So the federal government may use its taxing authority to require us to buy health insurance — and presumably any other commercial product it deems essential to the nation’s welfare. Well, shouldn’t every home have a portable defibrillator? So get moving on it, congressional busybodies. Impose a tax on families who refuse to buy one.
By cruel coincidence, the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act comes just in time to cast a pall over the Independence Day celebration of our many freedoms. No toasts for you this year, Justice Roberts.
All right, maybe one small one.
After all, it wasn’t all bleak news on the final day of the court session. On the one hand the court may have handed a victory to those who think the federal government should be able to dictate our health care and personal commerce, but it also checked those who believe the central state should be able to punish us for undesirable speech.
In other words, goodbye Stolen Valor Act.
That act, the legacy of former Colorado Congressman John Salazar, makes it a crime to lie about being awarded military medals or decorations. Such lies are despicable, of course, and when they are used to pursue a job or other benefit, perhaps they should be outlawed. But that’s not what the Stolen Valor Act did.
As the court majority (including Roberts) explained in ruling against the act on First Amendment grounds, “The Act in plain terms applies to a false statement made at any time in any place, to any person.”
In this particular case, the court added, “the lie was made in a public meeting, but the statute would apply with equal force to personal, whispered conversations within a home. The statute seeks to suppress all false statements on this one subject in almost limitless times and settings. And it does so without regard to whether the lie was made for the purpose of material gain.”
Now, the U.S. government obviously has no desire to crack down on “whispered conversations within a home” involving a glory seeking liar. Yet the mere fact that it could under the Stolen Valor Act is evidence of the dangerous way the law was drafted.
But why protect lies told in public, you may ask — especially lies so easy to debunk and, as the court’s dissenting minority points out, “have no value in and of themselves … “? Someone either earned a medal or he didn’t.
The problem is the precedent it would set. Many other lies are relatively easy to refute, too — some trivial, such as lying about your wealth or age, and some serious, such as lying about the Holocaust. Yet we don’t outlaw Holocaust denial because we don’t want government regulating the content of historical inquiry and political speech. And we don’t outlaw that lie you told your mother about your college drug use because, well, where would it all end?
By what limiting principle would government outlaw lies about military medals and refrain from going after false statements made in a host of other contexts?
And as the majority insists, “The court has never endorsed the categorical rule … that false statements receive no First Amendment protection. Our prior decisions have not confronted a measure, like the Stolen Valor Act, that targets falsity and nothing more.”
Supporters of the act claim that frauds and liars are undermining the integrity of the medals and eroding the respect accorded to true heroes. But the evidence is contradictory. The fact that so many phonies seek to bolster their self-esteem by laying claim to honors they did not earn may seem to dilute those honors, but it is also evidence the public remains as impressed by them as ever.
Valor can’t really be stolen anyway, as even the liars surely know.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter
