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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I am excellent. You know why?
J. Aughenbaugh: Why is that?
N. Rodgers: Because we're getting ready to start a new school year. New school year. It's all starting over. We get to pretend nothing in the past has happened.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, and listeners, we're excited because we're starting a new season, and Nia is usually good at having this information. Hopefully, I'm not stumping her. We are beginning what season, Nia?
N. Rodgers: Oh, no. It was a quiz, and I didn't study. Tell me how you are while I look it up. It's that terrible. I should know this off the top of my head. I want to say 22, but I need to make sure.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because as Nia pointed out, I always get excited this time of the year.
N. Rodgers: Well, part of why you get excited this time of the year is because you've just been reading lots of books that you're going to impose on your students, 22. We are starting season 22.
J. Aughenbaugh: I've basically concluded my annual summer hibernation furlough, as the old folks used to describe mandated time off. As Nia points out, I spend weeks, basically chauffeuring my daughter to various events, her and her friends. Then in the free time, I read a lot of books, watch a lot of old movies. I binge-watch TV shows. Nia, if I'm a little tired this morning, it's because Season 4 of Reacher just dropped on Amazon Prime.
N. Rodgers: I know, you do love Reacher.
J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, I do. I'm a huge fan of the book series. But the TV series, when they shifted from the movie version of the books, which had Tom Cruise as Reacher Holy miscast. Yes, I'm on that.
N. Rodgers: I'm on that bandwagon too. I've only read the first chapter of the first book of the Reacher Books because it just wasn't my jam. But he's described as basically huge. He's tall and he's big, thick, muscled. Alan Ritchson is physically perfect for what he's described in the books. But you don't always have to go with the book, sometimes the book isn't perfect. Tom Cruise just didn't seem to have what I think of as the reacherness of Reacher.
J. Aughenbaugh: As the author of the book series, Lee Child, pointed out when he sold the movie right, sold the book rights. He was just like, hey, they now own the character and they can do whatever they
want with it. That's how the media system works. He goes, and I was comfortable with it because they gave me a huge amounts of money.
N. Rodgers: It's good when authors do that Anne Rice fussed about Cruz as the vampire Lestat, which I think was unfortunate because he actually did work that role. There are some roles, a few good men where he's perfect. He is absolutely. Head on exactly what you want this person to do. It just happens that Reacher wasn't really. It wasn't quite right. It's not quite right set.
J. Aughenbaugh: The physical differences are so stark. Listeners, today's podcast episode is not about Reacher.
N. Rodgers: Or about television in general, although, by the way, the book is always better. As a librarian, I can say that 99% of the time the book is better. Not every time, there are some books where you're like, Oh, this should have been a much shorter movie. But for the most part, the book is almost always better, just because of the way you get description in books that you don't get.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because unless a movie is going to be four hours long.
N. Rodgers: Unless you've got Peter Jackson making making the Lord of the Rings series into what are huge, long involved movies. But even then he had to cut characters out. There's just only so much you can do in film. But if a book is a lot, takes place a lot in a character's head, which Reacher does. It's a lot about how Reacher's thinking. It's really hard to show that in a film, then you have to have exposition to get it out there.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's one of the difficult things that fans of the Reacher book series, but also the TV show. Part of that Nia, you went ahead and said I read the first chapter of the first book wasn't My jam. But some of the complaints I've heard from those who have attempted to watch the series is that there are so many moments of silence. You have to be comfortable with that. Because Reacher, the character, doesn't do a lot of explaining. In fact, that's one of the core attributes of the character.
N. Rodgers: In case anybody is wondering, I found that television show much more watchable than I found the books readable. In the 1% where I would say the film does better or the television does better, I actually really do like him as an actor and the way that he creates his presence on film. We're also not slamming Tom Cruise in the appropriate role. He was perfect in risky business. He's had a storied career. It just Richard just happens to be not one of the things that he did very well. But what I will say, a book series that translates well to film, even though there have been, three or four actors now at this point is the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan. Because they've managed to keep the characters all looking a very similar type, even though Alec Baldwin is very different from Chris Pine is very different from John Krasinski and Harrison Ford. They're all different, but they all have a similar type of acting and type of physical appearance that makes that work. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. What we're here to talk about today is why Aughie is not going to let me have whatever I want put on my license plate, which by the way would be FUVA in case you were wondering.
