White House Formally Responds to ‘Deport Piers Morgan’ Petition

Jay Carney defends first amendment while Obama attempts to eviscerate second

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
January 9, 2013

The White House has issued a glib response to the petition to deport CNN host Piers Morgan, claiming Morgan’s rhetorical assault on the Constitution is protected by the first amendment, despite the fact that Morgan is not a U.S. citizen and therefore does not enjoy a first amendment right.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney responded to the petition, which has reached over 109,000 signatures, with the following statement;

Let’s not let arguments over the Constitution’s Second Amendment violate the spirit of its First. President Obama believes that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms. However, the Constitution not only guarantees an individual right to bear arms, but also enshrines the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press — fundamental principles that are essential to our democracy. Americans may disagree on matters of public policy and express those disagreements vigorously, but no one should be punished by the government simply because he or she expressed a view on the Second Amendment — or any other matter of public concern.

The rest of the response is merely a re-hash of Barack Obama’s gun control rhetoric in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre.

In lazily arguing, “Let’s not let arguments over the Constitution’s Second Amendment violate the spirit of its First,” Carney is implying that Piers Morgan’s anti-gun crusade is protected by free speech under the first amendment when it clearly isn’t since foreign nationals do not have absolute first amendment rights.

The fact that the first amendment does not apply to non-citizens was established in the Supreme Court’s affirmation of Bluman v. FEC in January 2012. The court’s decision rubber-stamped a District Court decision which found under its first amendment analysis that, “The United States has a compelling interest in limiting the participation of foreign citizens in such activities, and “thereby preventing foreign influence over the U.S. political process.”

Legal precedent also dictates that foreign nationals can be deported from the United States for subversion against the Constitution. In Harisiades v. Shaugnessy (1952), the US Supreme Court upheld Harisiades’ deportation by ruling that the first amendment did not protect Harisiades’ membership of the Communist Party.

In issuing its glib response, the White House has completely failed to even address these cases and has erroneously claimed that the first amendment applies to non-citizen foreign nationals like Piers Morgan, when it does not.

The fact that the White House’s response was timed to coincide precisely with the national media furore over Alex Jones’ appearance on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight is also curiously synchronous, given that Jones was the author of the original petition and Morgan is a personal friend of the Obama’s.

The Obama administration has also revealed yet another side to its rampant hypocrisy – defending the first amendment while aggressively attempting to eviscerate the second via gun control measures that were planned well in advance of recent events.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.

This article was posted: Wednesday, January 9, 2013 at 6:02 am

Tags: domestic news, gun rights

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