​We recently reported on the vigorous protests and legal action by the Catholic Church to protect caregiving nuns from being forced by New York State to refer patients to suicide providers. The Church objects to the Medical Aid in Dying Act that would compel nuns to assist their elderly patients in meeting the requirements for assisted suicide and refer them to clinics willing to supply the lethal drugs.
 
As one state after another attempts to force religious people to violate their faith, states are discovering that opposition comes from more than just Christians.
 
In Illinois, four Muslim doctors recently filed suit to block the state’s enforcement of provisions that would force these doctors to help patients end their lives. The physicians also assert that the law’s provisions amount to a gag order that could punish them for encouraging patients to consider life-affirming treatments over assisted suicide.   
 
For these physicians, this is nothing less than an official command to commit a grave sin. The Quran teaches that “whoever saves a life, it will be as if they saved all of humanity.” And those who unjustly take lives? The Quran says it will be as if they killed all of humanity.
 
The lawsuit, brought in federal court on behalf of these physicians by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, takes aim at Illinois’ End-of-Life Options for Terminally Ill Patients Act.
 
Proponents of the law say it gives terminally ill patients “the option to seek medication to peacefully end their lives on their own terms in consultation with physicians.” Gov. JB Pritzker’s office maintains that healthcare professionals “are not under any duty to participate in the provision of aid-in-dying and are not subject to criminal or civil liability” for refusing to provide assisted suicide.
 
It is true that this law exempts physicians from being forced to prescribe the lethal drugs. Yet the physicians assert that doctors who refuse to provide referrals could still be slapped with heavy fines and have their licenses revoked.
 
Many Muslims are, understandably, alarmed. Ismail Royer of the Religious Freedom Institute testified in March at a hearing of the White House’s Religious Liberty Commission (RLC) about the fears of Muslim practitioners who worry that they will have to choose between practicing medicine and staying true to their faith.
 
“As the effective date of the Illinois assisted suicide law approached, I knew the physicians I’d interviewed in preparation for my RLC testimony were deeply worried,” Royer said. 
 
By some estimates, nearly 5 percent of physicians in America are Muslims. They should not be forced to violate their core beliefs, whether by referring people to providers of assisted suicide or accepting a gag order that could punish them for suggesting less extreme alternatives.

Frederick Douglass said that the suppression of free speech is a “double wrong” because it “violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
 
Douglass had no lack of such speech suppressors to contend with, both in antebellum American and during the time of Jim Crow. But he likely never imagined that one day those who would be foremost in dismissing their own rights and those of others to hear would be in colleges and universities.
 
This dispiriting realization emerges from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which has released its 2027 College Free Speech Rankings. Before we look at FIRE’s ranking of colleges, first take in the results of FIRE’s survey of their students.
​

• FIRE reveals that almost 70 percent of college students surveyed said that shouting down a campus speaker is acceptable under rare conditions.
  
  
• Fifty percent said it is acceptable to block some speakers.
  
  
• And 30 percent said using violence to stop a campus speech is sometimes acceptable.

 
These are responses to survey questions, not evidence that those students have disrupted an event or committed violence. But they reveal a dangerous confusion about what it means to protest. Students have every right to challenge a speaker, organize a competing event, or walk out. They have no right to prevent others from hearing a speech, much less to attack the person giving it.
 
The consequences of this misunderstanding became horrifyingly clear when Charlie Kirk was murdered during a campus event at Utah Valley University in September 2025. His killing tells us why the boundary separating argument from violence must be bright and inviolable.
 
FIRE’s new college rankings also describe a wider failure of campus openness.
 
Of 261 ranked schools, 121 received an “F” for their punitive speech climate. The University of Chicago came in first place for its open speech climate. New York University came in last.
 
At 61 schools, more than half of surveyed students said Kirk was difficult to discuss. Nine schools lost points after punishing faculty over comments about his death. Other campuses saw efforts to deny recognition to chapters of the organization he founded, Turning Point USA. 
 
