The American Standard Bearer

Score a big win for the left.

The flag amendment was shot down with a one vote spread in the U.S. Senate Tuesday. The amendment would have opened the door for legislatures to ban the burning of American flags in public places but it would also have banned other forms of desecration of the American flag, so it’s really not a surprise that it wasn’t passed.

The tradgedy is that conservatives had an opportunity, at least in part, to restore some original meaning to the First Amendment, but instead chose to frame the issue as one of patriotism. The left recognized that passage of the flag amendment would be a significant setback to their agenda of rewriting the Constitution, aggressively lobbied to kill it, and were successful.

Where conservatives see the Constitution as the foundational document of our republic, the left sees the Constitution as an arsenal or weapons to advance the cause du jour, and there is no more potent a weapon in that arsenal than the First Amendment. The First Amendment has been twisted and stretched to guarantee all sorts of “rights” for the leftist nut squads that make up the dominant media – “rights” incidentally that are not actually named in the First Amendment.

For example, the screechy Susan Estrich was on TV earlier this week speaking about the thoroughly despicable New York Times front page story on the U.S. efforts to track terrorist money. In defending the Times, she said matter-of-factly that the First Amendment guarantees our “right to know.” Estrich may be irritating, but she’s not stupid. She knows the First Amendment says nothing about a “right to know” but for the left, the end justifies the means.

In other words, Estrich claims a First Amendment “right to know” in order to aid the fellow leftists of the Times in once again attacking President Bush. If he were living today, I’m sure Benedict Arnold would claim the British have a “right to know.”

Preventing what amounts to a handful of goofballs each year from burning American flags should never have been the central point of the flag amendment. Rather, the point should have been to bring clarity to what rights are protected and what rights are not protected by the First Amendment.