Majority Leader Chuck Schumer loosens Senate dress code to allow senators to wear whatever they want starting Monday
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer loosens Senate dress code to allow senators to wear whatever they want starting Monday
The Senate sergeant at arms and relevant congressional staff have been notified about changes to the chamber's informal dress code, which will go into effect on Monday.
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How was the dress code not struck down under the first amendment? Clothing can be speech and the state generally cannot enforce what people wear in public spaces
- Courts generally don't have jurisdiction to rule on internal House and Senate rules, so it would never come up for a real ruling from a court.
- Arguably, the Constitution grants the House and Senate power to make their own internal rules, and expel/censure their own members, in a way that makes it so that the negative prohibitions in the Constitution (like the First Amendment) don't really apply to internal rules in the legislative branch.
- Government may regulate certain types of behavior, even if that behavior sometimes can be expressive speech, especially in regulating the time, place, or manner of that speech.
- Government can sometimes regulate workplace conduct in government workplaces, without the full protection of the First Amendment. For example, plenty of governmental bodies prohibit political speech in the workplace, or the use of official platforms for private/political speech by an employee, or employees wearing their official uniforms outside of work to imply an official endorsement of a particular candidate.
We need to add Rule Zero to the constitution: All rules will be submissive to the rules that preceded them, excepting amendments abolishing them.
Bam, free speech is now in effect under all contexts. Also, you can carry a gun on the senate floor and in the oval office. That would probably get a gun amendment passed real fast
Bam, free speech is now in effect under all contexts
I hope you realize that the First Amendment to the Constitution was ratified 3 years after the part of the Constitution that I'm describing, which is in Article I, before the amendments.
Eh, I don't think chronological order is the right order for this. That makes historically older rules have priority over newer ones even if they're outdated. The second amendment is the obvious example of amendments being outdated. Even if you are all for gun rights, I don't think you can argue that the amendment was written with modern weaponry in mind (and indeed, nobody argues that the average person should be allowed to own a fully functional tank).
And coming up with a better priority list would be impossible in the current political hurricane, as nobody would agree on the ordering.