anti-protest bill signed by Barack Obama is a quiet attack o
Pepe Silvia
Posts: 3,758
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... ch_.2.html
The government says the anti-protest bill was just a small tweak of the existing law. Don’t believe it.
n post-Occupy America, it’s often hard to know whether new citizen protest laws signal the end of free speech or a mere tweak of the machine. That looks to be the case with the new anti-protest bill that passed the House of Representatives overwhelmingly two weeks ago and was signed into law by the president soon thereafter. On its face, the new legislation doesn’t change a whole lot. Yet the Occupy protesters are in an uproar that the bill both targets them and also signals a radical shift in free speech law. Almost nobody else seems to have noticed it at all. Who’s right?
That all depends on what you want to protest and where.
H.R. 347, benignly titled the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act, passed the House 399-3. Such a lopsided vote suggests that nobody in Congress is bothered by this, on either side of the aisle. When President Obama signed it on March 8, almost nobody seems to have cared.
Simply put, the way the bill will “improve” public grounds is by moving all those unsightly protesters elsewhere. The law purports to update an old law, Section 1752 of Title 18 of the United States Code, that restricted areas around the president, vice president, or any others under the protection of the Secret Service. The original law was enacted in 1971 and amended in 2006. At first blush, the big change here is that while the old law made it a federal offense to "willfully and knowingly" enter a restricted space, now prosecutors need only show that you did it "knowingly"—that you knew the area was restricted, even if you didn’t know it was illegal to enter the space. This has been characterized in some quarters as a small technical change that hardly warrants an arched eyebrow, much less a protest.
But it’s important to understand what has changed since the original law was enacted in 1971, because it shows how much a tiny tweak to the intent requirement in a statute can impact the free speech of everyone.
For one thing, the law makes it easier for the government to criminalize protest. Period. It is a federal offense, punishable by up to 10 years in prison to protest anywhere the Secret Service might be guarding someone. For another, it’s almost impossible to predict what constitutes “disorderly or disruptive conduct” or what sorts of conduct authorities deem to “impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions.”
The types of events and individuals warranting Secret Service protection have grown exponentially since the law was enacted in 1971. Today, any occasion that is officially defined as a National Special Security Event calls for Secret Service protection. NSSE’s can include basketball championships, concerts, and the Winter Olympics, which have nothing whatsoever to do with government business, official functions, or improving public grounds. Every Super Bowl since 9/11 has been declared an NSSE.
And that brings us to the real problem with the change to the old protest law. Instead of turning on a designated place, the protest ban turns on what persons and spaces are deemed to warrant Secret Service protection. It’s a perfect circle: The people who believe they are important enough to warrant protest can now shield themselves from protestors. No wonder the Occupy supporters are worried. In the spirit of “free speech zones,” this law creates another space in which protesters are free to be nowhere near the people they are protesting.
Consider that more than 6,700 people have been arrested at Occupy events since last September. Thus, while these changes to the law are not the death of free speech, they aren’t as trivial as the administration would have you believe. Rather, they are part of an incremental and persistent effort by the government to keep demonstrators away from events involving those at the top of the political food chain.
Let’s start by recalling that political speech—of the sort you might direct toward Newt Gingrich or Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, both of whom merit Secret Service protection—is what the First Amendment most jealously protects. Demonstrators can almost never be muzzled based on what it is they want to say. The First Amendment also has a special solicitude for speech in what are called traditional public fora. There is a presumed right of access to streets, sidewalks, and public parks for the purpose of engaging in political discussion and protest. And while the government can always impose reasonable limits on demonstrations to ensure public order, that power comes with a caveat: It must never be used to throttle unpopular opinion or to discriminate against disfavored speakers. That is a powerful caveat: The degree of slack a court will cut any given restriction on public protest will rest on whether the government appears to be acting even handedly.
Restrictions that apply equally to all subjects and all points of view will usually be approved by the courts if they are narrowly designed to advance a significant governmental interest, such as public safety. But protest restrictions that discriminate based on subject or viewpoint must be absolutely necessary to serve a compelling state interest. Courts rarely permit them.
he changes in Section 1752 thus really do matter because they permit those in power to relegate their detractors to perform their political speech in remote locations, far from the public and the press. They do so in the name of protecting the security of the government official, despite the fact that their actual motivation for doing so has everything to do with the message of their opponents. Law professor Timothy Zick of William and Mary Law School published an outstanding analysis of what are known as “spatial tactics” in the Texas Law Review a few years back. When it comes to relegating demonstrators to obscurity, two approaches predominate: keeping protesters outside an expansive, sanitized bubble that surrounds the very event they have come to protest, or allowing them to come closer, but only within the confines of heavily policed “protest pens” that one federal judge likened to temporary internment camps.
