Bill Banning Flag Burning Clears House, Goes to Bush : Vote Is Whopping 371 to 43

The House voted final, overwhelming approval today for a federal ban on flag burning, just four months after a Supreme Court decision allowing destruction of an American flag as political protest.

“This is the least we can do to protect the sanctity of the flag,” Rep. Butler Derrick (D-S.C.) said before the House voted, 371-43, to approve the bill.

However, President Bush and many Republicans say Congress must do more than pass a mere statute, and they have been pressing for a constitutional amendment to outlaw flag destruction or desecration. The Senate will take up that issue next week.

Still, 154 Republicans joined 217 Democrats in supporting the statutory ban today, while only 18 Republicans and 25 Democrats opposed it. The bill passed the Senate 91-9.

House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) said he assumed Bush would sign the measure into law, despite his clear preference for a constitutional amendment.

Bush said last week that a new statute would not be adequate to get around the Supreme Court decision, which threw out the conviction of a Texas flag burner.

The bill on its way to Bush would revise existing federal law and provide up to a year in a jail and a $1,000 fine for anyone who “knowingly mutilates, defaces, physically defiles, burns, maintains on the floor or ground, or tramples upon any flag of the United States.”

The one-sided votes in Congress reflected the power of the flag as a political symbol, as demonstrated by a public outcry after the Supreme Court decision in June.

Derrick told the House that the court’s decision, throwing out the conviction of Texas flag burner Gregory Lee Johnson on grounds that his right to free speech was violated, hit Americans like “a slap in the face.”

Bush joined the call for a constitutional amendment, but Democratic leaders said changing the Constitution would be too drastic an action in response to an isolated case.

“Amending the Constitution as some would advance should be a last resort and not a first resort,” said Rep. William J. Hughes (D-N.J.).

However, House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.) said, “To those who believe we can overturn a Supreme Court decision at this time by statute, I can only repeat the immortal words of the farmer who, asked directions, said, ‘You can’t get there from here.’ ”

Supporters of the bill approved today said the wording had been carefully fashioned to withstand court challenges, banning flag defacement regardless of whether it involved political protest.

“It is the act of harming the physical integrity of the flag rather than any message that the action might convey that is to be punished,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks, (D-Tex.) told the House.

As in the Senate, many House lawmakers clearly planned to vote for both the bill and the constitutional amendment, a strategy considered politically safe.

A number of Republicans who voted against the bill, calling it inadequate, were joined by a smattering of Democrats who said that neither the amendment nor the bill should be approved.