J. Aughenbaugh: Stop right there.
N. Rodgers: Because I'm all about rivalries and you should not deny me this, Aughie. You should not deny me this.
J. Aughenbaugh: A little bit of background. As our longtime listeners well know.
N. Rodgers: I say that love in my heart. I don't actually hate UVA. Putting it out there. But I mean, they are our rivals.
J. Aughenbaugh: Occasionally on this podcast.
N. Rodgers: No, it should be F Spiders because I really do feel that way. In general, I just feel that way anyway.
J. Aughenbaugh: But occasionally on this podcast, we highlight lower court cases, whether at the state Supreme Court level or the lower federal courts that might draw attention of the Supreme Court at some point in the future. Here is one of those cases, and it just so happens to originate from the fine state, the fine Commonwealth of Virginia, it's all about something that's about 6 " high and is attached to 1 million motor vehicles in the state of Virginia alone. What we're talking about Vanity license plates.
N. Rodgers: Now, two things happen when you go to the DMV to get a license plate. I will take whatever number you give me license plate, which does not cost you anything. Well, it costs you a registration fee, but there's no additional cost. You just get whatever and your license plate says something like QLF 4127 or whatever. It's this number that you're never going to remember until you have to do the parking thing on your phone. But it's just a regular license plate. It has the regular Virginia stuff on it, there's nothing special. You don't pick out patterns, you don't pick out anything like that. It's just a plain license plate.
J. Aughenbaugh: Stop right there. The basic purpose of the license plate okay, is, as Nia pointed out, for registration and law enforcement purposes.
N. Rodgers: This vehicle belongs to this person, which we know by this license plate.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's a tag. It's one of the ways the government can, I hate how certain words end up getting negative connotations. It's one of the ways that a state government can monitor you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or track ownership.
J. Aughenbaugh: There are good reasons.
N. Rodgers: If you are in a hit and run, you want the police to be able to find that other car and hold them responsible. The way that they do that is with the tracking cameras, which we could have a whole episode on tracking cameras, and we will because we have many thoughts and feelings about the tracking cameras and searches and seizures. We got a whole amendment thing going on here with that. But there are some good things they can do with that. For instance, if someone is kidnapped and they are taken in their car, those license plates can be used to track where that individual has been taken. There are reasons that you would want a license plate on a car. I know that there are sovereign citizens out there who are like, no, they shouldn't be able to track me at all. I don't want anything on my car. That's not how it works when we live in a civilized society. We need to be able to figure out who somebody is who did something. It can be misused, but we're not going to talk about part.
J. Aughenbaugh: The second type of license plate sometimes referred to as a tag because that's how state governments view it, is the vanity license plate. Basically all 50 states in the United States allow you when you are registering your vehicle to create a vanity plate.
N. Rodgers: Yes. If it's not already taken.
J. Aughenbaugh: If it's not already taken, as Nia pointed out, various college football fans will go ahead and identify themselves as a fan of the UVA Cavaliers or the Virginia.
N. Rodgers: In my neighborhood, there is one packer. Somebody who is a Green Bay Packers, they perceive them as the number one Green Bay Packers fan. Good for you. I wanted Fabo, but it was already taken and it turns out that that's also $80 to have. There is an extra fee.
J. Aughenbaugh: That is an extra fee because it actually requires the state to manufacture, a special plate for you. The question becomes, in lower courts are splintered over this, can states censor the messages on a vanity plate? The most recent controversy, the thing that generated me and Nia's interest came from a decision that was handed down at the end of last month. We are recording in August. It was handed down on July 31. It involved Curtis Whateley who paid Virginia an extra $10 in 2023 for a personalized license plate. He had seven characters to work with.
