Democrats’ goal of censoring Donald Trump was embraced by an Obama-appointed federal Judge Tanya Chutkan in D.C. She imposed a sweeping gag order demanded by the politicized prosecutor, Jack Smith, to muzzle Trump as he campaigns for president. Her gag order was designed to censor Trump from criticizing Jack Smith and his partisan prosecutors, any of the court’s staff including the judge, and “any reasonably foreseeable witness or the substance of their testimony.” The prosecutors could seek to hold Trump in contempt for anything he says that might be interpreted as a violation.
In layman’s terms, the gag order sought to prevent Trump from being Trump. And that is unconstitutional for any court to do to the front-runner for president during his reelection campaign. No safeguard was put in place to prevent Biden, the Democrats, and the media from exploiting the gag order by relentlessly ranting against Trump on the same topics that he was prevented from addressing. Ads run by rivals immediately began to black out the airwaves while Trump was wrongfully prohibited from rebutting them, because of a gag order further censoring all who act under Trump’s direction. Late-night Leftist talk show host Jimmy Kimmel quipped that the gag order shut down Trump’s ability to criticize even him, because Kimmel is a potential witness. After all, Kimmel joked, “I don’t know about you — I saw the whole thing happen.”
Despite what Kimmel would have you to believe, this is more than just a joke. The ability of a leading presidential candidate to speak freely is foundational to the electoral process. Even if a candidate could theoretically navigate the murky waters of what is and isn’t speech covered by the gag order, every partisan reporter on the campaign trail would hound the candidate with a relentless torrent of unanswerable questions. And every time the candidate even says that he can’t answer a question because of the gag order, he comes across as weak and jeopardizes a charge of contempt anyway. No, partisan attempts to censor Trump are intolerable, and they should be treated as such.
This post originally appeared at https://www.phyllisschlafly.com/constitution/candidate-gag-orders-are-unconstitutional/
