gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is slowly eroding our representative democracy.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently sent a case regarding a Republican gerrymander in Wisconsin and a Democrat gerrymander in Maryland back to a lower court in Gill v. Whitford, a controversial ruling some called a delay in providing voters the power they deserve in choosing their leaders. Defined as the manipulation of the geographic boundaries defining electoral districts so as to favor a specific candidate or party, gerrymandering is practiced by both Democrats and Republicans to impinge on elections. This could be to bolster or undermine the voting power of a certain demographic or shield an incumbent politician from being ousted from office, but by every measure, it is an unconstitutional and unscrupulous tactic employed to artificially achieve certain electoral results. Every time a district is redrawn for political gain, elected officials begin to reflect the populace they represent with less and less accuracy. In most cases, a state's legislature maps out electoral districts, as mandated by the Supreme Court, which requires that the populations across districts are balanced through redistricting every 10 years. The process is overseen by the majority party, making it all the more susceptible to interference, but in other cases, partisan or non-partisan commissions are tasked with redistricting.

There are two primary methods through which gerrymandering is executed. Say that Candidate A and Candidate B both ran for a specific office. Candidate A represented the majority party, and had it not been redistricted, every one of the 100 constituents in a certain district would have voted for Candidate B. However, to ensure its success in elections, Candidate A's party split up the district into tenths, and attached each 10-person chunk to another district over which it holds sway. Because Candidate B's supporters were redistributed to districts where they form the minority, their voting power was diluted and Candidate A won the election. This is known as "cracking." Now imagine that had two districts not been gerrymandered, in both, 49 constituents would have supported Candidate A and 51 constituents would have supported Candidate B. To prevent this from happening, her party lumped together all of the opposing party's supporters into one district and all of its supporters into another, so that instead of losing in both districts, it would win one and lose the other. This is an example of "packing," and both cracking and packing are widely utilized to alter the course of elections.

The effects of gerrymandering manifested themselves clearly in this year's midterm elections. Earlier this year, federal courts declared congressional districts in Pennsylvania and North Carolina to be partisan gerrymanders. However, only Pennsylvania was re-mapped, flipping from a Republican stronghold to an evenly split delegation. In North Carolina, even though the popular vote was almost 50-50, the GOP's silent gerrymandering ultimately decided the election. When the count of district-by-district wins is a gross misrepresentation of the popular vote, you know there's been some partisan meddling in the election.

Negative racial gerrymandering is also commonly practiced to disenfranchise minority groups. With the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the federal government made it illegal to intentionally draw districts that dilute the voting power of demographic minorities, but it still remains prevalent, just carried out in more subtle and harder-to-call-out ways. The establishment of majority-minority districts, districts in which the majority of constituents belong to a racial or ethnic minority, was a court-ordered solution to the lack of minority representation in politics. However, this has been easily capitalized upon, and some legislatures have redistricted for political gain in the name of creating majority-minority districts.

So what can be done to halt this affront to democracy in all its forms? Creating politically neutral commissions to draw districts is a solution that has met with success. Researchers have come up with something called the "efficiency gap," which allows us to quantitatively measure how gerrymandered a state is - if we were to legislatively enforce a maximum efficiency gap to take in to account while redistricting, this could also prove effective. While it remains a long shot, another proposal to mitigate gerrymandering that has been brought up is the complete modification of our voting system to proportional representation or ranked-choice voting, which Maine has already implemented. Anti-gerrymandering initiatives were on the ballot in numerous states this year. Needless to say, we need to take legitimate action to prevent gerrymandering, the biggest constitutional obstruction still practiced today, from progressively chipping away at our democracy.

5 years.

Today marks my 5th blogging anniversary! I'll never forget the moment 8-year-old me stumbled upon the Blogger website and decided to try my hand at writing a blog. All these days later, I've grown and transformed as a writer and blogger; I view this site as an extension of myself, my thoughts, and my opinions, and I'm grateful for every opportunity I've been given to express myself. Hopefully, my journey will continue, and even as I begin my freshman year of high school and witness change in every facet of my life, I'll always appreciate everything blogging has given me and the connections I've made. Thank you for continuing to support me! <3

plea bargaining

Ninety-seven percent of federal cases are settled through a plea bargain.

