I am deeply honored to be the target of Democrat Sponsored speech suppressing legislation. The effort confirms what I have long claimed. A point that Noah Rothman just made in Commentary Magazine. Free Speech is a threat to the authoritarian tick.
Related: The “stop those free speech meanies” Bill Has a Full Committee Work Session This Wed. Feb 5th
That’s an amalgam of his thesis. He’s referring to a politician’s urge ” to criminalize the forms of expression [they] find distasteful.” What he calls “an old idea…that your freedom of expression is a threat to the public good.”
But HB1159 is more than that. It is a political test for speech defined by partisan lawmakers.
They decide when an interaction with a constituent is offensive to them and when they have had enough. This could be the third interaction or the tenth, the first, or never. The decision to claim you are being bullied stalked, or harassed (and when) is not only entirely subjective and decided by the lawmaker, the potential object of HB1159’s force has no way to know what or when they will have broken the law.
Perhaps I can frame it another way, in terms that might elicit the opprobrium suited to this effort. If you would not want this power in the hands of President Trump, then you had damn well not, under any circumstance, give it to yourselves.
Because while you feel like it may at this time serve some purpose that is, in reality, nothing more than personal interest (not for the good of the people), imagine that same power in the hands of your political opponents when you are the citizen and they are the public official.
I would oppose it regardless of who proposed it, you should as well.
Stephen MacDonald
Merrimack, New Hampshire
Blogger/Editor – GraniteGrok.com
*Submitted to the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee as Written Testimony regarding the Consideration of HB1159 – links excluded.
