Word: flags
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...First Amendment, untouched for 198 years, is safe again. Ever since the $ Supreme Court ruled last summer that burning the flag was a form of political protest that was protected by the free-speech amendment, lawmakers have been posturing and pontificating on the issue. No one could forget that Michael Dukakis during last year's presidential campaign was outflagged by George Bush. The patriotic grandstanding was led by the President, who traveled across the Potomac to the Iwo Jima Memorial -- cameras in hot pursuit -- to denounce the ruling and demand a constitutional amendment. But when the proposal came...
Government by Symbolism. Reagan was a master at this, and Bush has proved a very quick study. When the Supreme Court last July ruled that the burning of the U.S. flag qualified as protected free speech under the First Amendment, Bush and his advisers organized a media event before the Iwo Jima memorial in Washington so the President could call for a constitutional amendment to ban flag desecration. Congress shied away from an amendment, but last week it passed a simple criminal law that would impose a jail term of up to one year on anyone who burned the flag...
...Bush to reconsider, pointedly recalling his vacillating stands on the issue. "The President has already changed his position on abortion once, in 1980," Mitchell observed dryly. "He can do so again." Democrats might even prefer a veto. After being outmaneuvered in recent weeks on tax cuts and the American flag, they relish the prospect of watching Bush explain why he rejected federal help for poor women facing a horrible predicament. "This isn't about teenagers getting pregnant in a car at the drive-in movie," says a top aide to the House Democratic leadership. "This is about rape and incest...
Part of the courtship involves paying lip service to hot-button right-wing issues like abortion, tuition tax credits and the flag, though Bush has done little or nothing to advance those causes. For example, in June he called for a constitutional amendment to reverse the Supreme Court's ruling that flag burning is legal. But last week, after the Senate passed anti-flag-burning legislation as part of a plan for derailing any change in the Constitution, the White House reiterated its preference for an amendment but stopped short of threatening a veto. In late September Bush broke weeks...
...will permit a bill outlawing flag burning to become law without his signature. "I don't think it's enough," Bush said, renewing his call for a constitutional amendment along the same lines but adding that he would not veto the legislation in the meantime...