President Donald Trump is making his move against those who burn the American flag.
More than three decades after the Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot prohibit burning or desecrating an American flag because doing so would violate the United States Constitution, Trump will order prosecutors to punish anyone who burns the American flag.
The president signed an order on Monday directing the Department of Justice and other agencies to “vigorously prosecute” anyone who burns or desecrates the flag, as well as “pursue litigation” aimed at having the Supreme Court overturn the 1989 case Texas v. Johnson, which prohibited punishing anyone for burning an American flag.
In that 5-4 ruling, Justice William Brennan noted that the First Amendment’s speech protections apply not only to written or spoken words but also to symbolic actions such as burning the American flag.
“You burn a flag, you get one year in jail. You don’t get 10 years. You don’t get one month. You get one year in jail. And it goes on your record, and you will see flag burning stopping immediately,” he said.
“The American flag is the most sacred and cherished symbol of the United States of America, and desecrating it is uniquely and inherently offensive and provocative. It is a statement of contempt and hostility toward our Nation, and an act used by groups of foreign nationals calculated to intimidate and threaten violence against Americans,” Trump added.
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At another point, Trump spoke about deploying National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., and threatened to send additional forces into Baltimore, escalating his law-and-order campaign against Democratic-led cities ahead of the election.
“This is a meeting in a group of people that are doing an unbelievable job and a think called crime and, in particular, violent crime. Discussing it and I watched as a very incompetent man from Chicago said. Well, what are they know? They only arrested nine people. I said nine people in interest nine people we actually arrested a total of well over a thousand people. We took hundreds of guns away from young kids,” Trump declared.
“We apprehended scores of illegal aliens, we see dozens of illegal firearms than zero murders, it sounds sort of terrible to say it’s embarrassing. I did this over the weekend and make a speech and I acted like I was so proud. As I said, we had zero murders in the last week and some of these people from foreign countries,” he said.
“They said that doesn’t sound, so good and I said well doesn’t sound good, but Washington was the most dangerous place in this country, and now you know it’s probably the safest place in our country. Everyone starting to come here, the restaurants. Now you can’t get in many of them clothes because they couldn’t they couldn’t open with crime. Everybody before me as happy. What I’m doing most of you won’t say that, because you’re radical left, the newspapers are so dishonest,” he added.
Trump continued, “The press is totally dishonest, but that’s all right we got used to and we won a landslide, so they obviously lost their power mean it’s impossible to imagine that when you get 90 seven percent negative stories purposely negative stories.”
“Even though you’ve done 90 seven percent positive things that they could, that you could win an election in a landslide, winning all seven think of it all seven swing states winning by the popular vote by millions of votes. We had a fantastic the best, this year, districts, three thousand districts,” Trump said.
” I guess we won three thousand and five hundred and one two thousand and seven hundred and fifty and they won five hundred and that’s to me the best of all and we had tremendous in every way, the election and it’s hard to believe. You can do that when you have a corrupt media. But you are many of your corrupt and it’s nothing. We can do about it, but we keep winning and we’re going to keep winning,” he added.