The Five Pillars
of the First Amendment

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act's compelling-interest test is the operative federal shield for religious objectors, and it is only as strong as its exceptions. Congress should reject the Do No Harm Act's amendments and instead extend RFRA's protections expressly to emergency public-health orders, licensing decisions, and federal grant conditions — the three vectors through which free exercise was actually squeezed after 2020. State legislatures should enact state RFRAs where none exist and amend existing ones to apply to state and local emergency declarations.

Vehicle: federal amendment to 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb et seq.; state RFRA enactment and emergency-powers amendment.

No employer, school, licensing board, or government agency should be permitted to demand a clergy attestation, doctrinal proof, or a consistency audit of an individual's religious practice as a condition of an accommodation. The legal standard is already settled — a belief must be religious in nature and sincerely held, and adherence to an organized religion is not required — but the intake forms used during the mandate era ignored it wholesale. Statute should make the two-element test the exclusive inquiry and make anything beyond it an unlawful practice.

Vehicle: state employment-code amendment plus federal Title VII conforming amendment; state attorney general enforcement authority.

Groff v. DeJoy raised the Title VII undue-hardship bar nationally, but it did so through federal case law that most employees cannot afford to invoke. States should write the Groff standard directly into their own fair-employment statutes with an administrative complaint path and fee-shifting, so that a nurse or firefighter denied an accommodation has a state remedy that does not require a federal lawsuit. This is the single highest-leverage religious-liberty reform available at the state level right now.

Vehicle: state fair-employment practices act amendment with private right of action and fee-shifting.

Every state emergency-powers statute should be amended to prohibit any executive order, agency directive, or local ordinance that subjects religious assembly to occupancy, duration, or activity limits stricter than those applied to the most favorably treated comparable secular activity. This is simply Tandon converted from an emergency-docket injunction into a durable statutory rule, so that the next crisis does not require a Supreme Court application to reopen a church.

Vehicle: state emergency management act amendment; enforcement by declaratory judgment and injunctive relief.

Faith institutions must retain unreviewable authority over who teaches, preaches, and transmits their faith. Congress and state legislatures should decline every proposal that conditions federal or state funding, tax status, or accreditation on a religious organization's internal governance or expressive commitments. Grant conditions are the quiet mechanism here, and they should be named as such. ---

Vehicle: statutory non-discrimination-in-funding provision; appropriations rider prohibiting belief-based conditions on eligibility.

Congress should enact findings that recite, as statutory fact, the coordination documented in Missouri v. Biden, the Twitter Files, the House Judiciary Committee's EIP investigation, and Meta's own admissions to Congress — and then attach operative prohibitions to those findings. Codified findings survive changes in administration, defeat the "no ongoing conduct" argument that doomed Murthy on standing, and give future courts a legislative record they cannot decline to reach. This is the single most important legislative act available to this coalition.

Vehicle: federal statutory findings and prohibitions provision; template available in the Free Speech Protection Act (S. 188).

Federal employees and contractors must be prohibited outright from requesting, recommending, encouraging, or coordinating the removal, throttling, deprioritization, labeling, or demonetization of lawful speech by U.S. persons. The prohibition must cover indirect routes — task forces, liaison programs, "switchboarding," and third-party grantees — because the direct route was never the one used. The Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act (H.R. 140) passed the House on March 9, 2023 and should be re-passed and moved in the Senate.

Vehicle: federal prohibition on official conduct, enforced by injunction, employment discipline, and inspector general referral.

No federal grant, contract, subgrant, or cooperative agreement should be available to any entity that flags, scores, rates, or reports the lawful speech of U.S. persons to platforms, advertisers, or payment processors — a category that includes the GEC-family programs, the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project, the Global Disinformation Index, NewsGuard, and CCDH-adjacent operations. The prohibition should reach subawards, since intermediation is exactly how the money reached foreign flaggers who named the Finn plaintiffs. State legislatures should enact parallel bans covering state university and state agency participation.

Vehicle: appropriations prohibition plus permanent authorizing-statute bar; state higher-education appropriations rider.

Any American named, flagged, or reported in a federal or federally funded censorship report should have a federal cause of action for damages, declaratory relief, and mandatory disclosure of the record concerning them — with statutory standing that does not require tracing a specific removal to a specific official's specific email. This is the direct answer to Murthy and to Finn: procedural dismissal is only possible where Congress has left standing to be inferred rather than granted. The Censorship Accountability Act (S. 67, 119th Congress; H.R. 4848 in the 118th) is the closest existing vehicle and should be strengthened to cover grantees and contractors.

