President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday instructing the Department of Justice to prosecute instances of American flag burning and desecration that could incite a riot.
Trump emphasized that the Supreme Court, which protected flag burning under the First Amendment in the 1989 Texas v. Johnson case, has not ruled that burning the flag in a manner that can incite a riot or violence is constitutionally protected.
“As you know, through a very sad court, I guess it was a five-to-four decision, they called it freedom of speech. But there’s another reason, which is perhaps much more important. It’s called death because what happens when you burn a flag, is the area goes crazy,” Trump said. “If you have hundreds of people, they go crazy.”
“When you burn the American flag, it incites riots at levels that we’ve never seen before,” he added. “People go crazy — in a way, both ways. There are some that are going crazy for doing it. There are others that are angry — angry about them doing it.”
White House staff secretary Will Scharf noted that Attorney General Pam Bondi is tasked with investigating and prosecuting instances of flag burning where “prosecution wouldn’t fall afoul of the First Amendment.”
Trump said the penalty for those convicted of flag burning will be a mandatory one-year sentence in federal prison.
“What the penalty is going to be, if you burn a flag, you get one year in jail — no early exits, no nothing,” he said. “You get one year in jail.”
While Democrats are in strong opposition to essentially anything Trump does, many of them on Capitol Hill have voted in favor of measures to crack down on the desecration of the American flag over the years.
For instance, in 1997, Reps. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), Jim McGovern (D-MA), Richard Neal (D-MA), Frank Pallone (D-NJ), Adam Smith (D-WA), and Bennie Thompson (D-MS) voted in favor of a proposed constitutional amendment that would have prohibited the desecration of the American flag.
In 2005, Clyburn, Kaptur, McGovern, Neal, Pallone, Smith, and Thompson all voted for a similar amendment, as did Reps. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), Stephen Lynch (D-MA), David Scott (D-GA), and Brad Sherman (D-CA).