This may come as a surprise to those who associate criminal cases with vicious courtroom battles consisting of two high-powered attorneys hissing aggressively. In reality, the stark majority of guilty verdicts in the U.S. never make it to court — the defendant oftentimes takes a plea bargain instead, a profession of guilt that could secure a shorter sentence, resolving most cases in most jurisdictions. Only 19 countries admitted plea bargains in 1990, but now, that number sits at 66. Plea bargaining has always been a point of extreme contention — should we consider it an unconstitutional travesty of justice that capitalizes upon the vulnerability of innocent defendants within the system? Or is it an economically efficient means of resolving criminal cases and curbing prison populations?

The concept of plea bargaining was only born during the aftermath of the Civil War, when appellate courts began facilitating negotiations that resemble what we know today as plea deals. Deemed “shocking” and “terrible” at first, questions concerning the likelihood of innocent defendants pleading guilty and the secrecy of the process were posed, with the Wisconsin Supreme Court writing the practice off as a “direct sale of justice” in 1877. The process continued regardless. Alternatives to prison sentences were arranged, and police officers toured prisons making exchanges with convicts. By the 1920s, plea bargaining was virtually ubiquitous, with upward of 85 percent of criminal cases in cities like Chicago and New York City being settled through pleas.

Plea bargaining is prevalent for a myriad of reasons. Defendants can avoid having to bring their case to court and the risk of harsher punishments, mostly pleading guilty to a lesser charge or to only some of the charges held against them. Plea bargaining eliminates the uncertainty that comes along with a trial, and can provide more resources for the community. Trials are also expensive. Some estimate that prosecuting and convicting a single drug offender may cost up to $70,000, while plea bargaining could reduce that number to $4,200. The Supreme Court has recognized that if every case were to result in a complete trial, we would need many more courts, judges, and personnel. Aside from the economics, plea bargaining minimizes population levels at local jails and prisons by removing the need for defendants to be detained until they are tried. Prosecutors and courts are oftentimes overwhelmed with significant caseloads, and with plea bargaining, only the most serious cases have to be tried, while sentences for less severe infractions and misdemeanors can be negotiated. The practice changes the entire dynamic of case resolution and ensures that whatever resources remain are allocated only to the most serious cases.

However, practical as it may be, the concept of justice may be relinquished with plea bargaining. Innocent defendants with particularly damning inculpatory evidence stacked up against them are frequently advised and almost coerced by their attorneys into taking a plea deal — some form of sentencing is seen as inevitable, so defenders encourage their clients to at least negotiate for a lesser sentence. Criminologists estimate that the proportion of innocent defendants who plead guilty may fall anywhere between 2 and 8 percent.

Some blame plea bargaining for what the justice system in the U.S. is supposedly fashioning itself into — a draconian machine that takes in an accused person and returns a convicted criminal, with little respect to his or her legitimate guilt or innocence. Access to a fair trial is enshrined in the Sixth Amendment; critics argue that plea bargaining infringes upon that constitutional right, even though the Supreme Court condoned pleas in the 1969 case Brady v. United States. Plea bargaining can also lead to poor investigatory procedures, make it impossible for a defendant to appeal to another court, and, one of the most compelling dissuading factors, soften retribution for the guilty, trimming years off the sentences for serial killers, sex offenders, and other felons responsible for society’s most repulsive crimes. Additionally, while judges have to approve all proposed plea deals and negotiations, they do not get the chance to hear and review all the evidence comprising the case beforehand, nor will they always be aware of the amount of pressure put on a defendant to accept a deal.

Plea bargaining as a system cannot be eradicated. It is too efficient to be given up. But perhaps setting more restrictions on the way plea deals are made could allow us to retain the economic benefits of plea bargaining while championing justice and constitutionality. “Plea bargaining in the United States is less regulated than it is in other countries,” says Jenia Turner, a law professor at Southern Methodist University. For this reason, states are taking progressive measures to mediate the process. For example, in Connecticut, judges provide input. In Texas and North Carolina, evidence must be shared before a defendant pursues a plea deal. Turner argues that agreements should be recorded in writing, and that discounts off a jail sentence should vary depending on when a plea deal is accepted. The only alternative to imposing stricter regulations on pleas is holding more trials, something that would be, in most dimensions, infeasible; however, the city of Philadelphia combats this by holding bench trials, or trials without a jury. Bench trials work around most of the disadvantages typically associated with holding a trial for every case. Still, seeing such a solution implemented on a large scale is unlikely, since juries have always played an integral role in the U.S. justice system. Thus, harsher legislation and measures governing the use of plea deals in settling criminal cases must be instituted in order to ensure that defendants’ constitutional rights are upheld but the benefits of plea deals are still reaped.