Colleges should defend students’ freedom to condemn Kirk’s views, criticize responses to his murder, and debate the issues he raised. They should defend that same freedom for his supporters. Administrators can make the rule credible by protecting events from disruption and applying speech policies consistently, especially when the views at issue are unpopular with those on the far left or far right.
 
The troubled state of speech in American higher education is revealing that repression breeds repression. Or, as Douglass said: “No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”
 
The answer to a speaker you oppose is to make your case so well that others will want to hear it. A campus that teaches students to answer words with words is doing its part to preserve both free speech and peace.

Do businesses have First Amendment rights that allow them to reject compelled speech?

The Miami Herald thought so. It went to court to fight a 1970s Florida law that attempted to give political candidates a “right to equal space to reply to criticisms and attacks.” The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with the newspaper in 1974, holding that Florida law could not commandeer the paper’s “exercise of editorial control and judgment.”

The Justices’ respect for the editorial judgment was central to The Herald’s victory. The Court recognized that a “newspaper is more than a passive receptacle or conduit for news, comment, and advertising.”

What is true for a newspaper should also be true for other businesses, none of which relinquish their First Amendment rights simply because they earn profits. Protect The 1st Foundation advanced this principle in an amicus brief that urges the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold Apple’s free-speech rights.

The dispute arose after Epic Games sued Apple over rules requiring developers to use Apple’s in-app purchasing system. Although Epic lost its federal antitrust claims, a district court barred Apple from prohibiting developers from including content – buttons, external links, and other calls to action – directing users to alternative purchasing systems.

Apple allowed external links but continued to regulate their language, appearance, and placement. For this, the Ninth Circuit held Apple in civil contempt for violating the “spirit” of a permanent injunction to carry developers’ pitches for purchases outside its App Store.

PT1st’s amicus brief demonstrates that such a vague standard is especially dangerous when an injunction regulates speech. It leaves a speaker “to constantly seek guidance and permission from whatever judge communes with that spirit before engaging in First Amendment activity.”

Worse, “the Ninth Circuit wrongly held that the First Amendment was not even implicated by the letter or the spirit of the injunction.”

Like a newspaper, the App Store is not a passive conduit. Apple decides which apps to admit, which to reject, how to categorize them, and which to promote. It rejects often lawful content from apps it deems as inappropriate, such as sexually themed or gambling apps. In 2024 alone, Apple rejected more than 1.9 million submissions for fraud, privacy violations, and other failures to comply with its guidelines. Those editorial standards support Apple’s promise that the App Store is “a safe and trusted place to discover and download apps.”

The injunction degrades that promise by overriding Apple’s decisions about the messages presented within its own curated storefront. As our brief explains, Apple is required to “host Epic’s pitch for purchases outside the Store – and to do so in Epic’s style, language, format, and placement.” That is “an order requiring Apple to publish someone else’s speech that Apple would otherwise have declined to host at all.”

The Supreme Court addressed closely related principles in Moody v. NetChoice. Florida and Texas had enacted laws limiting large social-media platforms’ ability to filter, prioritize, label, or remove user content. Texas went further, prohibiting platforms from censoring expression based on viewpoint.

The Supreme Court vacated the lower-court judgments and required a proper assessment of the laws’ full range of applications. But it also made the controlling First Amendment principle clear: Selecting, excluding, organizing, and presenting third-party speech is expressive activity. When government orders excluded material to be included, it interferes with editorial judgment and “confronts the First Amendment.”
​
PT1st urges the Court to uphold Apple’s speech right, releasing it from any obligation to adhere to an unwritten “spirit” of a ruling.

Not a good week for the White House.

On Wednesday, Iowa Judge Scott J. Beattie threw out the presidential lawsuit alleging “consumer fraud” against pollster Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register. The judge said that allowing the legally “faulty” claims in this suit to proceed could “discourage others from reporting on and debating public affairs.”

