President Donald Trump signed an executive order aiming to crack down on flag burning on Monday.
“If you burn a flag, you get one year in jail,” Trump told reporters at a signing ceremony in the Oval Office, though the order itself does not include any details on sentencing. “You will see flag burning stop immediately.”
The order tasks law enforcement with seeking a workaround of constitutional protections, giving authorities the green light to arrest flag-burners if they believe the protest is carried out in conjunction with other illegal activities. It argues that there is no precedent for flag-burning “conducted in a manner that is likely to incite imminent lawless action,” and that “fighting words” aren’t “constitutionally protected.”
“What it does is incite to riot,” Trump said.
Though highly controversial, flag burning has long been protected as an expression of free speech. The Supreme Court ruled that the protest tactic was protected speech in the landmark case Texas v. Johnson. The justices backed up that ruling a short time later, invalidating a federal law banning desecration of the flag that was passed in Johnson’s wake.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the order can be carried out without stepping on protections in the Bill of Rights.
“We will do that without running afoul of the First Amendment,” Bondi said on Monday.
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Already, the move is drawing harsh pushback and criticism from typically Trump-friendly circles. Fox News commentator Brit Hume said the order “flies in the face” of the Constitution.
“George HW Bush ran against flag burning in 1988 and spent a whole week campaigning on the issue,” Hume wrote in a post on X. “But he called for a constitutional amendment to ban the practice. He didn’t pretend he could ban it by an executive order that flies in the face of constitutional speech protections. C’mon, man.”
The Libertarian Party released a statement defending the practice.
“Patriotism doesn’t mean blind allegiance to symbols,” the statement read. “If you ban burning the flag, you wholly discredit what it represents.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression criticized Trump for trying to “revise the First Amendment with the stroke of a pen.”
“You don’t have to like flag burning. You can condemn it, debate it, or hoist your own flag even higher,” the organization said in a social media post. “The beauty of free speech is that you get to express your opinions, even if others don’t like what you have to say.”
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