Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 2, 2019)
Wednesday, October 2, 2019 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon 17 Commentary... The attempted murder of the First Amendment By Jim Cornelius Editor in Chief The president is a man of tremendous and highly sensi- tive ego, and he feels himself under constant and bitterly unfair attack. The world is full of tumult 4 and Fake News. The year is 1798. The French Revolution has plunged Europe into bloody conflict. The fledg- ling United States is itself embroiled in an undeclared maritime shooting war with revolutionary France, after refusing to pay off its own Revolutionary War debt. After all, that money was owed to the old French mon- archy, not to the revolutionary government, oui? The U.S. is also back to trading with Great Britain, with whom rev- olutionary France is at war. It9s a tense international scene, and President John Adams and his administration see threats everywhere 4 especially from immigrants. The Jeffersonian Republicans are sympathetic to the French Revolution 3 and Alexander Hamilton thinks they are <more Frenchmen than Americans.= Faced with a hostile Republican press coming after him with hammer and tongs, Adams lashes out against <false, scandalous and malicious writing.= The administration and the Federalist majority in Congress are pushing through measures to protect the coun- try from the threat of un- American ideas infiltrating the culture, and the under- mining of government dignity and authority by a scurrilous press. Over the course of two months in the summer, the Federalists would pass a series of measures collec- tively known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. Recent immigrants to America9s shores were perceived as favoring Jeffersonian politics, so the Naturalization Act increased residency requirements for U.S. citizenship from five to 14 years. The Alien Enemies Act allowed the government to arrest and deport all male citizens of an enemy nation during wartime; the Alien Friends Act allowed the presi- dent to deport any non-citizen suspected of peacetime plot- ting against the government. The Sedition Act criminal- ized <fake news= 4 defined as <false, scandalous and malicious writing= against Congress or the president. Of course, then as now, the prob- lem was who got to decide what is false, scandalous and malicious, and, then as now, the answer was often simply, <anything that the president doesn9t like.= The Act also made it ille- gal to conspire <to oppose any measure or measures of the government.= Thus one set of Founding Fathers sought to strangle in its crib the most fundamen- tal right enumerated in the U.S. Constitution: <Congress shall make no law respect- ing an establishment of reli- gion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridg- ing the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.= The Federalists themselves seemed to recognize that they were violating their own prin- ciples 4 the Sedition Act was given a sunset clause allow- ing it to expire at the end of Adams9 first (and as it turned out, only) term. Treating the abridgement of the First Amendment as an emergency measure didn9t pacify the opposi- tion. Jefferson and Madison drafted the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, which argued that the federal gov- ernment did not have the authority to enact laws not specified in the Constitution and that the sovereign states had the right to nullify wrong- ful laws. Journalists and publishers were jailed under the Sedition Act. The principle of judicial review of the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress had not yet been estab- lished, so there wasn9t much recourse. Except that rage over the Alien and Sedition Acts helped Jefferson oust Adams from office in 1800, an election so bitter that 2016 pales in comparison. It was a close call for the First Amendment, and it wouldn9t be the last. The powerful don9t like to be crit- icized or held to account, and, especially in times of national emergency, the impulse is strong to shackle liberty in the name of security. The parameters and the value of <free speech= have never been a settled issue in the United States of America 4 not in 1798 and not in 2019. It9s perilous to take the First Amendment for granted 4 and always a worthy endeavor to exam- ine it. Citizens 4 Community and The Nugget are spon- soring a forum on the First Amendment on Thursday, October 24, at Sisters Fire Hall. The event begins at 5:30 p.m. All Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians 4 and anyone else 4 are welcome to join in.