The debate surrounding plea bargains will continue to rage on, forcing us to choose between effectiveness and justice, when in reality, we can cater to both necessities by increasing restrictions on plea bargaining and maintaining the practice. It will remain prevalent, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be perpetuated at the cost of defendants’ rights and liberties. By better understanding and regulating plea bargaining as it relates to the American criminal justice system, we are making strides towards ensuring both the highest levels of fairness and the highest levels of efficiency.

affirmative action

Affirmative action has always been contentious, but the debate has only intensified after Trump administration officials reported that President Trump's executive plan to crack down on race-based affirmative action in college admissions is in the works and will be put into motion soon. With one side arguing that certain groups of people need a leg up in college admissions because of their long histories with institutional racism and the other side arguing that discrimination against one group cannot be fought with discrimination against another, discourse surrounding affirmative action has long been impassioned. And while I initially called myself ambivalent toward affirmative action, as I researched more and more about the topic, I realized that would be a lie — I vehemently oppose it.

African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders, among other beneficiaries of affirmative action, have been systematically disenfranchised; this discrimination has engendered something of a racial achievement gap that’s left students belonging to these groups underrepresented in the highest echelons of American undergraduate education. To put it another way, systemic racism is real. My rationale for being anti-affirmative action is not rooted in a refusal to acknowledge the existence of systemic racism — a concept I've never missed a chance to help educate another person on — but rather in my belief that affirmative action, while viewed as an artificial means of empowering the marginalized, does little to achieve that. I’m not going to controvert the fact that institutional racism is an unfortunate reality, nor the scientifically proven idea that being surrounded by racial diversity is intrinsic to a strong educational experience.

Here's what I think: college admissions should be, for the most part, meritocratic. It doesn’t sit right with me that a student of one race should be held to higher standards than a student of another to earn admission into the same university. Affirmative action is, frankly speaking, highly reminiscent of the racial quota system, which the United States has had a troubled history with. Furthermore, affirmative action is premised on generalizations, rather than precise statistics, about the socioeconomic status of certain racial groups. There exist wealth disparities even among only Asian-Americans, the highest-paid race in the U.S. overall. The average household income for an Indian-American family stands at $110,026, the highest of any ethnic group in the U.S., while the average household income for a Burmese-American family stands at $35,016. Lumping Burmese-Americans into the same group as other, more well-off Asian communities — simply because they would all check the “Asian” box on a form — seems to me to be more than a little absurd. Not all Asian-American students are privileged overachievers whose tiger parents’ six- and seven-figure incomes buy them expensive SAT prep courses and college counseling — the same way not all African-American students are Bronxites who grew up sleeping on park benches and serving as their family’s primary breadwinner.

However, I would say that most of the plaintiffs that have brought affirmative action cases to court have little credence, and come off as disgruntled white students whose rosy perspective on college admissions led them to believe their 29 on the ACT and 2 hours of community service would have been irresistible to Harvard. And while it’s true that a lot of the research undermining affirmative action rests on more superficial indicators, like GPA and test scores, they’re still all we have to objectively assess a student’s academic merit — and besides, College Board research from 2015 also found a correlation between test scores and college success, upholding the validity of such research.

Asian-Americans typically perform better in school than their African-American and Latino counterparts, yes. What’s more, when the Trump administration follows through in dismantling affirmative action, the racial makeup of the most prestigious universities will shift in favor of Asian-Americans. Caltech and the UCs serve as empirical evidence of that. Other research brings forward the "mismatch" hypothesis, which suggests that students whose academic abilities are not aligned with those of the average student at the school they attend will be disadvantaged. If a student's GPA and test scores are significantly lower than their college's average, irrespective of their race or socioeconomic background, they will struggle and be more likely to drop out. Affirmative action could be the reason that a student is admitted to a school they aren't fit for in its zeal to artificially augment diversity — which could set him or her up for difficulty and preclude the student from being successful in college and beyond. Thus, holding certain students to lower standards than others on the basis of race verges on discrimination and could have a detrimental impact on even those viewed as positively affected. The perpetuation of that practice and the idea that it’s acceptable are simply appalling to me.

