Texas can reject a specialty license plate that bears an image of the Confederate flag, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
The court voted 5-4 that the rejection of the license plate designed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans did not violate free speech rights. In a shocking vote, Justice Clarence Thomas joined the court’s liberal wing of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Beyer as the deciding vote in the case.
The justices ruled that license plates are essentially government speech.
The First Amendment limits government regulation of free speech. However, it doesn’t restrict the government when the government speaks for itself.
Justice Samuel Alito strongly disagreed in a dissenting opinion.
“The capacious understanding of government speech takes a large and painful bite out of the First Amendment,” Alito wrote in an opinion joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy.
Alito gave an example of the plethora of specialty plates that a person could see while on the side of the highway.
He plainly asked if the sentiments reflected in the plates are the views of Texas and not of the car’s owner.
During college football season if you saw “Texas plates with the names of University of Texas’ out-of-state competitors in upcoming games … would you assume that the State of Texas was officially (and perhaps treasonously) rooting for the Longhorns’ opponents?” the opinion reads.
The case is Walker v. Sons of Confederate Veterans.
