Antonin Scalia Quotes
If it were up to me, I would put in jail every sandal-wearing, scruffy-bearded weirdo who burns the American flag. But I am not king.
Scalia, Antonin. Public lecture. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 16 Nov. 2015.
Trump was then President Elect who already had a large staff helping him fomake the transition. He still went off on his own with this state,ment whiich runs afoul of the Constitution which he would soon sware to defend when he took the Oath of Office. The Supreme Court had unequivocably ruled that the burning of the flag was a type of political speech and as such could not be curtailed or punished by the government. The penalty of a loss of citizenship was another constitutional thicket. In addition. in the hisoty of the country,, it had never been used as a punishment for breaking domestic law.
Referring to the Supreme Court decision, Texas v. Johnson (1989), in which flag burning was held to be constitutionally protected speech:
In this case, the Supreme Court held that burning or desecrating the American flag may not be prohibited or criminalized by the government. Flag burning, they ruled, is symbolic speech and is protected by the 1st amendment just like political pamphlets.
Antonin Gregory Scalia was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the Court's conservative wing. For catalyzing an originalist and textualist movement in American law, he has been described as one of the most influential jurists of the twentieth century, and one of the most important justices in the Supreme Court's history. Scalia was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018 by President Donald Trump, and the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University was named in his honor.