N. Rodgers: You get seven. You get seven characters or fewer. I could have done Fabo, but you can't do more than seven.
J. Aughenbaugh: In other states, it's eight or nine. He sought to convey a statement and here's a direct quote, expressing my opinion on the current state of policing in this country. That was a quote from his lawsuit. What he settled on was FTP and ATF.
N. Rodgers: With an ampersand between, with an sign between. FTP and ATF.
J. Aughenbaugh: The TP stands for the police. The ATF stands for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The F is what you can imagine, freak. Let's just go with that.
N. Rodgers: It is the four letter word that your mama would wash your mouth that with soap if you said on a podcast, which is why we're not going to see even though neither one of us has our mamas. Oh, no, you still have your mom. You don't have your grandma. Your grandma would wash your mouth that with soap. My mom would if I said that word.
J. Aughenbaugh: My mama certainly would have. In fact, she did.
N. Rodgers: But for future reference, that's just how we're going to refer to it as F.
J. Aughenbaugh: F, the police and the ATF. The first part of the controversy is that the state issued the plate. He used it for about a year.
N. Rodgers: This is part of where I get upset.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. He was driving around for about a year.
N. Rodgers: Nobody's saying anything. The state doesn't fuss, the cops don't fuss. Nobody fusses.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then the Virginia Department of Transportation known not all that affectionately in the Commonwealth of Virginia as VDOT. I'm from Pennsylvania. It's referred to as PennDot. Again, the Department of Transportation in that state is not referred to affectionately with that acronym. You'd be hard pressed to find that in any state. I'm sorry if you work for the Department of Transportation.
N. Rodgers: But you're not popular. You're not popular if you work for the whatever DOT. When you read ours, it could be read as VDOT which gives it an even darker.
J. Aughenbaugh: VDOT sees an anonymous complaint that caused them to reconsider and eventually cancel his vanity plate.
N. Rodgers: Yes, somebody was crabby about it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Representing himself, Mr. Whateley sued saying the cancellation violated his First Amendment rights. Virginia responded by saying that the plate is government property and contains a unique combination of characters that serves to identify vehicles. In effect, the plate is government speech, and the government gets to decide what speech it wants to engage in or not. That's a big if. Because what the Supreme Court has said is that the government can say whatever it wants when it is speaking. It can refuse to endorse messages with which it agrees or it can endorse messages that it concurs with.
N. Rodgers: It can refuse to endorse messages that it disagrees with.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, I said that first.
N. Rodgers: I think you said agrees with.
J. Aughenbaugh: Disagrees. Under the government, what we're talking about is what's known in constitutional law. This is another one of those doctrines, the government speech doctrine. The government is free to say what it wishes, select the views that it wishes to express, and engage in viewpoint discrimination when it speaks for itself. How does the doctrine work? Well, it's pretty straightforward. The First Amendment restricts the government from regulating or censoring private speech, but it doesn't apply to the government's own expressive conduct.
J. Aughenbaugh: If, for instance, the United States Congress tomorrow said to the IRS, we want the IRS to send out a bunch of ads on social media, on TV, radio, encouraging people to buy homes so that if they do so, they get to deduct the mortgage. The government can choose to do so. Now, might there be renters associations that are like, hey, wait a minute here. Renting property is also a good value. Why are we encouraging people to sink a whole bunch of money into buying homes? Well, guess what? It's the government's speech. It can pick one side or the other in the debate. You may disagree with it, but it's the government's speech.
N. Rodgers: The government cannot, however, endorse child pornography, which is, by law, illegal. It is illegal to have pornographic photographs of children. The government can't come out and say, hey, get your kitty born here. That's because they can't violate the law as written. They can't violate the statute with their free speech.
J. Aughenbaugh: This means the government has a certain amount of viewpoint freedom and the courts have recognized that the government cannot function or implement public policy if it had to remain completely neutral. Listeners, I hate to tell you this. It's like me telling you that SNA doesn't exist. But when implementing policy, policy discriminates. It picks winners and losers. It says some people are going to qualify for a program, and guess what? Others aren't. Some people are going to qualify for a loan program, others aren't. Some people are going to get financial aid to go to college. Guess what? Some people aren't. The government can engage in speech that implements those policy choices.