What was the alleged fraud? Selzer had accurately predicted that Donald Trump would win Iowa in 2016 and in 2020. Her final poll in 2024 showed Kamala Harris leading in Iowa. Trump instead won the Hawkeye State by more than 13 percentage points.

Did an inaccurate poll amount to “consumer fraud”? The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which defended Selzer, put the First Amendment point plainly – “In America, you don’t lose your First Amendment rights just because your prediction turns out to be wrong.”

On Thursday, a federal court delivered another reminder about press freedom: The White House must provide due process before revoking journalists’ credentials.  

Federal Judge Timothy J. Kelly issued a temporary order to restore White House access for three news outlets – Politico, MS NOW, and CNN. His order lasts 14 days while the court considers whether to grant longer relief. The administration argued in court that national security justified revoking the journalists’ passes without giving them prior notice or opportunity to respond.

“Nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns,” Judge Kelly wrote. He noted that prior official complaints had focused on the alleged untruthfulness and negativity of the outlets’ reporting.

As these three news organizations return to work, the court has yet to decide their First Amendment claims. In the meantime, will the administration learn that the momentary frisson of filing a punitive lawsuit is almost always followed by the sharp pain of being slapped down by a judge?
​
These rulings come as the press covers the pageantry of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington. The comparison should be instructive. In the United States, independent courts can check attempts to punish the press. That protection remains perhaps the greatest gift of the Founders – the First Amendment.

Three news organizations – CNN, MS NOW, and Politico – have now been banned from the White House.

The New York Times reports that CNN has retained First Amendment lawyer Ted Boutrous, a sign that a court challenge may be coming. But is this really a violation of the First Amendment?

You can scour the text of the Constitution’s premier amendment without finding a provision that reads, “the right of the press to occupy real estate in the White House complex shall not be abridged.” The president could, if he chose, remove the White House briefing room and restore the indoor swimming pool beneath it.

The rub, however, is that this action targets some news outlets but not others.

Because this action stems from the president’s publicly stated displeasure with the reporting of these news organizations, a legal challenge could have a considerable chance of success. Withholding access on that basis could well be determined by the courts to be viewpoint discrimination – a violation of the First Amendment.
​
The nation’s fourth president recognized that official discomfort with the press is part of the price of a free society. When devising what eventually became the First Amendment, Madison wrote: “The freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.”
To be continued…

​Protect The 1st congratulates Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) for taking the lead in fixing a serious gap in civil rights law by introducing the Restoring Civil Rights Attorney’s Fees Act.

Bob Goodlatte, former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and PT1st Senior Policy Advisor, said:

“PT1st commends Rep. Grothman for this well-crafted, narrowly tailored bill that corrects a specific injustice – the ability of government to use legal and policy maneuvers to deny attorney's fees to plaintiffs with meritorious constitutional claims.

“This bill does not mandate fee awards, change existing constitutional or statutory standards, or create new causes of action. It merely restores congressional intent that Americans with valid claims in constitutional cases should have a fair opportunity to recover their attorneys' fees.

“Protecting Americans’ ability to seek redress for official wrongdoing is essential to our Constitution and the rule of law.”

Background

Congress enacted the Civil Rights Attorney’s Fees Awards Act in 1976 to ensure that plaintiffs with meritorious constitutional claims could vindicate their rights regardless of their financial means. But Supreme Court decisions have narrowed the circumstances in which successful plaintiffs qualify as “prevailing parties” entitled to seek attorneys’ fees.

Under those decisions, the government can sometimes avoid paying fees by abandoning an unconstitutional policy before a final judgment – even after plaintiffs have obtained preliminary relief or their lawsuits have prompted the government to change course.

The Bill

The Restoring Civil Rights Attorney’s Fees Act would correct this injustice by allowing courts to award fees when plaintiffs obtain enforceable preliminary relief or when their litigation causes the government to end an unconstitutional law, regulation, or policy. Courts would retain discretion over whether to award fees.

