Arizona Shooting a Pretense for Attack on Free Speech?
It took only a matter of hours after the Arizona shooting — amidst the leftist media war cry for government controls against animated political speech — for those calls to be translated into federal legislation. CNN reported January 9 that “Rep. Robert Brady, D-Pennsylvania, said he will introduce legislation making it a federal crime for a person to use language or symbols that could be perceived as threatening or inciting violence against a Member of Congress or federal official.”
“The president is a federal official,” Brady said in a telephone interview with CNN. “You can’t do it to him; you should not be able to do it to a congressman, senator or federal judge.” Of course, the key word is “perceived”; we’re not talking about an actual threat. Brady makes it pretty clear that he’s trying to squelch legitimate political dissent. “The rhetoric is just ramped up so negatively, so high, that we have got to shut this down,” Brady told CNN, adding a comment that tries to link political rhetoric with actual crimes: “I’ve had my share of death threats.”
Whatever emerges from the text of Brady’s legislation when it is publicly revealed, it certainly would not propose to make it a new crime to threaten a Congressman with violence. That’s been a federal offense — a crime called “assault” — for a long time. The existing U.S. Code Title 18, Section 351 reads in part:
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