Stolen valor

There oughta be a law, and, gosh darn it, there will be one even if they have to keep rewriting it every couple of years until those pesky First Amendment defenders surrender from battle fatigue.

Even though the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has struck the federal 2005 Stolen Valor law that made it a crime to falsely claim to have earned military decorations, lawmakers in Carson City have introduced identical bills in the both the Assembly and Senate to make it a crime to falsely claim to have earned military decorations. The Senate version bears the names of all 21 senators.

The bills duly note the 9th Circuit’s ruling but attempt to skirt it by making it a crime to “mislead or defraud” by making false claims of military service or honors.

Fraud already is a crime. Carving out a special niche fraud for “stolen valor” is redundant, superfluous and a huge waste of lawmakers’ time. As for criminalizing the act of misleading someone, we would proffer a codicil: Make it a crime for politicians to mislead voters. That would fill the jails.

In its Stolen Valor opinion, the 9th Circuit judges quoted from a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck as unconstitutional on free speech grounds a federal law criminalizing the sale of videos depicting animal cruelty.

“Tellingly, in Stevens,” the 9th Circuit writes, “the Court found the government’s proposed ‘free-floating test for First Amendment coverage,’ to be ‘startling and dangerous,’ and went on to say that ‘[t]he First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech does not extend only to categories of speech that survive an ad hoc balancing of relative social costs and benefits. The First Amendment itself reflects a judgment by the American people that the benefits of its restrictions on the Government outweigh the costs. Our Constitution forecloses any attempt to revise that judgment simply on the basis that some speech is not worth it.'”

Judge Alex Kozinski summed it up in a concurrence: “If false factual statements are unprotected, then the government can prosecute not only the man who tells tall tales of winning the Congressional Medal of Honor, but also the JDater who falsely claims he’s Jewish or the dentist who assures you it won’t hurt a bit. Phrases such as ‘I’m working late tonight, hunny,’ ‘I got stuck in traffic’ and ‘I didn’t inhale’ could all be made into crimes. Without the robust protections of the First Amendment, the white lies, exaggerations and deceptions that are an integral part of human intercourse would become targets of censorship, subject only to the rubber stamp known as ‘rational basis review.’ ”