University of Houston 'All Lives Matter' crackdown tramples Constitution

By John Cassidy, Watchdog.org Texas Bureau

When Sulla returned from the first Mithradatic War to find that Marius and Senna had been messing with his homies, he slapped them silly. By slapping them silly, we mean of course the murder and state-sanctioned robbery of thousands of Roman citizens without trial or anything resembling due process.

When the Founders set about writing the Constitution, before the Jeffersonian hippies had called for anything like a Bill of Rights, there were just two rights that even the states were prohibited from infringing: In Article I, Section 10, Clause 1, the Constitution prohibited ex post facto laws and bills of attainder.

You already know, of course, that the former means you don’t get to make stuff illegal after the fact. The latter is even less controversial: the government can’t just single somebody out and say, “Guilty!” After all, if we’re going to have governments simply killing or imprisoning us and taking all our stuff, we might as well ditch all of history since Magna Carta, and just submit our fates to the powerful.

Yet at the University of Houston, this long-settled matter has become a matter of controversy.

Last month, as Dallas police officers were being gunned down by an assassin, student body vice president Rohini Sethi posted a message to Facebook: “Forget #BlackLivesMatter; more like #AllLivesMatter.”

This set campus blacktivists atwitter, and the student senate responded by passing 13-2 a bill to grant student body president Shane Smith “temporary power” to punish Sethi.

And so he did, suspending Sethi from student government for 50 days, which will cost her more than a grand in stipends, and requiring her to bow and scrape for the entire school year, with endless attendance at cultural events (three a month!), essay-writing, and other shows of shibboleth mastery.

As a controversy, the story fizzled when the nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights in Education published its analysis of the case: it would be wildly illegal for the public university to punish Sethi for her speech, and even a typical student senate, which has the power to allocate student fees, would be in trouble. However – and FIRE cites all the cases you’d need to be convinced – since UH’s student senate doesn’t actually control any fees, it would likely be classified not as an arm of the state, but as just another student group, meaning it would have the free speech right to slap at Sethi.

All the same, FIRE nails the senate for hypocrisy, as the Constitution of the Student Government Association swears that the body “shall take no action abridging the rights, immunities and privileges granted to students under the Constitution of the United States of America, the Constitution of the State of Texas, U.S. federal law or under the laws of the State of Texas. Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to deny or abridge these rights, immunities and privileges.”

That Constitution of the United States of America, of course, has a First Amendment that’s obviously been trampled here. But that sort of thing has become routine on campus. We thought it worth noting that the present tyranny is now reaching the point of embracing the principle, if not the gore, of Sulla’s proscriptions, one of the main causes of the death of the Roman Republic.

Now, in fairness, the classical definition of attainder wouldn’t apply to just any legislative punishment, just capital punishment. It’s been the case in the United States since 1810 that any confiscation of property by legislative act would be considered attainder. But perhaps UH student body president Shane Smith is just a deep thinker, who wants to restore the pre-1810 understanding of the law, when these actions were known as bills of pains and penalties.

That sort of thing has no precedent in modern America, although it does rather sound like something from The Princess Bride – not sure what, but it would definitely involve the Six-Fingered Man and the Pit of Despair.

Contact Jon Cassidy at [email protected] or @jpcassidy000.

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