Legislators who propose and pass this legislation use it to demonstrate their support for Israel, or coal mining, or gun rights, or whatever anti-boycotting cause they're advancing.
Entities who are forced to sign these pledges generally put as much thought into it as you or I put into agreeing to a TOS with a binding arbitration agreement. In other words, not very much thought at all.
Because ... As you've pointed out, the government cannot, in practice, prove that those entities are actually boycotting unless the entities come right out and say it. So if the entities actually want to boycott Israel, they can continue to do so without announcing it. The law doesn't actually stop anyone from boycotting Israel; at best, it merely stops them from publicizing what they're doing.
You can do both without doing business with the government though, so legality is not questioned.
Of course, there is a ton of gray area here that the courts will have to rule on, but the whole point the ACLU is making is that they believe these anti-boycott laws are in violation of the first amendment.
"Actually free speech means you can lose government contracts or you job as a government employee too"
You know, at least I think China is a bit more honest about how they approach this question.
It could totally be a slippery slope towards the government amassing more power and then granting contracts only to those who parrot the party line, but I believe the solution to that is to reduce government size and power.
And also, I don't find your position so controversial that you'd need a throwaway account.
I think there's a stronger case that your purchase choice is covered as free expression or that the government can't compel you to do business with a private entity.
But that is exactly what boycotts are all about. An effective boycott isn't just you deciding to stop buying something, but it's about convincing lots of other people and organizations to also stop buying something.
And, perhaps most importantly, in any organization there is guaranteed to be a paper trail for any prohibitions against, say, purchasing from any companies in Israel. This kind of legislation absolutely would have a chilling effect on organizational purchases, which is where the vast amount of money sent to places likely to be boycotted comes from.
Are you referring to the Boston tea party or was there a much longer running boycott? I ask because my weak understanding is that colonists waylaid ships in port and actively destroyed the cargo. That’s more than a boycott, I think?
And I’m guessing that when the ACLU mentions the Boston Tea Party at the beginning of the article, they mean the bigger series of events and not as much the destruction of property in the harbour. I imagine they’re not advocating for the constitutional right to illegally destroy property as a form of boycott.
(Fully appreciating that context was very different in 1773, I’m not suggesting the Boston Tea Party was “wrong”.)
These days, we have plenty of monopolies that probably deserve similar treatment (or anti trust actions), so the schools don't teach that part of the story.
For ordinary tea drinkers the whole tea thing actually made tea cheaper. It's one of the weirder things to get attention as a reason-for-revolt, really. I suppose the "tea party" protest is just odd and interesting enough that we can't resist lumping that in with far more legitimate grievances.
There is obviously gray area here, but I think it's extremely unlikely the courts will rule that these anti-boycott laws are OK because it only affects employment or contracts. More than likely, courts will see it as a free speech restriction, but will apply the strict scrutiny test to determine if these are an allowed compelling government interest.
Whatever you might feel about Israel, you can't deny the fact that they are a strategically valuable geopolitical ally, and it's not unreasonable for the federal government to avoid doing businesses with companies that are actively and publicly boycotting a strategic ally. What if it was Taiwan instead?
Not only is Israel an immoral apartheid state, it's a liability to US citizens. There are many reasons to support BDS (Israel boycott, divest, sanction) and that Israel has successfully lobbied for this unconstitutional violation of the first amendment deserves more awareness and pushback.
Bin Laden cited that as one of the reasons, there was a long list[1] that also included Western forces preventing genocide in East Timor (by the way, Christopher Hitchens gave an excoriating answer on this to some supine fool[2]), the partition of India/Pakistan, stoping "hope" in Somalia, the Russian "crusade" in Chechnya, another crusade in Bosnia (there's a lot of crusading going on), things in the Philippines, Sudan and Bangladesh, the UN for lots of things… there wasn't a cat fight in a Muslim's back garden that he couldn't turn into a reason to kill innocent people, but he also didn't hold back on his hatred for Israel and Jews, that is true.
I may have missed something as there are a lot of grievances about "Muslim lands" in his speech but to portray it as being about one attack or one place would be to misrepresent his views.
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/monitoring/media_reports/16...
"God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the Towers, but after the situation became unbearable—and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon—I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followed—when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the US Sixth Fleet. As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me punish the unjust the same way: to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden#September_11_a...
So ergo, we must destroy the first amendment to shield other countries from valid criticisms? I'd think we'd want our allies to respect our right to free speech above all else.
Edited to add: I even think we would want to respect our right to free speech over the beliefs of our allies.
If, say, you boycott the democratic party (e.g.), then the Biden government would have every right to cancel any contracts because of your political speech. The only way to prove that you're not actually boycotting would be to donate to the democratic party.
In a democracy, a government does not have the right to selectively boycott its citizens for their political views. Otherwise, what's next -- the party in power refusing to award contracts to businesses that support the opposition party? You can see how democracy would collapse pretty quickly.
If a country really should be excluded from trade pass a sanction.
And it doesn't apply at all to e.g. Teachers who are being forced to sign waivers like this
The cheapest bid might be even cheaper absent the boycott. I, and plenty of other people, don't want to pay this premium because of a company's political agenda. Fulfill the contract with the most efficient supplies on the market, or don't both bidding at all.
