by Jamin B. Raskin

About the author: Jamin B. Raskin is a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law.

On February 13, 1997, House Rules Chairman Gerald Solomon (R-NY) and Rep. William Lipinski (D-IL) introduced H.J. Res. 54, a proposed constitutional Amendment that reads as follows:

Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.

Congressmen Solomon and Lipinski thus seek to become authors of the first constitutional amendment since Prohibition designed to put people in jail and the first in our history to strip First Amendment freedoms from the Bill of Rights. Congress should act with common sense and reject the first amendment to the First Amendment.

The Amendment is explicitly aimed at eviscerating the Supreme Court’s 1989 decision in Texas v. Johnson, which struck...