Vehicle: federal private right of action with statutory standing, fee-shifting, and minimum statutory damages.

Every agency communication with a platform, advertiser, payment processor, or flagging entity concerning U.S.-person content should be a required federal record, preserved for a defined term, logged in a public register, and exempt from deliberative-process withholding. The Murthy record was assembled only because litigation forced it; the next record should exist before the litigation does. Preservation duties should attach to grantees by contract term, not merely to agencies.

Vehicle: Federal Records Act and FOIA amendments; grant and contract clause requiring preservation and production.

Section 230's immunity was designed to protect private editorial judgment, not to launder state action. Congress should provide that a platform loses § 230(c) protection with respect to any moderation action taken at the request, direction, or encouragement of a federal official or federally funded entity — converting the immunity into an incentive to refuse the phone call. The carve-out must be narrow and evidence-triggered so that ordinary private moderation retains its shield. ---

Vehicle: targeted amendment to 47 U.S.C. § 230(c) with a government-coordination exception.

Congress should pass the PRESS Act or its equivalent, barring federal compulsory process against journalists and their service providers for newsgathering material, with narrow, judicially supervised exceptions for imminent violence. The 2021 memorandum and 2022 regulation proved the concept works and then proved why executive-branch self-restraint is worthless: both were reversible at will. Statute is the only form of this protection that survives a change of administration.

Vehicle: federal statute codifying and superseding 28 C.F.R. media policy (H.R. 4250 model).

Every federal and state press protection should define a covered person by the activity of gathering and disseminating news to the public — regardless of medium, credential, institutional affiliation, or compensation. Independent, Substack-based, podcast, and video journalists must be inside the definition, because they are the ones actually taking the pressure. A functional definition also forecloses the worst future abuse: a licensing regime that decides who counts.

Vehicle: statutory definitional provision in federal shield law and in state shield statutes.

FARA and successor foreign-influence authorities should be amended to expressly exclude the publication, commentary, or newsgathering of U.S. persons from registration triggers, absent proof of direction and control by a foreign principal established by clear and convincing evidence. The coalition supports genuine transparency about foreign principals and opposes every proposal that sweeps domestic advocacy and reporting into the same net based on the views expressed. Where a domestic outlet's foreign-policy coverage is the predicate, name it: that is a speech regulation wearing a national-security label.

Vehicle: amendment to 22 U.S.C. §§ 611–621 narrowing the "agent" definition and adding an express U.S.-person publication exemption.

The federal prohibition proposed in the speech pillar must cover payment processors, app stores, ad networks, hosting providers, and email platforms — not just social media. Removing a journalist's ability to be paid is a more complete silencing than removing a post, and it currently sits entirely outside the doctrinal conversation. NRA v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175 (2024), unanimously confirmed that a regulator who coerces intermediaries to cut off a disfavored speaker violates the First Amendment (Congressional Research Service); statute should make that holding operational and self-executing.

Vehicle: federal prohibition on official conduct extended to financial and infrastructure intermediaries, with private right of action.

No federal agency, grant, or contract should fund any entity that rates, scores, or blacklists news outlets for advertiser or platform consumption. When taxpayer money underwrites a credibility score that dries up an outlet's ad revenue, the government has defunded a newspaper without ever appearing in the transaction. State legislatures should apply the same bar to state agencies, state pension investments, and public university partnerships. ---

Vehicle: appropriations prohibition plus permanent authorizing bar; state procurement and higher-education restrictions.

State and municipal permitting statutes should be rewritten to eliminate open-ended official discretion: fixed objective criteria, published timelines, written reasons for any denial, automatic approval on administrative delay, and expedited judicial review. Discretion is the whole mechanism — where an official may weigh "community impact" or "anticipated controversy," the permit becomes a content decision with a clerical face.

Vehicle: state model permitting act preempting discretionary local ordinances; expedited declaratory relief.

No jurisdiction or public institution should be permitted to charge an assembly organizer for security costs calculated by reference to anticipated opposition, the speaker's views, or prior controversy. This heckler's-veto-by-invoice is the most common modern denial and the least litigated, because the event simply never happens and no one has a record to sue on. Statute should cap or socialize public-order costs and require itemized justification subject to challenge.

Vehicle: state statute prohibiting content-correlated fees; state attorney general enforcement authority.

Public colleges and universities should be statutorily required to make facilities available on viewpoint-neutral terms, prohibited from disinviting or relocating speakers due to opposition, required to discipline conduct that materially disrupts a scheduled event, and subject to suit by affected students, faculty, and invited speakers. Combine this with the state defunding provision from the speech pillar so that institutions cannot simultaneously host censorship research and plead neutrality.

