While the GOP governors of Florida and Texas are spending taxpayer money to dump migrants in blue states (and Florida’s governor, at least, may have stepped on a landmine in doing so, see story here), California Gov. Gavin Newsom has a political stunt of his own.
He’s invading their turf with billboards (photos below) inviting women to California for abortions. His re-election campaign paid for 18 of these billboards in Indiana, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas. The website the billboards refer readers to, though, is funded by California taxpayers. (See story here.)
While there’s been some muttering about legal challenges, I don’t see how those states can do anything about the billboards. They’re privately funded, and they’re political speech protected by the First Amendment. They don’t advocate breaking the law, because abortion is legal in California.
At least that’s the assumption. If the Supreme Court’s new majority is hellbent on twisting the words of the Constitution to advance conservative causes, and one of those causes is curtailing speech that conservatives don’t like, and another is criminalizing interstate travel (which is by the Commerce Clause) to get abortions, then anything could happen.
On the other hand, if the court does begin selectively curtailing speech and restricting interstate travel to further the GOP’s political goals, then they’ll be making political rather than legal decisions, and that will intensify the post-Roe backlash and might lead to Congress restricting its jurisdiction, term-limiting the justices, packing the court, or all of these. In other words, they’d be asking for payback.
The Supreme Court may have another free speech issue to decide soon; on Friday, September 16, 2022, the Fifth Circuit — the most conservative of the 11 federal appeals courts — upheld a Texas law barring large social media platforms from banning or censoring users (see story here), a move aimed at among other things overturning Trump’s banishment from Twitter, previously his favorite mode of communicating with supporters.
It’s inconceivable that private companies can’t control their content, especially when all they’re censoring is content they consider dangerous because it encourages violence or enables “extremists such Nazi supporters, terrorists and hostile foreign governments” to promote their agendas.
But let’s say the Supreme Court upholds this Texas law, and also allows Texas to censor Newsom’s billboards. That’ll you the court is enforcing Republican prerogatives, not upholding the law, and if that’s the kind of court we’re going to have, then let’s make the court powerless because it’s better to have no court at all.
