Or perhaps the Consitution is not the be all and end all of legislation? Can you show me where in the Consitution I can’t talk on a cell phone while driving? But I know there’s a section in Chicago’s laws that makes it illegal for me to do so. I think it answers Dio’s question just fine. He should ask a better question if he wants a better answer.
IIRC, there have been other cases during Bush speeches where folks have been arrested and detained, only to later have the charges dropped. I suspect the goal is to squealch dissent around the president, so by arresting and detaining but later saying “oops” they acheive what they set out to do.
Can anyone help me with some cites?
My guess is that you don’t live or work in DC, so you don’t have to put up with people disrupting traffic and shutting down the city for their pet cause, and also that you don’t work in regulatory law.
True story. There’s an FCC rulemaking going on. It’s a technical matter… telephone carriers get a subsidy from the FCC for providing service in rural areas, and the FCC is trying to decide whether or not to change the way that government financial support is calculated for those carriers. So, as happens in every rulemaking, people and groups on both sides of the issue are filing documents that provide legal, scientific, economic, or whatever reasons that the Commission should or shouldn’t make the change. And since we have clients that serve rural areas, and they might be affected by the change, my boss sends me to check the FCC’s filing system to see what comments have been filed and what the arguments are.
There’s a problem, though, because one of the sides of the debate is doing what’s sometimes called false grass roots or “astroturf” lobbying. They’ve set up a website that says, basically, “Greedy corporations are trying to convince the government to deny telephone service to rural areas. Fill out this webform and tell the FCC not to deny affordible telephone service to rural Americans.”
So, you just put your name and address on the form, and it sends a comment to the FCC saying something like, “Dear FCC, I am a concerned citizen with a telephone. Please do not change the rural telephone universal service support mechanism and deny affordible telephone service to rural Americans.”
So, if you go to the FCC’s filing system to check on comments relevant to the rulemaking that were filed by lawyers, phone companies, economists, and advocacy groups, all of whom have informed themselves on the issue at hand and have real arguments, they’re buried somewhere amongst 7000 copies of “Dear FCC, I am a concerned citizen with a telephone. Please do not change the rural telephone universal service support mechanism and deny affordible telephone service to rural Americans” filed by people who know nothing about Universal Service, rural telephone service, funding support mechanisms, and whose only contribution to the debate is a five minute electronic form and whose only information on the issue is biased fearmongering by one side.
I stand by what I said before…these types of protests and grass roots action in many cases aren’t constructive, just disruptive, and gets in the way of real debate by educated people and established political channels on the issue.
Did you hear the latest? That the police are not only not charging her but apologizing?
Because there is no law forbidding wearing t-shirts in the House of Representatives. Really! You should check it out.
Actually, I rather think it is. That’s why the highest court in our country is dedicated to upholding it. Our constitutional rights pretty much trump everything else. In fact, if they’re not upheld, the case is thrown out and charges are dropped. That’s why they’re, you know, inalienable.
What the hell kind of non sequitor is this? There’s no right to shoot people in the Constitution!
Sheehan is an idiot, but this is probably exactly what she wanted. She gets more publicity!! Maybe she’ll be stupid enough to take up her threat to run against Feinstein. That would be fun to watch.
I’m trying to figure out exactly when people will realize that the quashing of dissent is much bigger than one crazy lady.
The fact that the Capitol Police also removed another person that wasn’t even wearing a protest t-shirt is scary, when there are no laws against it.
Catch and release is fun, but that’s for fishing, not for detaining to quash dissent.
Sadly, you’re probably right. sigh I don’t think the woman should have been arrested, but she really gets on my nerves. It seems she wants media attention more than she wants to actually do something.
Hasn’t her family distanced themselves from her, saying she’s had a breakdown of sorts?
I do hope she gets help.
I live near San Francisco (they do that here, too), and I don’t like them, either. (Nor do I understand why blocking traffic would be beneficial to their cause, whatever that might be) But I think they’re a necessary evil. I’d much rather be inconvenienced by having to find alternate routes to drive around protesters than worry about being arrested for wearing a T-shirt supporting the ‘wrong’ cause. It’s wrong when a teacher persecutes a student for wearing the ‘wrong’ jersey, and it’s at least as wrong when the Capitol Police arrest someone for wearing the ‘wrong’ T-shirt. Freedom of speech is one of the things that makes this country great.
There’s a problem with requiring people to have informed opinions on a subject before debating it in the public sphere, too. There’s no objective standard for how informed someone is on a given issue. Someone would have to decide which opinions are informed and which aren’t, and there’s a chance for all kinds of bias to slip in in that process, consciously or unconsciously.
That was pretty. I think I like the undertaker’s voice the best of all the guys so far.
Whoa! Totally wrong thread!
I have worked in DC at intervals, and I agree with Otto. This is disturbing on a shitload of levels.
If “the fucking protesters on both the left and the right” “shut the hell up and let the established political system work,” you know who’ll be running things, even more than they already are?
The people behind those Astroturf campaigns, that’s who.
Now that was weird:
That line on the article is gone now. The quote was also on an image in the front page of MSNBC and now the line was removed from the article, in any case, it is true:
Indeed. And there’s been a lot of that sort of catch-and-release lately:
Spuriously arresting protesters, then freeing them a few hours later without charging them, is a great trouble-free way of suppressing protest.
Sheehan may be an idiot, but the rights to free speech, peaceable assembly, petition for redress of grievances, etc. don’t just belong to those worthy of our approval; they belong to all of us, or ultimately they can be taken away from all of us.
To me, that’s a far bigger concern than whether Sheehan’s an idiot. Should be true for you too.
See my post #195. Do you think they ‘goofed’? Once is happenstance, twice coincidence, and six times is a freakin’ conspiracy.
And that’s just t-shirts.
If they want to do that, that’s fine.
But this business of detaining people who haven’t violated any laws, just to get their inconvenient protests out of the way, has got to end.
And this business of restricting protesters to “free speech zones” further and further from whoever or whatever they’re protesting, has also got to go. The whole freakin’ country is a “free speech zone,” and I want it back.
Again, see post #195.
Maybe, just maybe, they realized someone might notice the inconsistency if they took Sheehan away but left Young there, wearing her politically correct T-shirt, given the high profile of the event. Ya think?
Apparently they said just about that to Young:
The quoted text used to be here, but the newest version of the article no longer has that text. (I’ve still got the earlier version on my laptop, though.)
They’re lucky it wan’t someone spiteful, like me. I would file formal complaints and maybe a lawsuit for false arrest, false imprisonment, unlawful detainment, whatever a clever attorney could come up with. I guess the reason they dropped the charges was, they couldn’t find any law that had been violated.
New York City… free speech zones, a "dragnet and lots of arrests. It was a big stink for about 5 minutes and then got forgotten. I think it was during the primaries (?)
Side comment to John Mace - Sheehan may run against Feinstein. If she does, I predict Feinstein will crush her. Feinstein has a record as a moderate-to-liberal Dem, and years of experience. I’d say she is damn near bulletproof right now.