Party. ~~~~~ Dear readers, that's the email bag for this week. Please join us by emailing me anytime at casey.popshots@yahoo.com. See you at the email box next Saturday.