N. Rodgers: The tobacco companies would just as soon not have a label on their packages that say, this thing causes cancer. But the government can force them to say, you must tell people that cigarette smoking contributes heavily to certain cancers.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: You must tell them this.
J. Aughenbaugh: Now, the relevant case is from 2015, so not that long ago. The court ruled in the case of Walker v. the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the state of Texas, which had issued hundreds of specialty designs for license plates, like messages of choose life, God bless Texas, fight terrorism, I'd rather be golfing, could refuse to allow one bearing the Confederate battle flag. What's interesting to note, however, is the vote was 5-4. The majority opinion was written by Justice Stephen Breyer. He was joined by, the courts then, other three liberal members. That would have been Kagan, Sotomayor, and Ginsburg. What was interesting, they were joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. Now, these specialty plates are used, according to Breyer, to suggest that the government endorses a particular message. Otherwise, as Breyer points out, if you wanted to go ahead and say, God bless Texas, and Texas didn't offer such a license plate, you could affix what to the back end of your car, Nia?
N. Rodgers: A bumper sticker.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Probably in some instances with bigger letters than your license plate. You could write it all the way across your bumper sticker in big capital letters.
J. Aughenbaugh: It reminds me of a prank that George Clooney played on Brad Pitt. George Clooney got a bumper sticker that was outlined in marijuana plant leaves that had the message "F the police". He put it on Pitt's, bumper sticker to one of his cars. Brad Pitt drove around for almost two years with this bumper sticker, and he got pulled over multiple times by the cops before it dawned on him. The reason why he was getting pulled over was because he had a bumper sticker that said, "F the police."
N. Rodgers: Beware of your friends.
J. Aughenbaugh: But anyways, we like to be balanced as we cover court cases on this podcast. In the dissent, Justice Alito was rather incredulous of Breyer's logic. "If a car with a plate that says rather be golfing passed by at 8:30 AM on Monday morning, would you think this is the official policy of the state, better to golf than work?"
N. Rodgers: But I think his other reason was even better.
J. Aughenbaugh: He said, say the University of Oklahoma plausibly wanted to convey a government message during football season in Texas, he said,"That would border on treason".
N. Rodgers: If you wrote University Go Okies on your license plate in Texas, are you saying that the Texas government supports that message? The answer to that would be, heck, no. For me, part of the frustration here is when I rent a space, when I rent this apartment that I live in, I don't want the landlord to tell me where to put my furniture.
J. Aughenbaugh: Correct.
N. Rodgers: If I want to sleep in the kitchen, I could be a weirdo and sleep in the kitchen. That's me. I could put a bed in the kitchen. That'd be strange, but I could do it. I understand that the landlord doesn't want me to build a fire pit in my living room because my apartment is not built for that thing and it will burn down the place. I understand that. But within a certain view of renting your license plate, which is what they're arguing, is that the state continues to own your license plate and you are just renting it year to year. If that is the case, then as the person who rents it, should you not be able to put whatever you want to put on your license. Here's my overall thing that makes me upset about this, everything is offensive to someone. Numbers and letters are offensive to people when they are arranged in any readable order. There's going to be someone who, I'm going back to my preference license plate, which would be F Spider. Not just because of you, but also because I don't like spiders.
J. Aughenbaugh: I don't like Spiders.
N. Rodgers: I'm not a fan. But someone out there, some arachnid-loving person would be like, you're a horrible person. You probably step on spiders, and I'm like, every chance I get. I don't lie.
J. Aughenbaugh: This reminds me, Nia, I used to have a bumper sticker. For listeners who don't know this, I'm a huge Scooby-Doo fan. I even have a tattoo of Scooby-Doo above my right ankle. I used to have a bumper sticker, and these were pretty prominent during the 1980s and 90s, what would Scooby do? WWSD with a big picture of Scooby-Doo, with his tongue hanging out of his mouth, with his nice green collar, etc. As listeners may also know, I'm Catholic. I went to mass. Afterwards, this elderly woman saw me getting into my car, and she came up to me and tapped on my window to chastise me for having to take off on what would Jesus do?