So what's an alternative to race-based affirmative action that could genuinely help underprivileged students? Wealth-based affirmative action. Sure, some students grow up lacking resources other, more privileged students have access to, but that disadvantage knows no race. "Low-income" and "non-Asian person of color" should never be treated as interchangeable. Both forms of affirmative action would have disadvantages; for example, when it comes to wealth-based affirmative action, the "mismatch" hypothesis could still hold true, but when the pros and cons are weighed out, it does seem to be the more equitable system. Affirmative action based only on a student's income level and not their race could help ensure that students whose high school achievements are extraordinary relative to their family's financial circumstances have a shot at admission to top schools, truly breaking the cycle of poverty and inequality.

the israel-palestine conflict

For nearly a century, Israel and Palestine have been locked in a territorial dispute, with, in essence, two states claiming the same land to be under their jurisdiction. This conflict, surrounding who owns what land and how the land is to be controlled, has been dominating headlines and generating controversy since its beginning. "Though both Jews and Arab Muslims date their claims to the land back a couple thousand years, the current political conflict began in the early 20th century," writes Vox on the history and emergence of the conflict. "Jews fleeing persecution in Europe wanted to establish a national homeland in what was then an Arab- and Muslim-majority territory in the Ottoman and later British Empire. The Arabs resisted, seeing the land as rightfully theirs. An early United Nations plan to give each group part of the land failed, and Israel and the surrounding Arab nations fought several wars over the territory. Today's lines largely reflect the outcomes of two of these wars, one waged in 1948 and another in 1967."

The 1967 war gave sovereignty over the Gaza Strip and West Bank to Israel, although those territories are now governed by Palestinian authority and under Israeli occupation. The main approach being considered to mitigate the issue is a two-state solution, along which Palestine would be given the Gaza Strip and West Bank, while Israel would retain the rest of the land. Another possibility is a one-state solution, in which all the land either becomes Israeli or Palestinian, but this alternative has been denounced despite its plausibility as the outcome of this conflict. Dissent has also cropped up surrounding the Zionist ideology; the core facet of Zionism is the belief that Jews should have their own nation, a state to themselves. Arabs and Palestinians are overwhelmingly opposed to Zionism, mostly because Jews are afforded privileges that others aren't. They view Zionism as "a species of colonialism and racism aimed at appropriating Palestinian land and systematically disenfranchising the Palestinians that remain."

While Israel has peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, its Muslim-majority neighbors generally support Palestinians. Its relations with Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, and Iran are especially weak. Some of this hostility has led to warfare, and Israel has fought in multiple wars over the Israel-Palestine issue. Syria has held a grudge against Israel since 1967, when Israel seized a region known as the Golan Heights. Syria is also an ally of Iran, one of Israel's biggest diplomatic opponents. Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, funded by Iran, plays a pivotal role in Lebanese politics, making it all the more unlikely that Lebanon will have any part in negotiations between Israel and Palestine. Turkey has more recently aligned itself with Palestine. Following an Israeli raid on a Turkish aid mission to the Palestinian-claimed Gaza Strip, Israel-Turkey relations exacerbated, and relations have remained poor despite the countries having formally renormalized in 2016. Iran entirely fails to recognize Israel's legitimacy as a state and has provided funding to other opponents of the Syrian national cause. Another key player in the conflict is Saudi Arabia; while Saudi Arabia largely supports Palestinian claim to the territory, both Israel and Saudi Arabia share Iran as a common enemy. When it comes to the United States as it fits into the picture, the US and Israel are diplomatically friendly, with the US remaining a major proponent of Israel. While the countries' relations started out fragile, during the Cold War, the US supported Israel, viewing it as a threat to Soviet influence. The American public is immensely supportive of Israel, and the government has bestowed upon it $118 billion in aid, with American delegates to the UN Security Council blocking resolutions critical of Israel. 