Vehicle: state higher-education statute with private right of action and institutional reporting requirement.

Where a jurisdiction enforces a restriction on assembly — including 18 U.S.C. § 1507's prohibition on residential picketing of judges — it must enforce it uniformly, and legislatures should require public reporting of enforcement decisions and declinations by statute and by cause. Selective enforcement converts a neutral rule into a viewpoint license, and the only durable check is disclosure.

Vehicle: federal and state enforcement-transparency reporting mandate with inspector general audit authority.

Congress should require, by statute, that pretrial detention and conditions of release in cases arising from political assemblies be justified on individualized findings of danger or flight, without reference to the defendant's expressed political views or associations, and should mandate annual public reporting of detention outcomes in such cases. This is a rule-of-law protection that applies identically to every movement, and it should be written now — while its beneficiaries are unknown. ---

Vehicle: amendment to the Bail Reform Act, 18 U.S.C. § 3142, with reporting requirement.

Congress should prohibit any federal agency from opening an assessment, applying a threat tag or tripwire, or referring for investigation any U.S. person on the basis of speech directed to a government body — including testimony, comment, correspondence, or peaceful attendance at a public meeting — absent a true threat as defined by the First Amendment. The prohibition should require notice to any individual so designated and mandate purging of the record. States should enact parallel prohibitions binding state fusion centers and state police intelligence units.

Vehicle: federal statutory prohibition on investigative predication with notice and expungement remedy; state fusion center statute.

The Administrative Procedure Act should be amended to require that agencies publish a reasoned, categorized response to every substantively distinct comment received on a proposed rule — including comments submitted through mass campaigns, addressed by category rather than dismissed as duplicative — with failure to do so constituting independent grounds for vacatur on judicial review. Right now the duty exists in doctrine and evaporates in practice. This is the reform that converts commenting from a ritual into a right.

Vehicle: amendment to 5 U.S.C. § 553 with express judicial review standard.

State open-meetings laws should be strengthened to guarantee a minimum public comment period at every meeting of a school board, county commission, or state agency; prohibit content-based restrictions on comment topics; bar removal of speakers for criticism of officials; require written justification for any ejection; and provide a private right of action with fee-shifting. The school-board era demonstrated how quickly a decorum rule becomes a censorship rule when the criticism gets personal.

Vehicle: state open-meetings act amendment with private right of action.

Any American named in a federal or federally funded report, list, or dataset concerning speech should have a statutory right to notice, to inspect the record concerning them, to submit a correction, and to compel a written agency response within a fixed period — enforceable in federal court. This is the administrative complement to the private right of action in the speech pillar: some Americans want damages, and every American should at minimum be able to make the government answer for a list it paid for. Had this existed, the Finn plaintiffs would have had a remedy before litigation, not instead of it.

Vehicle: federal notice-and-correction statute modeled on Privacy Act amendment procedures, 5 U.S.C. § 552a(d).

Congress should establish statutory independence, fixed terms, protected budgets, and mandatory public reporting for agency ombudsman offices and inspectors general handling First Amendment complaints, and prohibit their reorganization or defunding without congressional notice. A petition channel that reports to the officials being petitioned is not a channel.

Vehicle: federal statute establishing ombudsman independence and reporting requirements; appropriations protection.

No federal or state agency should be permitted to refer a petitioner to a licensing board, tax authority, child welfare agency, or law enforcement body on the basis of the content of a petition or public comment. Retaliatory referral is the most personal form of jawboning: the target is not a platform but a family. Statute should make such a referral actionable and require disclosure of the referring official. --- ## Closing The First Amendment is one sentence containing five guarantees, and the Founders wrote them together because they knew the guarantees fail together. A government that can tell you what to believe can tell you what to say. A government that can tell you what to say will tell your publisher what to print. A government that controls the press does not need to permit your assembly, and a government that need not hear your petition need not answer for any of it. Finn v. Global Engagement Center ended without a ruling on the evidence. Murthy v. Missouri ended without a ruling on the merits. In both cases the record existed, the harm was real, the Americans were named — and the answer was procedure. Procedure is a legislative problem, and legislatures answer to voters. That is the entire theory of this blueprint: what courts declined to reach, statute can require; what agencies did quietly, statute can forbid; and what Americans were denied, statute can give back. Restore the First asks policymakers at every level to take up these five pillars as one instrument. Preserve the record. Compel the hearings. Give the named their day in court. And codify the limits, so that the next administration inherits a prohibition instead of a playbook. ---

Vehicle: state and federal anti-retaliation statute with private right of action and mandatory disclosure of referral source.