To make a point about constitutional rights, a state legislator has filed a bill to create requirements and a registry for journalists and to impose fines and other penalties for violating the provisions.
“Every time I turn around, there’s a spin on the Second Amendment,” South Carolina state Rep. Mike Pitts, R-Laurens, told the Index-Journal in Greenwood, S.C.
He said of his bill: “Basically, it is the [concealed weapons permit] law with journalists and pens instead of guns.”
Pitts said he introduced the bill, called the South Carolina Responsible Journalism Registry, as an “experiment to make a point about the media and how they only care about the Constitution when it comes [to] their portion of the First Amendment.”
In a Facebook post Wednesday, the Republican lawmaker said the news media makes much of the First Amendment right to a free press but easily can “trample on our Second Amendment rights to ‘keep and bear arms.’”
“If they had their way, there would be no Second Amendment,” Pitts wrote.
His bill—which has been referred to the Committee on Labor, Commerce, and Industry—would require media outlets and journalists to pay fees and register with the South Carolina Secretary of State’s Office. It would create requirements to work as a journalist for a media outlet and also for a media outlet before it hires a journalist.
“This is a dangerous, ridiculous law, and a fundamental violation of the First Amendment,” Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation, said.
Under the bill, journalists could be fined $25 to $500 for not registering and could be jailed for up to 30 days, the Post and Courier in Charleston reported. The paper notes that Pitts compares these penalties to those received for concealed weapons permit violations.
Von Spakovsky said the measure “is similar to British licensing laws for newspapers, which were efforts by the British crown to control and censor them.” He added:
I can’t think of anything worse than putting a state government in charge of determining who is a “qualified” journalist. This legislator needs a basic education in the history and meaning of the First Amendment.
Political observers give the bill little chance of advancing, the Post and Courier reported.
He is “not a press hater,” Pitts, 60, told the Post and Courier.
“My real issue is simply to start to debate about all of your constitutional rights. And that they are all equally important, and they are all separate,” he said in an interview with the Index-Journal.
Pitts wrote on Facebook:
The First Amendment states: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.’ The only portion they [the media] care about is freedom of the press. They constantly attack people who follow their Christain [sic] beliefs and attempt to portray them as bigots, and they certainly do not like the fact that normal everyday Americans gather to petition the government and air grievances. Look no further than how they have demonized the Tea Party.
