More Bush Support for the Constitution

The $80,000 Anti-Bush T-Shirts

by Bill Katovsky on HuffPost

Last year, I wrote on HuffingtonPost about a young Texas couple who had been arrested for wearing anti-Bush T-shirts at a Fourth of July event in Charleston, West Virginia, where the President was scheduled to give a speech.

Jeff and Nicole Rank, of Corpus Christi, Texas had stood quietly in the crowd, wearing hand-drawn T-Shirts with Bush's name on the front and the international "No" symbol. They didn't yell, they didn't cause a fuss. Yet they were forcibly removed from the event by a phalanx of law enforcement officials at the behest of Bush operatives.

It was another egregious example of how little the Bush White House genuinely respects freedom of speech.

Can't spoil a Bush photo op, can we? Nonetheless, the Ranks' wrongful arrest made national news, and the ACLU decided to handle the couple's case against the U.S. government for a violation of their civil rights.

Well, justice prevailed (sort of) on Thursday, when the government settled the lawsuit for $80,000.

More here ...

What my friends on the right seem to miss is that the REAL client in every case the ACLU takes is the Constitution - without exception. The degree to which one decries the ACLU's defense of the provisions of the Constitution (whatever the surrounding circumstances) is a good measure of how opposed one is to the actual rule of law and the degree to which one actually hates America and what it stands for.