How do you think Trump's defense team is doing in the impeachment trial?
I am not a lawyer but from the Wikipedia entry for the Brandenburg v. Ohio ruling reads:
The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".
One should acknowledge that President Trump said the word "peacefully" one time during his statement to the crowd he assembled that day. But doesn't the rest of his words that day, and his other speeches and tweets, undermine that one use of the word "peaceful"? Can't the rest of a speaker's words make the use of a contradictory word into a "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" undermining of that one use of the word?
Even in the sentence you quote:
I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard...
doesn't that meet the Brandenburg requirement that it be a call for imminent action? One can debate wether there was a call specifically to overthrow the Constitution by preventing the Congress from doing their duty by acknowledging the States' Electoral College votes and thus intending extending Trump's term in power, and/or encourage the assembled group to murder people like VP Pence but forcing one's way into the Capitol building is clearly the "lawless action" described in the Brandenburg test, isn't it?
Thus, aren't both the "imminent" and the "lawless action" aspects of the Brandenburg test met?
Finally, do you honestly think that the Founders only intended impeachment to apply the low bar of "actually criminal under Federal or State law" to an office as important as the President of the United States of America? Don't you think that the Founders intended a higher bar of speech and behavior to be applied to the President, and that they intended the Congress to be responsible for throwing out people who didn't meet that higher bar and banning them from future office?
Do you think that Brandenburg should apply equally to a random guy yelling stuff at a KKK rally and to someone with the 'bully pulpit' of the office of President? Even holding only to the test of illegality, shouldn't the courts take into account the actual power the speaker has in government and culture when looking at speech through the framework laid out in Brandenburg and factor in both the weight the speaker's position carries and the reach that a President's words have to encourage "kooks" versus one jerk in a pillowcase in a farm field in Ohio?
Do you think that the Republicans in the Senate who are going to vote against conviction regardless of what evidence is presented are actually fulfilling their responsibilities to the nation as the Founders envisioned?
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