By Kayla Garcia-Pebdani
NEW YORK, NY – A New York Times political columnist recently commented on a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and how it’s an important precedent because it notes the worth of a standard for free speech rights in a time where political censorship continues to be a prevailing issue.
David French, a NY Times columnist and former attorney who has argued high-profile religious liberty cases, released his article entitled, “Civil Liberties Make for Strange Bedfellows” that follow the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision, delivered by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in favor of the National Rifle Association’s allegation against New York State official Maria Vullo, the superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services.
French argues targeting free speech against political components is often “the first sign of a decline into authoritarianism,” and refers to Frederick Douglass, who wrote in 1860 that the meaning of liberty “is meaningless where the right to other one’s thoughts and opinions have ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the first of all strike down.”
French emphasizes the unanimous Supreme Court decision creates ripple effects not only for New York politics or the heated debate over gun rights, and in his words “the Supreme Court reinforced the constitutional wall of protection against…government leaders, including Trump.”
In 2017, superintendent Vullo conducted an investigation into the NRA Carry Guard insurance which gave members coverage for “personal injury and criminal defense cost related to license firearm use” and “insured New York residence for intentional, reckless, and criminal negligent acts with a firearm that injured or killed another person.”
Initially, this investigation found the guard violated New York law by “entering intentional, criminal acts, and that the NRA violated the law by promoting carry guard without an insurance producer license.”
However, it all became an issue when Vullo and Lloyd’s incentivized limited legal infractions committed by the company “so long as Lloyd’s ceased providing insurance to gun groups, especially the NRA.”
Essentially, the state would refocus its investigation of insurance affinity programs to “solely on those syndicates which served the NRA, and ignore other syndicates writing similar policies,” cited the New York Times writer.
The NRA argued Vullo’s actions were coercive, and as French points out, “(W)here is the line between government persuasion and government coercion?” Ultimately the court unanimously decided the government can violate free speech rights when coursing third parties to engage in contact that could be reasonably understood as a threat of adverse government actions in order to punish or suppress speech, noted French.
While the Supremes’ opinion leaves the case to be handled again in lower courts, this creates a precedent anywhere from the political left to the political right, and limitations to utilize their power within government to punish opponents and censor, individuals ideas, publications, and the will of the people, wrote French.
French further utilizes the story to draw the importance of how diminishing the First Amendment for an individual’s personal gain only in hand allows your opponent to gain power, and even more, leaving an individual to “have nowhere to hide.“
