CHAUTAUQUA – You really shouldn’t miss this one.

The public is welcome at a Hillsdale College Freedom Forum on “Freedom and Western Civilization.”

The forum is on Tuesday afternoon, Aug. 16, and Wednesday morning and afternoon, Aug. 17, at the Chautauqua Suites Hotel and Expo Center, 215 West Lake Road, Mayville.

According to Hillsdale, its freedom fora “provide two days of thought-provoking discussions organized around six lectures by three of Hillsdale’s finest professors. Guests will delve deeply into the meaning of freedom from an interdisciplinary perspective by examining politics, economics, and literature.”

The lecturers are Roger Butters, associate professor of economics; Khalil Habib, associate professor of politics; and David Whalen, professor of English.

The $50 registration fee includes six lectures, late-afternoon receptions on Aug. 16 and 17, plus an Aug. 17 breakfast buffet. Hotel accommodations aren’t included. Limited accommodations are available at a special rate at the Chautauqua Suites.

Registration is by Aug. 8 at HillsdaleEvent.com/22ny or by calling (888) 886-1174.

Additional information is available by contacting Peggy Youngs, director of lifelong learning, at the same telephone number or at FreedomForum@hillsdale.edu.

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If you attended the July 25 morning lecture at Chautauqua Institution, you heard the speaker make several points, one of which was that the U.S. Supreme Court “should defer to the judgment of Congress on” particular “campaign-finance” issues.

By extension, this would include deferring to other legislatures when the challenged law isn’t federal law.

So what’s wrong with such deference?

This is one of those slow, low-and-outside pitches at which you, faithful reader of this column, can take a nice, easy swing and then hit the ball over the fence.

“Campaign-finance-law” issues involve banning, otherwise limiting, or regulating – that is, requiring disclosure of – political speech, which is at core of what the First Amendment protects.

The Supreme Court established in Marbury v. Madison in 1803 that the court itself decides what the U.S. Constitution means and how it applies.

In so doing, courts, particularly the Supreme Court, don’t defer to anybody or any body.

They don’t defer to public-opinion polls.

They don’t defer to the parties before the court.

They don’t defer to the executive branch.

They don’t defer to government agencies.

And they don’t defer to Congress or any other legislature.

If the high court deferred in any of these ways, the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education, who challenged racially segregated schools in the 1950s, would have lost.

If the high court deferred in any of these ways, then the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, which in the same era challenged a state government’s requirement that it disclose its membership list, would have lost.

If the high court deferred in any of these ways, then high-school-football coach Joseph Kennedy – in 2022 – would have lost his challenge to his losing his job for praying at midfield after games.

If the high court deferred in any of these ways, then the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association – in 2022 – would have lost its challenge to a New York gun-control law.

Yet all of these challengers won.

The July 25 morning speaker urged the amphitheater audience to remember the words of Supreme Court Justice and Chautauqua County native Robert Jackson that the Constitution isn’t a suicide pact.

Yet that doesn’t foreclose understanding that the high court doesn’t defer in any of these ways.

That, after all, was a basis for Jackson’s West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette opinion, which the court issued on Flag Day 1943.

In Barnette, Jehovah’s Witnesses challenged the requirement that their children say the pledge of allegiance in school, because doing so conflicts with their sincerely held religious beliefs.

Other Jehovah’s Witnesses had lost a similar challenge in the high court in Minersville School District v. Gobitis in 1940. But from 1940 to 1943, new justices joined the court, and others reconsidered their positions.

Gobitis, written by Justice Felix Frankfurter, deferred to a school board.

Barnette, written by Jackson, didn’t defer to the school board, and overruled Gobitis. Frankfurter dissented.

Does any of this mean the high court is always right? No.

Yet it does mean that when it comes to what the Constitution means and how it applies, the high court doesn’t defer to anybody or any body.

Dr. Randy Elf’s Aug. 20, 2020, Advocates for Balance at Chautauqua, or ABC, presentation on “How Political Speech Law Benefits Politicians and the Rich” is at https://works.bepress.com/elf/21. His Independence Day 2022 federal-appellate brief on the constitutionality of law regulating political speech is at https://works.bepress.com/elf/167.

COPYRIGHT ç 2022 BY RANDY ELF