Georgetown Law Center, one of America’s top law schools, suspended a newly hired lecturer a day before he was to start work for tweeting that Biden, instead of choosing “the objectively best pick” for the Supreme Court, instead plans to pick “a lesser black woman,” which seems to imply that no black woman could be as good some other choice.
The instructor, Ilya Shapiro, came to Georgetown Law from the Cato Institute, a rightwing think tank. Conservatives and Republicans are criticizing Biden’s promise to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer with a black woman, so considering where Shapiro came from, his thoughts on the subject aren’t surprising. Georgetown issued the usual press release stating his remarks are inconsistent with their values, and he probably can kiss that job goodbye. Read story here.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the intellectual spectrum, where gutter rats live, firebrand GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn is asking a federal court to block the North Carolina State Board of Elections from entertaining a voter challenge to his eligibility to run again. “The 11 voters claimed Cawthorn’s speech at a rally preceding the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot violated the 14th Amendment, which disallows people who ‘engaged in insurrection or rebellion’ from running for Congress,” The Hill reported here. Some details of their position are presented in the video below; you can read the challenge in its entirety here.
They’re emphasizing a statement Cawthorn made at Trump’s rally preceding the Capitol riot that “it’s time to fight.” But this is standard fare in political speeches, and isn’t normally taken literally. The question in his case is whether he intended it to be, the crowd understood it that way, and it contributed to the violence after the rally. The case against Cawthorn is made stronger by his history of incendiary rhetoric that seems to call for political violence.
The issue, of course, is whether Shapiro and Cawthorn are being sanctioned for what should be protected as free speech. Shapiro, who is Russian, may simply have expressed himself awkwardly. If he meant to say Biden should consider the entire potential pool of candidates, not just the black women in the pool, that doesn’t strike me as a firing offense. At a premiere law school, I’d expect it to touch off vigorous debate, not a personnel action. Instead of firing him, maybe they should send him to ESL classes to brush up on his English skills.
But Cawthorn has no such excuse. He’s in no way a sympathetic figure; quite the opposite. Intellectual discussion is the last thing he’s interested in; he’s made a career of political arson. He regularly dances right up to the line of inciting violence, to see how close he can get without crossing it; if his foot slips and he does, should anyone mind if a metaphorical pallet of bricks lands on him? But the constitutional and statutory provisions the challengers are deploying against him were intended to disqualify Confederate rebels from holding federal office, and Cawthorn did not (a) secede from the Union, (b) fire at Union troops, or (c) personally participate in the Capitol riot. If he helped plan the violence on Jan. 6, then they should prevail. But if all he did was urge Trump’s rally crowd “to fight,” that’s awfully thin and would need a lot of beefing up with additional evidence of intent to make it stick.
The main point is we need to always be mindful of the distinction between challenging, thought-provoking, debate-generating speech and hateful or inciting speech, and make sure we don’t confuse the former with the latter.