The bill would protect Americans across the political spectrum who are seeking to enforce their rights to free speech, religious liberty, equal protection, due process, and other constitutional guarantees.
​
Protect The First looks forward to supporting Rep. Grothman as he works to advance this much-needed legislation into law.

We’ve regularly reported on aggressive moves by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr to threaten the broadcast licenses of local stations in an effort to punish networks for politically significant speech.

While the FCC pioneers new ways to use official power to try to regulate speech, the Securities and Exchange Commission is setting the opposite example. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins is scrubbing old rules that have long curtailed the First Amendment rights of Americans working in financial services.

In May, Chairman Atkins rescinded Rule 202.5(e), a gag rule that prevented defendants who settled with the agency from ever publicly challenging its allegations.

As one such defendant, Thomas J. Powell, wrote about that rule:

“While the SEC remained free to publish allegations against those it accused of violating securities regulations, even when no court had tested those allegations, the rule compelled settling respondents to stay silent about their own cases.”

The shelving of that gag rule was a major victory for the First Amendment, even though the SEC is rarely thought of as an agency whose work implicates speech rights.

Now Atkins is proposing to rescind another speech-curtailing regulation: 206(4)-5, or the SEC’s so-called “pay-to-play” rule. That rule generally prohibits an investment adviser from providing compensated services to a government entity for two years after that adviser or certain employees make covered political contributions. Exempted contributions are limited to $350 when the contributor is eligible to vote for that candidate, and $150 when that contributor is not.

The theory behind this Obama-era rule is that political contributions could influence elected officials who may play some role in selecting appointed officials responsible for choosing firms to manage public pension funds.

As worthy as preventing favoritism may be, Chairman Atkins correctly noted that local ordinances and state laws, along with federal election regulations, are the better suited to police political donations than the SEC.

And make no mistake, this restriction has curtailed speech rights.

“I can’t speak up, and I can’t fight for what I believe,” Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, complained. “Doesn’t that violate my First Amendment rights?”

Atkins said that the harm from this policy radiated throughout entire organizations. He said:

“Many firms simply impose blanket prohibitions on employee political contributions rather than navigate the rule’s complexities. People should not have to choose between their political speech rights and a job in a particular industry.”
​
Questions about speech arise much more often in the domain of Chairman Carr’s FCC than in that of Chairman Atkins’ SEC. Perhaps the FCC Chairman might see in Atkins’ actions a praiseworthy example to follow. We would much rather have reason to commend the FCC’s actions than condemn them.

​The angels may appear to be on the side of ABC in its lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission, but the devils are in the details.

We’ve followed the Disney-owned corporation’s spirited First Amendment defense against the FCC’s extraordinary decision to subject the broadcast licenses of eight ABC-owned stations to an early review. These licenses are in jeopardy over official ire at the liberal bias of ABC shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live and The View.

Leave it to Thomas Hazlett to tell the rest of the story – that the broadcasters’ regulatory predicament is the result of a trap they helped set for themselves.

Hazlett, a professor of economics at Clemson University and a former chief economist at the Federal Communications Commission, is a renowned scholar of telecommunications economics and policy. Hazlett writes in The Wall Street Journal that “there’s a loophole” in the First Amendment treatment of broadcasters. Hazlett observes:

“While most media operate in a laissez-faire regime, terrestrial radio and television broadcasting are licensed, and their airwave access has sometimes been deemed a privilege, not a right.”

Hazlett quotes comedian George Carlin, who said that radio and television are “the only two parts of American life not protected by the free-speech provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution. I’d like to repeat that because it sounds vaguely important.”

Hazlett points out that the 1927 Radio Act’s “public interest” language, which opens the door for regulation of broadcasters’ speech, was written by the National Association of Broadcasters. Hazlett concludes:

“The broadcasters traded freedom for free licenses and a lucrative, protected market.”