Jerusalem has been at the epicenter of the conflict, because Palestine claims East Jerusalem, while Israel has dismissed Palestinian claim over this chunk of the city and advocates for a unified Jerusalem as its capital. In other words, Palestine claims East Jerusalem with West Jerusalem belonging to Israel, while Israel claims the entirety of the city. And because of this disagreement, there’s been a lot of issues appearing with international recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state and of Jerusalem as a divided capital. The United Nations has championed the acknowledgment of East Jerusalem as Palestinian territory. US President Donald Trump recently announced his executive decision to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, intrinsically failing to address the fact that Jerusalem doesn’t belong just to Israel. There was actually legislation passed in 1995 that would facilitate this embassy move, but there was a loophole in the law allowing presidents to sign a waiver every six months delaying the move if they felt it would have a detrimental impact on national security interests. Every president in the past has evaded authorizing the move, and while Trump signed the waiver two times before, he’s now relocated the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has grown to become one of the largest, most contentious diplomatic crises, with some criticizing Israel's excessive use of force against Palestine and others advocating for Israel's right to retaliate when threatened. The UN recently voted to condemn Israel for being overaggressive in clashes along the Gaza border, in which 123 Palestinians have been killed and more than 14,000 wounded since March. In a best-case scenario, Israel would relinquish its claims to East Jerusalem, Israel would remove its settlements from the West Bank, each country would restore diplomatic relations with each other and establish embassies, Israel would work to foster economic growth in the West Bank, and Palestinians would move out of the Gaza Strip and into the West Bank. Until we reach a two-state solution, this conflict will burn on just as it has for nearly a century, and Israel and Palestine will remain stark enemies fighting for international recognition.

abortion and bodily autonomy

As contentious as the issue of abortion may have grown to be, the pro-choice rationale — or at least my rationale for being pro-choice — is simple.

Abortion is defined as the deliberate surgical termination of a pregnancy. It's a procedure a woman may resort to should she decide to end her pregnancy, a measure she may take for a multitude of reasons: the birth may pose an imminent threat to her health, or she simply may not have the means to raise a child. And as politicized as bodily autonomy has become, the debate boils down to a woman's right to decide whether or not to shoulder the responsibility of birthing and raising another being. The morality of abortion has been contested; it's been called murder, and some have gone as far as calling the hundreds of thousands of babies aborted each year victims of some sort of genocide. This level of insularity toward the struggles of women facing unplanned pregnancies has translated into legislation, with some states passing sweeping bills so stringent they effectively ban abortion. Mississippi recently passed a bill banning abortion past 15 weeks of gestation, with exceptions allowed only in cases of medical emergency and severe fetal abnormality — under this law, even rape and incest are not sufficient reasons to terminate a pregnancy via abortion. NPR calls it "one of the most restrictive abortion bills" in the nation, and it is.

My support for abortion is premised on the idea that if a baby has the right to non-consensual access to a woman's body, she should have the right to an abortion. As British pro-choice activist Kate Smurthwaite argued in a debate regarding the ethics of abortion, since "being pregnant means that the whole of your body is being used to sustain an embryo," a woman forced to bear a child is being put in a position in which she must serve as "an incubator for a child she doesn't want." Smurthwaite articulated this better than I could've. To put that into perspective, I couldn't be swayed to donate my blood or organs against my will even if it meant that someone's life would be avoidably lost as a result. This right of mine is already protected by federal law, so why should this logic not apply to the debate surrounding abortion? Why should I allow for a baby I do not want to grow inside of me for nine months, for the encroachment of my liberty? If I am a college student in Mississippi working multiple jobs to fund my tuition so I can earn a degree and be one step closer to financial stability, and one night I am raped and impregnated at a party, why should that bill preclude me from exercising the constitutional right to an abortion granted to me by the Due Process Clause? 

As though giving more importance to the life of an undeveloped fetus than that of a fully grown woman is not inherently problematic enough, by giving a fetus the status of a person, you are also bestowing upon it certain civil rights. If a miscarriage occurs, should the mother be held criminally liable and convicted for first-degree murder? That sounds ridiculous, of course, but legal consideration of a fetus as a person would have such repercussions. 

