President-elect Donald Trump has said that US citizens who burnt the American flag should be either jailed or stripped of their American citizenship.
Trump wrote in a tweet Tuesday that “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag - if they do, there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!”
Left-wing protesters have taken to the streets since Trump's election victory earlier this month. Some of the protests have turned violent.
The US Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that flag-burning was a form of free-speech protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Trump's Democratic rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, co-sponsored a bill in 2005 which would have criminalized the burning of the American flag. The bill would have made flag-burners liable to a year prison - the same as Trump wrote in his tweet - and up to $100,000 in fines. The bill said nothing about citizenship, however.