Bryan helps defeat flag amendment

Benjamin Grove

Thursday, March 30, 2000 | 11:18 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Richard Bryan's switch Wednesday helped defeat a proposed constitutional amendment empowering Congress to ban the desecration of the American flag.

"This is one that I have anguished about over the years," Bryan, D-Nev., said. "It's always been for me a very tough and close call."

Supporters of the amendment were four votes shy Wednesday of the two-thirds majority needed for Senate passage.

Bryan, who retires from Congress this year, has supported such amendments in the past. Now he says he would support a legal statute punishing flag burners but not a constitutional amendment.

"My view is, see if a statute might do it," Bryan said.

Bryan added, "I'm enraged when I see people burning the American flag. It makes me mad as hell, frankly."

Bryan said he knew his decision would not sit well with veterans. Among them was Al Libby, who is on the senator's veterans affairs board. Bryan explained his stance to Libby a month ago, but Libby still disagrees, the adviser said this morning.

"You shouldn't burn the flag unless it's on Flag Day in the proper way, with respect and honor," Libby, a Vietnam veteran, said.

Another Vietnam veteran and former prisoner of war, Steve Long, said he supports Bryan's view.

"I don't think we need a constitutional amendment to command respect," said Long, deputy executive director of Nevada's Office of Veterans Affairs. "You can't legislate pride in your country."

Bryan said he had been re-thinking the issue, discussing his stance with others and reading on the topic. He said he was influenced in part by a letter from former Gen. Colin Powell, a highly respected war hero who does not support the amendment.

"Someone made the argument to me that every country has a flag, but only the United States has the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment," Bryan said. "That's pretty strong."

The Senate voted Wednesday 63-37 to defeat the amendment. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., voted for it.

"Sen. Reid does not believe that individuals should have the right to desecrate the flag," his spokesman, David Cherry, said. "The court has given Congress no other option than to pursue a constitutional amendment."

The Supreme Court in 1989 said federal laws banning flag desecration are unconstitutional.

Constitutional amendments need a two-thirds majority, or 67 votes, for Senate passage. Amendments also need two-thirds House majorities and three-fourths approval by state legislatures.

The House passed similar bills in 1995, 1997 and 1999. The Senate last visited the issue in 1995, failing to collect the two-thirds majority. Forty-nine states, all but Vermont, have passed resolutions asking Congress to approve the amendment.

Nevada's House members last year voted for the amendment. In 1995 and 1997 votes, former Rep. John Ensign, R-Nev., now a Senate candidate, also voted for the amendment.

"As a veteran, I'm someone who is very proud of defending our flag," Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., a former fighter pilot, said. "I have a number of friends who lost their lives defending the American flag. It stands for 221 years that our nation has stood by and defended freedom. Burning the U.S. flag is an insult to the sacrifices of veterans and the American families who have lost someone in war."

Gibbons said desecrating a flag is tantamount to hate speech, which is not protected.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said she listened to her constituents on the issue and weighed the importance of it to her own family, including parents who immigrated from Europe.

"Veterans care passionately about this issue, they consider the flag the ultimate symbol of this country," Berkley said. "That flag means a lot to me, too. This is not to suggest that someone who holds a different opinion is somehow less patriotic."

One other senator, Robert Byrd, D-W.V., joined Bryan in switching his vote.

Byrd in an emotional speech said men in battle died for the Constitution and the freedoms that the flag represents, not the flag itself.

"The flag lives because the Constitution lives, without which there would be no American Republic," Byrd said.

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., voted for the amendment, calling the debate on the flag issue more important than most other legislative matters, saying it "goes to the heart of who we are as a people."

"In my opinion burning the flag is not speech," Lott said. "It is behavior of the most repugnant kind. (The flag) is a symbol that men have carried into battle. It does represent those most basic things that we believe in in this country."