President-elect Donald Trump may want to start consulting the Constitution before he logs onto Twitter. On Tuesday morning, Trump tweeted that flag burning, an act constitutionally protected as free speech, should be a punishable offense:
Though it's not entirely clear what prompted Trump to tweet about flag burning, Bloomberg reporter Jennifer Jacobs noted it might have something to do with Trump's upcoming meeting with Fox News' Pete Hegseth:
The constitutionality of flag burning has been challenged before. In June 1990, the Supreme Court declared that laws "against desecrating the flag are unconstitutional," Time reported. And in 2012, the late Justice Antonin Scalia explained that flag burning, while he personally disagreed with it, is undeniably "a form of expression" protected under the First Amendment. "It is addressed in particular to speech critical of the government," Scalia said of the First Amendment. "I mean, that was the main kind of speech that tyrants would seek to suppress."
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