Should Non-Lawyer Politicians Get a Free Pass?
Simple Justice: Much is being made across the blogosphere about VP candidate Sarah Palin’s dubious understanding of how the 1st Amendment’s freedom of speech works. That she botched it badly is clear; the media doesn’t interfere with her freedom of speech by exercising its freedom of speech to criticize her.
Those inclined to rush to her defense argue that it’s not her fault for making a stupid lawyer mistake in her lack of understanding of the nuanced distinction between government action and private action, since she’s not a lawyer. The pro-Palin spin is that she shouldn’t be held to a standard of legal correctness that is beyond the common person’s reach. The anti-Palin spin is that ignorant people don’t get greater latitude in being wrong simply because they’re ignorant.
But this issue raises a larger issue, one that I’ve seen as problematic on every level of government for as long as I can remember. Whenever our politicians lack the education and knowledge to understand and appreciate how the law works, particularly the Constitution, they feel nonetheless empowered to expound on their personal view of how it should be, and what it is, in their view.
This present two really nasty problems. The first is the facile ad hoc reinvention of constitutional rights and duties by each individual elected official. Miraculously, they seem to keep coming up with some strange ideas that mesh seamlessly with whatever they want to do at any given time.
The second aspect of this problem is that whey the expound on the vision of law, and being elected officials they are naturally entitled to expound on every subject from nuclear physics to constitutional interpretation despite their slightly less that deep understanding of the subject, they do so publicly. The public, like the non-lawyer official, hasn’t the slightest clue whether they’re right…