This case is more analogous to the case of the cake shop who wouldn't make a wedding cake for a gay couple. It's less about free speech in general and more about discrimination in doing business.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/24/bakersfield-ca...
This isn't an issue of market efficiency though, it's an issue of violating the first amendment.
I, and apparently most voters, don't want to pay that extra money.
Second, there is zero proof that Israel provides goods at a discount, show your work.
Third, in your fabricated scenario, a fourth company would just come in and buy the (fictitious) discounted parts and win the bid. That's how the free market works.
You're clearly not arguing in good faith, so this is the end of the conversation for me.
So if there isn't a fourth company, yes there will be a premium paid due to the boycott. Your claim is essentially that if the winning bidders don't engage in the boycott then the boycott will not have an effect. Sure, but if the winning bidder does engage in the boycott, it will have an effect on cost.
If you're a politician you aren't allowed to say anything against them either.
> the Arkansas Times [...] was asked to sign [a no-boycott certification] in order to renew its advertising contract with a state technical college.
> A teacher in Kansas was told that she could not participate in the state’s teacher-training program because she refused to sign the anti-boycott form
> A lawyer in Arizona was told that he could not be paid for his work on behalf of incarcerated people because he refused to sign the certification
> a child speech pathologist in Texas lost her contract with a local school district because she refused to sign.
> One town in Texas even briefly required victims of Hurricane Harvey to sign the anti-boycott certification as a condition of receiving disaster relief funds.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of...
The First Amendment, along with nearly all the rest, applies to the states and the federal government equally.
Just so you know how entrenched Israel (and a certain race) is inside the US government.
What if the government only awarded contracts to companies who promised not to donate money to Democrat PAC's (or Republican PAC's)?
What if the government only awarded contracts to companies who stayed silent on gay marriage, and didn't normalize it in their advertising?
These strike at the heart of the first amendment. Companies are allowed to engage in political speech/action, and boycotting Israel is precisely that. Some people think Israel is a valuable ally, others think it's a horribly unjust and undemocratic country for its treatment of Palestinians.
The government isn't allowed to favor or disfavor individuals or companies due to their political views. That's a bedrock principle of democracy. That's what the first amendment is about. There's zero gray area in this case.
But they already do that, don't they? I mean, not anti gay marriage, but pro diversity. For some reason the UCF bought email lists from some entity, and they believe me to be a small business owner in some US state who shares my first name. I occasionally get emails from them asking me to join their diversity-training in order to become eligible as a supplier.
That's pretty old news. The only new thing (and the reason the ACLU cares, I assume) is that it's affecting a view that is currently associated with the left (BDS/anti-semitism/anti-israeli campaigns).
But diversity isn't speech. E.g. if a business is black-owned or female-owned has nothing to do with their political speech/views.
And diversity is a unique case, related to protected classes, having to do with past explicit discrimination against these groups, and trying to remedy that to some small extent.
In any case, it has nothing whatsoever to do with political expression, and therefore nothing to do with the first amendment. And so no, it has nothing to do with left/right either.
It's just something that most here do agree with, so they're fine with it.
Yes that quote is political speech/belief. But it's the expression of the legislature on policy, that is democratically determined, whether you agree with it or not.
It's not the speech of minority-owned businesses. Awarding contracts to take diversity into account is based on who the businesses are owned by, *not* what those businesses say/believe.
You can disagree with awarding contracts based on diversity all you want, just don't claim that doing so has anything to do with free speech or the first amendment, because that's incorrect.
> Yes that quote is political speech/belief. But it's the expression of the legislature on policy, that is democratically determined, whether you agree with it or not.
The same applies to this case, where the democratically elected legislature says you don't get contracts if you say "don't buy from Jews" and passes laws to that effect.
Whether it's minority ownership or affirmative action in its workforce is irrelevant. Employment policy is policy around protected classes, it's not speech.
While your case of 'you don't get contracts if you say "don't buy from Jews"' makes contracts dependent upon speech. Which contradicts the first amendment.
The distinction is not complicated here. You might not like it, but the distinction exists.
And if a union wants to boycott Taiwan, or Canada god forbid, they probably should have the right to do so.
It gets a bit more complicated with buyers however, what happens if companies do not want to 'sell to' groups, like 'Republicans' or 'LGBTQ advocates' etc..
I think we probably ought to err on letting people decide who they want to sell and buy from and then be very careful when we interject on that, with a difference to protecting individuals rights, and from specific kinds of harm and/or arbitrary treatment.
Which is all a bit different from the government itself deciding who and who not to buy from.
The new wave of antiboycott laws this article is referring to are much less justified, I think, but you'll note that they're on the same topic in response to still-ongoing efforts by the BDS movement to promote a secondary boycott. So it's not as unreasonable as it would first seem.
As an individual, I would definitely support BDS businesses if I could. I'd stop doing so after Israel ended it's eternal war / apartheid system.
The point of a boycott is to allow individuals to force companies to take actions, not to avoid hurting the amorphous feelings of corporations that don't have a problem with the status quo.
Note that a large percentage (and sometimes the majority) of Jewish Israelis disapprove of the onging human rights violations BDS is trying to end.
- It means you can't advertise that you boycott X and get business from other people who also want to boycott X.
- It means you can't require a subcontractor to also boycott X when doing a job for you.