Impact
Like the Lloyd Lafollete Act protecting communications with Congress, the anti-gag statute has been an effective weapon for lawyers to discredit, negotiate and generally call repressive government bluffs. On the micro level, it is a resource that never has failed for Government Accountability Project (GAP) in challenging gag orders or retaliatory investigations to enforce them.
On the macro-level, however, the anti-gag statute suffers from the same defect as the Lloyd Lafollette Act: it is a right without a remedy. Those victimized by its violation do not have any formal legal access to enforce the right. Further, because it is an annual appropriations rider, the anti-gag statute quietly could be killed as part of the back rooms and late night games involved every year with appropriations laws.
Read more about this topic: Anti-Gag Statute
Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.”
—Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice—there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.”
—Thomas S. Kuhn (b. 1922)