N. Rodgers: What would Jesus do? WWJD, which, if you have been religious at all in your life in terms of Christianity, is a question you should be asking yourself for behavior. In this situation, what would Jesus do? I should do that. I should do whatever that is; the giving, respectful, loving thing or whatever. That's how you're taught. If you're not part of those religious faves, then you might not have that experience. But that is something that Christians are regularly supposed to ask themselves.
J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners, what Nia and I are pointing to is, and this is going to be the fundamental question and we are hypothesizing the Supreme Court is going to have to answer this, is a vanity plate government speech or is it private speech? If it is private speech, then the government is going to have to comply with the First Amendment and show that there is a good reason why that private speech should be restricted. If it is government speech, then the government can go ahead and censor any message you might want to put on a vanity plate. You see this with the lower court rulings, Nia. The
district court in Lynchburg, Virginia ruled for Virginia, saying that the plate was government speech. Therefore, the government could remove that particular vanity plate. The American Civil Liberties Union then stepped in and handled Whateley's appeal. I didn't even know this. Listeners, I've said this before, one of the reasons why we love doing this podcast is the stuff you learn, and we are geeks about learning. I did not know this. According to the ACLU of Virginia, 10% of all the state cars registered in Virginia have vanity plates. I didn't know it was that many. Maybe I don't look that carefully.
N. Rodgers: That's a huge number, 10% of the number of people in Virginia. That is huge.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with ACLU.
N. Rodgers: By the way, we're one of the cheapest places to get a vanity plate.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, it's only $10 extra. Other States?
N. Rodgers: In Utah, it's 10. But in a lot of places, it's 25, it's 50. In some places, it's 70.
J. Aughenbaugh: States use this to augment the budget of their department of transportation.
N. Rodgers: In Virginia, the first year you get it, it's free. The $10 is your update. But in DC, it costs $100 to get it the first year, and $100 every year after that. I think that may have to do with senators and congress people, and all those other people who want vanity license. But anyway, that's a whole separate issue. It's a cash cow for them.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's a money raiser. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a unanimous three judge ruling, said that vanity plates are private speech protected by the First Amendment. But that's only the first step. The Supreme Court could still end up agreeing with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, but then go ahead and say, but when you do your analysis, you're going to have to go ahead and take into account private speech is sometimes subject to government regulation. Now, we've talked about this previously on the podcast. My students in my constitutional law class knew this. Can the government abridge your freedom of speech? Yes.
N. Rodgers: Yes. That question has been settled a long time ago.
J. Aughenbaugh: But nevertheless, Whateley still has an opportunity to show, now the district court, that his speech deserves First Amendment protection. He could argue, for instance, that he's commenting on a matter of politics of government. Let's face it.
N. Rodgers: Clearly, that's what he's doing.
J. Aughenbaugh: The behavior of the police and the ATF has been called into question over the years.
N. Rodgers: I'm surprised that F ICE has not been attempted, and should people be allowed to have that on their license plate? I think that one of the arguments that's being missed here is I refuse to take seriously what's written on your license plate before I take more seriously the fact that you do not give a turn signal when you change lanes. If we're going to be up in arms about what's on people's license plates, how about we first be up in arms about the fact that people can't drive? That they're poor drivers. I didn't pull you over because of what's on your license, but I pulled over because you're a bad
driver. Hello, I should not be following you as it's a mystery as to what direction you're going to go. I'm not the FBI and I'm not following you for nefarious purposes. I just want to know what lane you want to be in so I cannot be in that lane. I don't get it. The other part of this that I don't get is, and part of it is that I work on a college campus, every year, I learn words for bodily functions, for personal get togethers, let's call them that, for whatever else. Words that I'm like, really, that's what? Because every generation has new reference points.
