Reason Wins a Round

In Washington these days, reason so seldom triumphs over pique that all its victories deserve to be celebrated. This is particularly so in the case of the Senate’s rejection last week of a Constitutional amendment that would have empowered Congress and the states to outlaw vandalism of the flag.

The proposal was introduced last summer during the frenzy of congressional outrage that followed the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that a man who burned the flag in protest at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas was exercising his right to free speech under the First Amendment. The decision nullified existing federal and state statutes protecting the flag, and some senators sought to remedy the situation by inserting into the Constitution a sentence reading, “Congress and the states shall have the power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag.”

Had it been passed and ratified, the measure would have been the first legal exception to the Bill of Rights ever enacted.

Fortunately, the amendment’s proponents, who were vocally supported by President Bush, managed to win only 51 votes, 16 short of the two-thirds majority required. Two aspects of that result are especially noteworthy: The first is that Democrats and Republicans were to be found on both sides of the question; 10 GOP senators opposed the measure, while 18 Democrats assented to it. Such a split--increasingly rare in this era of rancorous partisanship--suggests that, at least on Constitutional questions, conscience still holds sway on the chamber’s floor.

This is all the more remarkable because the vote was conducted under pressure from a President who, in some large measure, owes his election to an adroit manipulation of popular patriotism. That the Senate resisted such pressure and put a substantial public interest--preservation of the Bill of Rights’ integrity--ahead of a popular symbolic gesture--consecration of the flag as a civic icon--does something to restore the chamber’s tarnished reputation as a serious deliberative body.

So, too, did the quality of debate on the issue on both sides of the aisle. Democratic majority leader George J. Mitchell of Maine, a former federal judge, made the case for rejection with particular force: “Across the millenniums of human history,” he said, “there is no better, no clearer, nor more concise nor more effective statement of the right of citizens to be free of the dictates of government than the American Bill of Rights. Principles which have stood that test of time should not be lightly discarded.”

Those sentiments were echoed by New Hampshire Sen. Gordon J. Humphrey, a conservative spokesman. The Bill of Rights, he declared, protects “the natural right to speak one’s mind however offensive that may be to the hearer . . . It is a precious right, this binding the power of government so it cannot begin to interfere in the natural rights of any human being.”

This sort of sober argument puts the conduct of a handful of clownish vandals into perspective. It reminds us all that freedom of speech is the necessary--though not sufficient--condition in which there can flourish all those other liberties that make for a just and decent society.