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The Trump Judiciary

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There is going to be much more of this kind of thing from our neoconfederate judges:

An opinion handed down Wednesday by three Republican judges could chill the First Amendment rights of protesters — and potentially allow police to shut down political movements by filing lawsuits harassing movement leaders.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Doe v. McKesson effectively strips First Amendment protections from protest leaders who commit minor offenses, ignoring longstanding Supreme Court precedents in the process.

[…]

The Fifth Circuit dodges Claiborne by suggesting that if McKesson endorsed any illegal activity, that justifies stripping him of his First Amendment rights.

At one point, the protesters allegedly blocked a street, which violates Louisiana law. Thus, the panel of three Republican judges reason that “Officer Doe’s complaint does allege that McKesson directed the demonstrators to engage in the criminal act of occupying the public highway, which quite consequentially provoked a confrontation between the Baton Rouge police and the protesters, and that Officer Doe’s injuries were the foreseeable result of the tortious and illegal conduct of blocking a busy highway.”

This minor criminal act, according to the Republican judges, is enough to establish that “the First Amendment is not a bar to Officer Doe’s negligence theory.”

You know how, in the ignominious end to the judicial career of the author of Bush v. Gore the Supreme Court said that although the state can force doctors to read anti-scientific anti-abortion propaganda it can’t place standard-issue truth-in-advertising restrictions on “crisis pregnancy centers?” That’s pretty much where First Amendment law is headed.

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