J. Aughenbaugh: New slang.
N. Rodgers: What used to be hot isn't hot anymore, and I'm a geezer. I say things, and they look at me like, okay, boomer, even though I'm not a boomer. Don't call me that. Those are five points. You know what I mean? The quote from RaeAnn Pickett that just made my face want to explode. She's a spokeswoman for Jay Jones, who is the state's attorney general. "The Commonwealth has a responsibility to ensure that state issued license plates are not profane and do not promote dangerous hate speech or incite harm." I want to put out here, I lived in Auburn, Alabama for a year. If you have a War Eagles, Tigers, Go Auburn thing, don't go to Huntsville after dark because they're going to break out in your car.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or Tuscaloosa, where the University of Alabama is located.
N. Rodgers: Because roll tide. You don't get to say anything other than, yes, sir, roll tide. That rivalry is very intense. No, let me put this in a different way because I'm getting all wound up. The person behind the wheel of the car behind me should be at least 16-years-old or older.
N. Rodgers: They are not a child. If this is the first time that they are encountering an idea that makes them uncomfortable, they have bad parents and they have had bad schooling because they should have been uncomfortable before this and not have an emotional meltdown when they see it. The person who saw his license plate, which by the way, he had had for a year and nobody said anything. Was an adult. An adult said, he's hurt my fifis. I'm like, Oh, toughen up, baby? Now, I know some of that's Gen X. Some of that is they told us to walk it off when we broke legs. I get it that we have a whole different world view. But there are ideas that make you uncomfortable, and that's okay. That's not something that the state should protect you from. It's scary to me.
J. Aughenbaugh: I go back to something that Justice Scalia said in his majority opinion in RAV versus St. Paul. It's a really dangerous slippery slope to allow the government to decide what views are acceptable. For me, if you're going to allow vanity plates, then the default should be that the government allows the person who wants to express a message quite a bit of freedom. Because I'm not all that comfortable with the government deciding what view it wants to allow. Now the alternative is Virginia gets rid of its vanity plate program.
N. Rodgers: Which is an alternative. Well then nobody can do it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then nobody can do it.
N. Rodgers: But if you put F grandmas on your license plate, all you're doing is telling me who you are. You're just announcing to me that you're a person I don't want to have anything to do with. Thank you. I appreciate you being forward about what chirk you are. Because I'd rather you be forward than me see you with a regular license plate, and then you get out of the car, you start yelling at grandma's. I'm like,
Oh, okay. You're a piece of work. There's something to be said for the truth of advertising. If your license plate tells me who you are. I'm like, okay. Now I know.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, I understand that some states use these vanity plate programs to raise money. But.
N. Rodgers: They're still paying the prisoner that makes it $0.10 an hour. If you want to talk about the whole process is corrupt we can episode on that at some point.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, you went for the kill shot on that. While we're slamming these programs, let's go to get to the brass tacks. The state's making a killing no pun intended, by having.
N. Rodgers: Also basically enslaved labor, people who can't say no. Anyway, I have all feelings about this. But my biggest feeling is, if this is your biggest problem, person who followed him and didn't like his license plate, I want your life. If this is the thing that upsets you. Given all of the things that are going on in the world, given screw worm and given exploding lettuce and all kinds given all of the things that are happening in the world, the Strait of Hormuz, the fires in the West. Really? This is the thing?
J. Aughenbaugh: If we just narrowed on driving. People not using turn signals, which you mentioned..
N. Rodgers: Stopping four feet before a sign.
J. Aughenbaugh: Refusing to move over to the turn lane that they want to use until the last possible moment. I'm just, it's a turn lane for a reason. Get over so you can get out of the way of the rest of the traffic.
N. Rodgers: People driving 55 miles an hour through the fan, running over bicyclists, running over pedestrians, running over various animals. What are you doing? Slow down. What emergency do you have? But that you need to be driving through the fan like this. Leave 10 minutes earlier and slow down.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you do have an emergency where you have to go fast, then don't travel a heavily populated neighborhood. Go to an interstate. It's one of the reasons why their speed limits on the interstate are higher than in residential neighborhoods. But for me, and I mentioned this, perhaps I'm this clueless to where I haven't even recognized that one out of every 10 fellow driver in Virginia has a vanity plate. I didn't even know this.
