Robertson's urging the government to assassinate Chavez

[Volokh, Eugene]

	I think it's positively valuable for people to be able to debate
whether the government should assassinate foreign leaders.  Some foreign
leaders should be assassinated; if treaties prohibit us from doing that,
then we need to consider whether we should get out of those treaties; if
laws prohibit the President from doing that, then we need to consider
whether we should repeal those laws.  I find little morally appealing in
the notion that it's OK to kill enemy soldiers -- or soldiers of a
country that wasn't our enemy until five minutes ago, when we decided
that it was proper to attack them -- but not OK to kill their
commander-in-chief.

	I think there are sound practical arguments against such
assassination -- among other things, a tit-for-tat pattern of political
assassination is likely to hurt democracies (where many politicians
share power, where the politicians ought to be more accessible to the
people, and where most politicians other than the President and the
Vice-President generally are) more than autocracies (where the few
leaders who have power can often hole up in their bunkers).  But these
are questions that deserve consideration and frequent debate.

	I don't think we should be assassinating Chavez, for many
overlapping reasons.  But the line between him and the people whom we
are at least morally entitled to assassinate is likely to be a very
fuzzy one, and urging that the government put the line in this place
rather than that strikes me as core constitutionally protected speech.

	This having been said, I agree that if a side effect of the
speech is for people (whether civilians or rogue elements in the
military, acting without their superiors' agreement) to do the
assassination themselves, that's quite unfortunate.  Perhaps in some
situations speech like the one we're discussing might be restricted
because of this side effect, though that's a complex question.  But on
these facts, it strikes me that this side effect is highly unlikely.

	Eugene


Sandy Levinson writes:
 
 I Pat Robertson were sojourning in the UK and made a similar statement
about assassinating someone the Blair government liked, would he not
qualify for immediate expulsion under the new standards.  Indeed, if
Robertson were a resident alien within the US., might not the US
consider deporting him as a "terrorist," similar to some of the people
who have been gone after for ostensibly supporting Middle Eastern
organizations?  So is the strong First Amendment defense of Robertson
based on the fact that he is, after all, a citizen, or on the presmise
that "any person" within the US, including resident aliens, is free to
counsel the murder of  those deemed "bad people" from the speaker's
perspective?  And if we support citizen speech but not resident alien
speech, is that because we give some special "credit," as it were, to
the speech of our fellow citizens, or simply out of a positivist belief
that we're "stuck" with the First Amendment and have to tolerate certain
kinds of egregious speech, but the FA, at the end of the day, protects
only citizens?