Culture & Civil Stability

First Amendment Protections — Everywhere

Tied to all forms of speech across all platforms — traditional and digital. The First Amendment does not expire when speech moves online. These protections follow the speaker, not the medium.

End Government-Corporate Censorship

Though we may not all agree with what someone has to say, we should all be willing to defend their right to say it. Government coordination with corporations to suppress speech has no place in a free society — regardless of the justification offered.

This is a live, current legal area, not settled ground — Murthy v. Missouri (2024) addressed exactly this question at the Supreme Court and largely turned on standing rather than resolving when government contact with platforms crosses into unconstitutional coercion. The enforcement mechanism: mandatory disclosure of every government request to a platform to remove, suppress, or demote content — published in plain English, not legal or technical jargon, with the original request text preserved unredacted alongside the agency's plain-English summary. Coordination doesn't have to be banned outright to be stopped; it has to be made impossible to do quietly. An agency that has to publish exactly what it asked a platform to take down, in language anyone can read, loses the ability to pressure platforms off the record.

The Second Amendment

Pro-2A. We are in a world today that cannot legislate away firearms — and attempting to do so drives the problem underground rather than solving it. Firearm safety is taught in schools as part of the life skills curriculum, treating firearms as a reality of American life that citizens should know how to handle responsibly.

Mandatory minimums for firearm offenses: a 1-year minimum sentence for a first offense. Enhancements stack on top of the baseline — +2 years if injury is involved, +5 years if death is involved, +3 years for a repeat offense. Laws that are not enforced are not laws at all. A person who robs someone at gunpoint and walks out with time served or a diversion program encountered no law — they encountered a suggestion.

Red flag laws are supported, on the condition that they come with complete, enforceable rules for everyone involved — not just a process for removing weapons. For the accused: a clear standard of evidence, a real opportunity to contest the order before a judge, and a defined timeline rather than an indefinite hold. For the accuser: consequences for bad-faith accusations — knowingly filing a false petition to deprive someone of a constitutional right is not a cost-free act, and the law needs to say so explicitly rather than leaving it to chance. For law enforcement: clear chain-of-custody rules requiring that seized weapons are either returned to their owner once an order lapses or is overturned, or destroyed — never sold or transferred through civil forfeiture. A process that lets agencies profit from confiscated firearms creates exactly the wrong incentive for how these orders get requested and enforced.

Background checks are supported, and the honest starting point is that the current system already gets close to immediate in most cases: NICS resolves roughly 90% of checks instantly today. The real problem is the other 10% — a 'delayed' status the FBI has up to three business days to resolve, and under current law, a dealer can legally complete the sale after those three days even if NICS never finishes — a gap that let the 2015 Charleston church shooter, whose check was delayed past three days on an incomplete record, buy a firearm he was legally prohibited from owning. Modern record-syncing technology should be closing that gap, not leaving it open on a clock. The fix is two things together: invest in the record-completeness problem that causes most delays in the first place (incomplete mental-health adjudication and out-of-state record reporting — a data problem, not a speed problem), and close the default-proceed loophole so a sale can't complete until the check actually finishes.

[PENDING: Closing the default-proceed loophole is actively contested federal legislation — opposed on due-process grounds (argument: removing default-proceed turns a delay into a de facto denial without government ever proving one). This is not a simple technical fix; worth knowing the real fight going in.]

No Fee for Permission to Exercise a Right

The government may verify that a person is qualified to exercise a constitutional right. It may not charge them for the permission. If a background check, permit, fingerprinting, or mandated training course is required before a citizen can buy a firearm, the government that requires it pays for it from general revenue — the same way it already pays for elections, courts, and public defenders. The federal system already works this way: a federal NICS check costs the buyer nothing, and federal law requires no license, permit, or training to buy an ordinary firearm.

Washington shows why this matters. Every purchase today carries a $33 State Patrol background check fee, up from $18 after the Legislature removed the statutory cap in 2026 at the agency's own request, with no revenue projection and future increases set by posting on the agency's website. Starting May 1, 2027, the permit-to-purchase law adds a $90 permit fee, a $36 fingerprint fee, a locally set collection fee, a privately paid certified training course, and a $90 renewal every five years — while the State Patrol is separately required to re-verify every permit holder's eligibility each year and still charges $33 at each purchase. The qualification hasn't changed. The price of proving it has. For scale: at roughly 22,000 checks a month, absorbing Washington's background check fee into the general fund would cost about $8.7 million a year.

Scope. Covered: any payment the government requires before a person may act — permit, license, background check, fingerprint processing, mandated training, required documents. The label doesn't matter: the National Firearms Act's $200 machine-gun transfer tax works as a permission fee and is covered. Not covered: taxes on products (sales tax, the federal firearms and ammunition excise tax), the price of the firearm itself, or costs a person chooses to incur. Also not covered: fines, fees, and restitution that are part of a criminal sentence. Losing a right after a conviction is part of the punishment, and restoration follows completion of the full sentence. But the sentence is what the judge imposes: no statutory interest accrues on any sentence obligation, including restitution. If a victim's loss warrants more, the judge sets restitution higher — Washington already allows up to double the victim's loss or the offender's gain.

Enforcement. A jurisdiction charging a permission fee on a constitutional right receives written notice and a 5-business-day cure period to suspend collection. After that, an affected person may recover the fee plus discretionary damages of $100–$5,000 per violation.

[WHERE THIS STANDS: This is not current law. Courts allow fees that recover administrative cost (Cox v. New Hampshire, 1941; Kwong v. Bloomberg, 2d Cir. 2013), and Bruen (2022) only warns against "exorbitant" fees without defining the term; DOJ v. San Jose (filed Sept 2026) is the first major test. Washington reviews Article I, Section 24 — which says the right "shall not be impaired" — under "reasonable regulation" (State v. Jorgenson, 2013); a 2025 dissent and a pending petition argue for strict scrutiny. A federal ban on state permission fees would rest on Congress's Fourteenth Amendment enforcement power, which must be "congruent and proportional" (City of Boerne v. Flores, 1997) — expect a challenge. Strongest counterargument: it shifts cost to taxpayers who never use the right; elections, courts, and public defenders are funded the same way. On sentence obligations, the wealth-test criticism applies: a person who cannot pay stays without the right longer than a person who can. Federal restitution would need a judicial doubling authority added, since federal mandatory restitution is set at the full loss.]

De-escalation and Civil Discourse

Less culture-war rhetoric. Debate becomes a mandatory high school class — teaching students how to disagree constructively, engage with opposing views, and argue with evidence rather than emotion. Internet hygiene is part of the life skills curriculum. Democracy requires citizens who can talk to each other.