N. Rodgers: I don't notice. I am much more busy yelling at you about your turn signals. I am the lunatic in the other car who you can see yelling. You can't hear the because I keep my windows up. But I'm going really the whole time, because I'm that guy.
J. Aughenbaugh: My 14-year-old has begun to shall we say, emulate some of my speech patterns. Apparently, when some driver, ends up doing something well, but late, I rather sarcastically will go ahead and say, good boy. It's a dog.
N. Rodgers: She picked that up.
J. Aughenbaugh: She picked that up. I'm like, who says that? She goes, you do all the time. When somebody doesn't like, pull out right in front of you, you're like, don't do it. Good boy. I'm more
concerned about that than I am about somebody who's got a vanity plate that might offend my delicate sensibilities. I'm sorry.
N. Rodgers: Really, if reading words upsets you this much. I've got some concerns about the newspaper and books. Because these days, I don't know. The other thing, too, to come back to bring it full circle is you gave it to him with no problem. He rides around for a year with it, and then some anonymous person complains and you get investigated. The idea that we can tattle on each other, we've seen that before in history. We've seen when neighbors turned on neighbors and turned people in for stuff and it never turned out. There's never and it was happily ever after at the end of those stories, never. It is always. Then the next step was everybody died.
J. Aughenbaugh: One of the core premises of George Orwell's 1984 is that you can create a state, where the government encourages people writing one another out, that leads to a level of fascism that nobody will enjoy. There's no happily ever after.
N. Rodgers: It means the government does not have to be huge. The government can be tiny because it uses her entire population.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's like what I always thought was the danger post 911 when the government was telling people, if you see it, report it.
N. Rodgers: If you see something, say something. Oh, do we really want that? Because we've got people who see ghosts in this country. We've got people who see angels. We've got people who see aliens. We've got people who see Bigfoot. Do we really want these people reporting everything they see? Let's be careful about that. That is opening a great big can of worms with Americans because Americans see conspiracies under the couch. We are a nation of people who, if we don't know, we'll just make it up. We're that people. I don't know that we want people policing each other. That's the other thing is, I don't want to police other people. I don't have the time to police your license plate. I have so much other stuff to do. That falls to approximately 10,000 on my list of things to do. Not only have I not noticed you have a vanity plate, I don't care. Sometimes in traffic, I amuse myself by trying to figure out what it was, if we're all stopped at a light and I'm like, Oh, what that means. I try to work it out verbally. I'm in the car saying things to myself, trying to figure out what it is that you have on your license plate. But most of the time I'm amused. When I finally get it, I go, that's cute or whatever. But I'm never, I have to report this. Someone should do something about this. No. Really?
J. Aughenbaugh: But listeners, going forward, if you hear your stories about this case.
N. Rodgers: Will it go to the Supremes do you think?
J. Aughenbaugh: It would not.
N. Rodgers: For the fundamental First Amendment question, not questions we've brought up.
J. Aughenbaugh: It would not surprise me in part because there are differences among the lower courts in the various states, whether or not vanity plates are actually government speech or not. That's probably the most fundamental question.
N. Rodgers: Do you have a prediction on this court? It's a pretty conservative court these days.
J. Aughenbaugh: But on the other hand, as a number of legal scholars have pointed out, the Roberts Court is probably the most actively pro freedom of speech court since the early years of the Warren Court. They may actually go ahead and say.
N. Rodgers: Do we see a reversal from Thomas?
J. Aughenbaugh: No, I don't think Thomas will change his vote. But it wouldn't shock me if Roberts and Kavanaugh and Gorsuch go ahead and say that the government has a choice. Either don't offer vanity plates, or if you offer vanity plates, you cannot restrict the message. I could definitely see Gorsuch.
N. Rodgers: Then we would see states choosing. We want to restrict the message so we're not going to have them.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Because we don't message on here. Then other states would be like, freedom. They would just be like, great, we don't even have to have councils that worry about what's on here.
