Speech in the United States
Speech Or Debate Clause Resources
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Speech or Debate Clause in the Legislative Process
The constitutional guarantee, enshrined in Article I, Section 6, Clause 1, that prevents legislators from facing criminal prosecution for any statements made in Congress. The idea of the clause was to ensure that congressmen and senators would have total freedom of speech while in Congress, ensuring that they would not face reprisals for voicing opinions unpopular with the president. The only exceptions are for acts of “Treason, Felony, and Breach of the Peace.”
Stemwinder (in Politics)
Related to political science, the following is a definition of Stemwinder in the U.S. practice of politics: A rousing political speech that galvanizes a crowd to take action.
The Word Detective notes the term is “one of those grand old words that have traveled so far from their origins that nearly all traces of their beginnings have faded from popular culture.”
Slate: “The term dates back to the middle of the 19th century, when the stem-winding watch came into vogue. The newfangled timepiece was a vast improvement over its predecessor, the key-wound watch, because the mechanism for setting it was a stem actually attached to the watch, rather than a key that was easily and frequently misplaced. This technological advance was so widely appreciated that, by the end of the 1800s, the term stemwinder had taken on the figurative meaning of ‘excellent’ or ‘outstanding,’ or, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, ‘a person or thing that is first rate. …’”
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