In the early television age, this regulatory protection shielded legacy broadcasters from new entrants. Hazlett then proceeds to describe how these restrictions were turned on the industry that designed them. In 1973, to cite one example, President Richard Nixon’s political allies challenged the license renewals of two Florida TV stations for failing to meet their “public interest” obligations. It just so happened that both stations were owned by the same company that owned The Washington Post, where two reporters named Woodward and Bernstein were publishing an investigative series about the crimes of the Nixon White House. The Washington Post Company’s stock price plunged 50 percent. Similar intrusions from the FCC occurred under Democratic administrations going back to John F. Kennedy.

We draw two lessons from this history lesson.

First, government overreach – whether in speech, privacy, or other basic rights – is rarely just the story of officials behaving badly, though there is plenty of that. It is often the result of businesses seeking regulatory advantage to boost their competitiveness and handicap their competitors. Many executives and stockholders are shocked when the monster they helped create turns on them.
​
Second, broadcasters might consider a new arrangement with the government. Paying a reasonable market price to secure their spectrum rights might enable broadcasters to control, as Hazlett puts it, both their spectrum and their content.

​This can’t be an easy week for Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr.
 
He sits on a dilemma – one horn being a direct and public request from President Trump to “punish” NBC journalist Kristen Welker, the other being mounting public and Republican criticism of the FCC’s heavy-handed forays into policing broadcast speech.
 
To date, Chairman Carr has followed President Trump’s desire to use the regulatory authority of the Federal Communications Commission to retaliate against media critics.
 
Carr pressured Disney-ABC to fire late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, only to be criticized by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for making a statement to the network (“we can do this the easy way or the hard way”) that the senator likened to a mobster’s threat.
 
When Carr opened an investigation into whether the daytime talk show The View improperly gave airtime to Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, he prompted Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) to say that the FCC was exploring the “foothills of violating the First Amendment.”
 
Whatever directives the White House may have given Chairman Carr about these actions in private, there is no mistaking the charge President Trump has now given him in public.
 
Kristen Welker drew the president’s ire by saying on NBC’s Meet the Press that he has had “some mixed results” in his endorsement of Republican candidates. While the president has had extraordinary success in backing his preferred Senate candidates – replacing two incumbent Republican senators with his picks – it is true that he has been far less successful in backing gubernatorial candidates.
 
The president immediately fired back, saying Welker would be “reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment” for the crime of “purposeful inaccuracy.”
 
The president added on his Truth Social account: “The Press is a Disgrace to our Nation, and I hope that Chairman Brendan Carr, and the fine people of his Commission, will take this Threat to our Country very seriously.”
 
And on what basis might the FCC assert authority over the comments of a journalist? The president answered that question: “How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given Public Airwaves.”
 
This is in keeping with Chairman Carr’s oft-stated rationale for his investigations, predicated on the New Deal-era rules governing broadcasters’ access to public airwaves.
Carr told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo said that broadcasters “struck a deal with the American people. You broadcasters get subsidized access, free access to a valuable public resource, the airwaves, worth billions of dollars. In exchange, you have to operate in the public interest.
 
“Look, as a country, we should have a trusted, respected news media, and we’re not there. So I hope more broadcasters return to their public interest obligations.”
Thus, the president’s demand to “punish” and “rebuke” a journalist is clearly based on the theory that the use of public airwaves by broadcasters entitles the government to regulate their reporting until, in the judgment of the government, the news media are “trusted” and “respected.” For decades, the “public interest” obligation has traditionally meant that broadcasters have a general duty to be responsive to local events and needs, avoid obscenity, and give political candidates relatively substantially equal access outside “bona fide news interview programs.”
 
Now the president is proposing to interpret these broad and general obligations into an asserted authority to micromanage speech. Could there be a better example of policing speech than “punishing” a journalist for the relatively mild suggestion that the president’s political endorsements are not always successful?
 
We don’t discount conservative complaints that most corporate news organizations are biased. The best solution to the perception of biased speech has proven to be more speech, creating a market for alternative perspectives in which Fox News has prospered. But regulatory policing of speech is a recipe for authoritarianism.