As it is, abortions have become increasingly difficult to access for women across the US. Mississippi, where the aforementioned bill was passed, only has one abortion clinic. In Wyoming, Missouri, North Dakota, and South Dakota, abortion clinics are similarly inaccessible. In 2014, 90% of US counties lacked an abortion-providing facility, and in 2008, one-third of patients obtaining abortions needed to travel more than twenty-five miles. Abortion rates have been declining steadily since the procedure was first legalized in 1973 with the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, even though roughly the same amounts of women have been seeking an abortion. "Twenty-five states have enacted Targeted Restrictions on Abortion Providers — or TRAP  — laws imposing strict requirements on abortion clinics and providers that the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research group, says 'go beyond what is necessary to ensure patients' safety.' Reproductive rights activists also call them 'clinic shutdown laws,' because they say the laws are often written with the intent of closing abortion clinics in the state," write Rebecca Harrington and Skye Gould of Business Insider. A case surrounding one of these TRAP laws made its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the law "provides few, if any, health benefits for women, poses a substantial obstacle to women seeking abortions, and constitutes an 'undue burden' on their constitutional right to do so." But laws of this sort still exist across the US, and as a result, women may attempt performing an abortion on their own. An economist found that Google searches for "self-induced abortions" have spiked, and the World Health Organization reports that this can lead to maternal complications and death.

The solution here is clear: redirect the energy spent passing legislation that infringes upon women's reproductive rights toward passing legislation that facilitates the establishment of abortion clinics where women need them most. We should be focusing on augmenting the accessibility of safe, legal abortions in registered facilities instead of precluding women from terminating pregnancies when the Supreme Court ruled abortion constitutional 45 years ago in 1973. 

free speech

The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees Americans the right to free speech. But amid the tumult that now characterizes the United States' political climate, we've begun to see opposition crop up, with some advocating for a legal distinction between free speech and what we call hate speech along with the criminalization of the latter.

"Free speech" and "hate speech" are both nebulous terms, and it's difficult to decide exactly what constitutes the boundaries separating them. The most common understanding of the term "hate speech" is that it refers to any speech that attacks or discriminates against people on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, religion, physical ability, or beliefs, among other attributes. However, past efforts to criminalize hate speech have been unsuccessful and shrouded in controversy.

Last year, a coalition of students at Stanford University aligning themselves with the Republican political party invited a speaker to campus named Robert Spencer, an author who had long leveraged his blog as a platform to help propagate Islamophobia. The two organizations Spencer founded are classified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which describes Spencer as one of the "most prolific and vociferous anti-Muslim propagandists." This invitation precipitated dissent among Stanford students and faculty, with some calling attention to his constitutional, inalienable right to free speech, and others calling attention to the constitutional, inalienable right of Muslims to be safeguarded from religion-based hatred and discrimination. Both arguments are valid, but should Stanford be obligated to allow him on campus? The funds that go toward student-run organizations and such events are raised partially from students' tuition; why should students and families who disagree with the idea of Spencer speaking at Stanford, who object to his bigotry, have to pay for him to come on campus? These questions are difficult to answer, but the truth is that Stanford can disallow him from coming to campus, and students can take issue with the usage of university funds to sponsor the talk, without either being a violation of the doctrine of free speech.

But why? A large amount of people make one dangerous assumption about free speech - that it entitles us to an arena or venue where we can share our most controversial beliefs. All Spencer's right to free speech entitles him to is the ability to share his views without persecution, but not necessarily where he likes. In other words, he can be an Islamophobe, but no one is obligated to allow him to express his Islamophobia at Stanford, nor should dissenting members of the Stanford community have to pay for said Islamophobia to be brought on campus. Stanford can tell Spencer, "You can say this, just not here," and that is in no way unconstitutional. It would be difficult for the university to do so without appearing overly partisan in a already polarization-rife environment, but if this argument were to be boiled to constitutionality and legality, doing so would pose no problem.

Something else proponents of free speech fail to realize is that those that disagree with them also have the same right, meaning that people are not obligated to respect or agree with viewpoints they find problematic. The Constitution grants no one immunity from opposition and disagreement. This is a problem we see arising continuously - people hiding behind the ambiguity of the Constitution to push their own agenda, to justify questionable actions on their part. This selective interpretation of the Constitution verges on exploitation; the document can always be modified if need be, such that we do not find ourselves in 2018 governed by regulations set by men on a committee in the 18th century. While this debate regarding free speech and hate speech will rage on, we should strive to better understand where the Constitution's limits on speech end, and bring rationality into an argument that has had people on every side of the spectrum roaring at each other for centuries.