I’m sure by now everyone has seen the picture of the woman flipping off the President(al motorcade). I’m sure lots of others have done it, not necessarily because of who the president is but because of the traffic jams the motorcade/stopped traffic causes. Some have admitted such.
Many years ago, either during Bush or Clinton era someone wrote an op-ed piece into the alt-weekly paper (so take it with a grain of salt) that closing roads for the president was illegal as an unjust & uncompensated taking of people’s time. Further, since a lawyer or surgeon sitting in his Mercedes makes as much in an hour as the minimum wage schlub stuck right next to him on a public transit bus makes in a week does the government need to compensate everyone at an individual rate? Also, how do you compensate those without an income: unemployed, retired, stay-at-home-mom?
Since it would be impossible to determine who had how much time taken from them & what their individual compensation rate should be they should just cease closing roads for his motorcade.
IF someone were to file a lawsuit based upon this premises would it have legs or would it get tossed out at first review?
Could this also be extended to the aviation operations that are losing business due to TFRs (Temporary Flight Restrictions) in S. FL (Mar-a-Lago in winter) & NJ (Bedminster in summer) on a regular basis because Trump doesn’t like DC?
You have to measure the value of the President’s time vs the value of the average person’s time. The argument would be that the President losing fifteen minutes due to traffic delays does more harm than five hundred people losing an hour each due traffic delays. (Let’s avoid discussing the value of specific presidents.) So you reroute traffic so the President’s motorcade speeds through and everyone else has to adjust their travel around it.
I wish there was something that could be done. It really does seem that presidential security goes too far, sometimes.
Of course, I thought the film White House Down should have ended in the first 10 minutes with an armed assault. No one man is more important than the entire country. Yes, people try, and have succeeded in, killing the president. But people are killed every day. No one cares about that.
Even if “the people” won that analysis, the courts wouldn’t intervene. You just don’t have a “right” to travel without delays.
In my little town they cut off my access to my office twice a year for some stupid parade or another. (For the life of me, I don’t see the appeal, but that’s another thread perhaps) I don’t have a right to sue over it. I just curse my luck and come back in a few hours.
I see roads around here closed for parades, marathon runs, bicycle rallies, community days, etc. Not to mention those rolling roadblocks known as funeral processions. There’s not a week that goes by that some road in the area isn’t closed off for some reason.
Yes, you can! Just send me your Social Security Number, Date of Birth, Mother’s maiden name, Name of your first dog, the name of your best friend in High School, and your bank routing number. I’ll have the funds wired to you pronto.
That’s a slippery slope argument. There’s a lot of distance between saying the President’s time is more valuable than the time of a group of a hundred average people and saying that the President is more important that the entire country.
I would say thrown out. Mileage may vary but the police have wide discretion in closing roads and even highways when they feel public safety could be involved and something like a Presidential motorcade could certainly be thought of in that respect. In addition I believe our city also treats it as a sort of “parade permitting” and files the appropriate forms in advance. I could be wrong about that but I believe it still is the practice.
What annoys me more is that Presidential motorcades do not adhere to speed limit laws.
Way back, my sister was traveling along I-95 when a helicopter ordered her to pull over. Two minutes later, Jimmy Carter drove by at 80 MPH in a 55 MPH zone. If we’re going to allow faster speed limits based on a person’s importance, should doctors be allowed to 5MPH above the speed limit, while officers of Fortune-500 companies be allowed to go 10 MPH above the posted speed limit?
Ah, yes. The President is the head of the Executive branch. The Executive branch enforces our laws, but the senior executive is allowed to break the very laws he is entrusted to enforce.
The President has no authority to enforce traffic laws. The DOJ has no authority to enforce traffic laws. Especially state laws.
There’s also a matter of security. A motorcade is vulnerable. The less time spent in one, the better.
Somewhere in your state motor vehicle statutes there is a provision giving the police the authority to shut down roads and divert traffic. It’s probably going to be in some administrative section and away from the traffic violation section that everyone pays attention to. Whether or not someone can prove it’s unconstitutional would take a lot of effort and money and probably go no where.
Any given police officer on patrol can break the speed limit under the circumstances where it is necessary (even just to write a simple citation), and they are entrusted to directly enforce traffic laws.