J. Aughenbaugh: To me, that would lead to a very interesting debate at a state legislature, where a state Department of Transportation is telling state legislatures, if you cut this program, we lose this amount of money. Think about it in Virginia.
N. Rodgers: It's a budgetary question at that point. Because we have moral concerns or do we look at the budget and go.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, think about just quick math. Let's say there are one million drivers in Virginia, people that have to register their vehicle with the Commonwealth of Virginia and 10% of that one million have vanity plates. So 100,000 people with Virginia tags have vanity plates.
N. Rodgers: They pay $10 a year for them?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, they pay $10 a year. Now, do the math.
N. Rodgers: That's $1 million.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, 10 * 100,000 is one million bucks.
N. Rodgers: That DOT doesn't get to do other stuff with. Whatever the other stuff may be highway maintenance, beautification.
J. Aughenbaugh: Think about the net profit. Let's say they are paying $0.15 on $1, for a state inmate to produce these vanity plates. The state is still clearing easily three quarters of $1 million.
N. Rodgers: Virginia, you're not going to have that in your budget next year. Oh, heck we are. You want on that license plate.
J. Aughenbaugh: This then becomes, as you pointed out.
N. Rodgers: You put your money where your mouth is in terms of. Most states would not. Most states would say, Oh, heck, no, we don't have, we can't lose. think about DC at $100 a year. That's not going to be an easy thing to let go of. They don't have nearly the size population we have, but I would be willing to bet that all the diplomatic plates are vanity plates. Everybody who's got an embassy in DC, which is pretty much 190 out of 197 recognized countries like hello. That's a not small chunk of change. That could be a real question of money, money in terms of speech. Which, you know how I feel about that, except in this case, I'm actually digging it. Now I have to rethink my whole money and speech position. Great. Thanks, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: My work here is done.
N. Rodgers: You do this to me every time. I think I know a thing, and then you go, but wait, do you really? I go.
J. Aughenbaugh: Welcome back to the podcast.
N. Rodgers: Welcome to our world. I hope you enjoyed a summer of not having having to think and rethink your positions because we're about to change that again. We've got some fun stuff coming up this year. We're going to be looking a lot at the clauses of the Constitution. We're also going to be looking at buying a country. Aughie and I are considering buying a country. We're going to look at historically how this has been done.
J. Aughenbaugh: Particularly in the United State, yes.
N. Rodgers: Yes. The chunks of the United States that we have bought have been pretty much all of it, except the East.
J. Aughenbaugh: Everything East of the Mississippi was granted to us in charters from the British Crown. Otherwise, we have purchased, annexed, fought wars, and then purchased, swindled.
N. Rodgers: We're going to lay some groundwork for how Donald Trump can get Greenland, I guess. Anyway, we've got some cool stuff coming up this year, unfortunately. I thought we would start with something a little more light hearted, which is really what's written on your license plate.
J. Aughenbaugh: Let's not forget, listeners, as we get closer to the midterm elections, we will have a series of episodes looking at this year's midterm elections.
N. Rodgers: Then results and where that's going to take us for the next two years till we get to the presidential.
J. Aughenbaugh: Election year of 2028.
N. Rodgers: Remember that in Virginia, we vote every year, so don't relax. After the midterms, there'll be another election next year because that's how we do it. That's how we do it around here.
J. Aughenbaugh: We exhaust.
N. Rodgers: We don't want you folks to forget how to vote, so we're going to have you vote every year. I do think though if we could make a plea for this episode, it matters less what's on your license plate than how you drive, please drive like a sane, reasonable person. Please consider the other people on the road, not just the other cars, but the pedestrians and the cyclists. We have a lot of those in Richmond and the animals. You come around the corner and hit a bear in Richmond, you got to be careful here. Just slow down, pay attention and license plates offend you, just move on because you got bigger fish to fry.
J. Aughenbaugh: Thank you, Nia.
N. Rodgers: Thank you, Aughie.
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