Follow-up to the Sanders restaurant issue, but I hope it can be kept in GQ.
Suppose Vice-President Pence wants to go back and watch Hamilton again. He buys some tickets on the re-sale market.
I’m assuming that when the Veep is going to something in a public venue, the Secret Service will want to do an advance check, put their people in place, and so on.
What happens if the business owner refuses to cooperate? Doesn’t return their calls, doesn’t allow them in in advance, says that no-one can come in without a ticket and so on.
Any legal sanctions the owner faces? (Not talking about political response; legal remedies that the Secret Service could take)
He’d be coming as a private citizen, not in an official capacity. I don’t see why any private person can make demands on any business that would disrupt the rest of their business.
They’d probably want the seats immediately around him to be bodyguards. Since those seats are already sold, what do they do to those customers? They can’t just refund their money & offer them tix to another performance - (You’re only in NYC that one day.) The show is sold out; many people are buying tickets in the secondary market. How do you know how much more than face value those people paid even if you’re willing to reimburse them?
They’d probably want everyone to go thru metal detectors. What happens to the little Swiss Army knife in your pocket? You can legally bring it to any other performance but you can’t bring it into this one? The theater probably doesn’t have any space or process in place to store them & return them to you after the show.
They might want to put a Secret Service member backstage; this person, who doesn’t know the show could either be injured by or in the way of moving sets.
Every show has seats set aside for the use of performers (to give to friends and family). These are usually released the day of the show. In the old days, you could go to the box office of a sold-out show at the right time (when the house seats were released) and get tickets. Nowadays, they tend to sell them as discount seats in a lottery the day of the show. Pence would buy house seats (at full price), not go to the secondary market (with a big markup).
So getting the seats is not a problem given a day’s notice.
As for the rest, the Secret service will probably sit flanking the vice president. Other agents will be standing on the side or back to keep an eye on the crowd. They will want to check out the layout, but that’s hardly a problem if they show up a few hours before the show.
The police, including the Secret Service, generally need a warrant to enter and search private property without permission. The vice president’s Hamilton tickets aren’t an exigency that creates an exception to the warrant requirement. To hold otherwise would contravene fourth amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure and fifth amendment protections against deprivation of property without just compensation. Generally, the Secret Service and the vice president himself are relying on the consent of the property owners to enter private property.
If the vice president has Hamilton tickets and he is allowed entry on the terms provided on his ticket. If he is denied entry for reasons that contravene his contract with the theater, he has a contractual claim against them. In your hypothetical, the Secret Service has no such contract they can enforce.
This thread discusses my opinion of what would happen if you refused to serve the president.
The world is run so the issues that the OP raises virtually never come up. The VP doesn’t do anything spontaneously. His staff makes arrangements ahead of time. If those arrangements don’t work out, then he is the one to miss Hamilton.
I remember occasions in which businesses didn’t want a candidate to disrupt them. They simply go other places.
And there have been times when a President or the equivalent stops in a hotel unexpectedly and the Secret Service cleans out a floor. Those people are sent elsewhere.
Here’s an old joke.
Businessman shows up late to a hotel. The clerk tells him they’re all booked up.
“What if the President were coming?” he asks. “Would you find a room for him?”
“Of course,” the clerk says.
“Well, I know for sure he won’t be here. So you can give me his room.”
As a practical matter, my assumption is that the Secret Service would lean heavily on the protected official to avoid going someplace where cooperation in security arrangements has been refused.
That said, federal law gives them the unspecified right to “protect.” The legal parameters of this authority were found by the US Supreme Court in 2012 to be sufficiently unsettled that agents were entitled to qualified immunity in a suit alleging that they had arrested someone in violation of the First Amendment.
If a protected individual insisted on going someplace uncooperative (suppose for instance, that Yale Law School refuses to cooperate with Secret Service security requests for Audrey Pence’s graduation ceremony), my guess would be that the Service would consider itself to have the legal right to conduct sweeps beforehand and seize a sufficient area to establish a security perimeter, but probably would not risk too much exposure. In other words, set up a seating area in the back of the auditorium, not down in front. The sanctions would be physical removal or detention, as if one were protecting a small federal building that moves. Persistent interference would be grounds for arrest as some sort of disorderly conduct offense.
I suspect that such a seizure would not be found to be “unreasonable” in itself under the Fourth Amendment, but federal prosecutors would probably be barred from using evidence of crimes found by the Secret Service during such an action.
My OP isn’t meant to suggest that the Veep just plans to drop in unexpectedly. Suppose the tix are for a month from now.
My question is whether the Secret Service can require the theatre owner to cooperate in providing security for the Veep. The answer appears to be “no” based on the responses so far.
If I were head of the Veep’s SS detail, I’d say “Sir, my job is to protect you. I can do that best if you never go see Hamilton.”
“Can I go when I’m a private citizen?”
“Certainly. That would be much safer, and less problematic.” “Okay, tell the President to add me to his list.”
“You mean the list of people making a break for it the night before Mueller’s report is released? Good idea, sir.”
If it came down to a face-off, the problem is more likely political and PR-related than legal.
Presumably the secret service could while accompanying the VP to wherever he happened to be, force people to move away, just as police can force people to move away from the scene of a train-wreck or a serious gas leak or a spill of agent orange (or whatever we want to equate the VP to).
However, how would that look? bad enough he got lectured for simply attending a performance without disruption. Imaging the media storm if a dozen people got pushed out of their seats, or denied entrance to the theatre, or the performance was cancelled in protest. (I’m assuming not all the performers would be happy if the performance went forward.)
I remember hearing about a case where the restaurant (a Denny’s in Carolina, I think) that refused to serve the (black) Secret Service contingent itself! They sat at their table for a long time, ignored, nobody would take their orders or anything. Caused quite a fuss, being 100+ years after the Civil War.
I went to the MIT graduation in 1998 when Clinton spoke. All the attendees had to go through a metal detector, but there was no other special operations. It was open air incidentally.
President Obama visited my workplace and gave a little speech from there a few years ago - the SS were there days in advance, people who worked in the (very large) building he toured who weren’t specifically selected to be part of the program were asked to work from home or from elsewhere on campus that day, they went through cleanroom areas with bomb sniffing dogs(!), they roped off parking lot areas where he would be driving/parking through, etc.
On the other hand, he stopped and had lunch at a local restaurant that day - I think they gave it a quick walkthrough beforehand.
My point is, I think the security preparations are in proportion to how far in advance his visit is made public - if a disgruntled coworker wanted to try to do him harm he would have had weeks to plan - there’s less of a risk involved making a last-minute, unannounced visit to a restaurant.