Here’s one way the new legislation becomes doubly problematic: The exclusion zones imposed by Section 1752 have no natural or intuitive spatial boundaries. They can be as large as law enforcement claims is necessary to ensure the security of whoever the Secret Service is protecting. The “free speech zone” is a moving target, not a delineated area.
Brett Bursey learned that distinction the hard way. The 50-year-old brought an antiwar sign to an October 2002 Bush rally at an airport in Columbia, S.C. Police and Secret Service agents told Bursey to take his sign to a free speech zone a half-mile away or face arrest for trespass. He refused.
Bursey knew more about state law than the officers arresting him. Thirty years earlier, he had demonstrated against the Vietnam War when Richard Nixon visited the same airport, and demonstrators who refused to disperse were charged with trespass. The South Carolina Supreme Court threw out their convictions.
So, not unreasonably, Bursey thought he’d get the same result in 2002, and to a point, he was right. The state trespass charges against him were indeed dismissed on the strength of the precedent that he himself had helped to set a generation earlier. But four months later, he was charged with violating Section 1752. His conviction was upheld on appeal.
Bursey later described his experience to the San Francisco Chronicle. When he asked authorities if the problem with him staying in the area was related to the content of his sign, police told him that it did. As to geography: “The problem was, the restricted area kept moving. It was wherever I happened to be standing.”
Bursey might not have been convicted had he not engaged in a lengthy discussion with police regarding the legality of his actions, which helped to prove that his incursion was willful. A showing of that mental state is no longer necessary, however. In futzing with the intent requirements of Section 1752, Congress may well have had Bursey in mind.
It is tempting to dismiss the exile of protesters as a reasonable concession to security in what law enforcement would like you to believe is a new age of terrorism. After all, they will say, demonstrators are not being silenced; they are merely being denied access to the forum of their choice and the chance to amplify their own message by presenting it against the backdrop of the message they oppose. But that is precisely why we should be concerned.
Whatever they have come to say, the presence of demonstrators at these events carries a powerful message in and of itself that cannot be delivered as effectively in any other place. Being permitted to deliver their message in the same forum and at the same time as the speaker they oppose highlights the passion and commitment that animates the protesters. It underscores the existence of dissent, which is precisely what those who would sanitize the space around high officials would have us forget.
In short, citizen protests puncture the pretty, patriotic illusion of a focus-grouped, Photoshopped media event, and replace it with the gritty patriotic reality of democracy in action. That’s why the teeny cosmetic changes to Section 1752, which purport to be about new kinds of security, are really all about optics. They conflate dissent with danger, a Cold War habit which America was beginning to outgrow, but which after 9/11 seems to be a permanent part of the political landscape.
The government says the anti-protest bill was just a small tweak of the existing law. Don’t believe it.
n post-Occupy America, it’s often hard to know whether new citizen protest laws signal the end of free speech or a mere tweak of the machine. That looks to be the case with the new anti-protest bill that passed the House of Representatives overwhelmingly two weeks ago and was signed into law by the president soon thereafter. On its face, the new legislation doesn’t change a whole lot. Yet the Occupy protesters are in an uproar that the bill both targets them and also signals a radical shift in free speech law. Almost nobody else seems to have noticed it at all. Who’s right?
That all depends on what you want to protest and where.
H.R. 347, benignly titled the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act, passed the House 399-3. Such a lopsided vote suggests that nobody in Congress is bothered by this, on either side of the aisle. When President Obama signed it on March 8, almost nobody seems to have cared.
Simply put, the way the bill will “improve” public grounds is by moving all those unsightly protesters elsewhere. The law purports to update an old law, Section 1752 of Title 18 of the United States Code, that restricted areas around the president, vice president, or any others under the protection of the Secret Service. The original law was enacted in 1971 and amended in 2006. At first blush, the big change here is that while the old law made it a federal offense to "willfully and knowingly" enter a restricted space, now prosecutors need only show that you did it "knowingly"—that you knew the area was restricted, even if you didn’t know it was illegal to enter the space. This has been characterized in some quarters as a small technical change that hardly warrants an arched eyebrow, much less a protest.
But it’s important to understand what has changed since the original law was enacted in 1971, because it shows how much a tiny tweak to the intent requirement in a statute can impact the free speech of everyone.
For one thing, the law makes it easier for the government to criminalize protest. Period. It is a federal offense, punishable by up to 10 years in prison to protest anywhere the Secret Service might be guarding someone. For another, it’s almost impossible to predict what constitutes “disorderly or disruptive conduct” or what sorts of conduct authorities deem to “impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions.”
The types of events and individuals warranting Secret Service protection have grown exponentially since the law was enacted in 1971. Today, any occasion that is officially defined as a National Special Security Event calls for Secret Service protection. NSSE’s can include basketball championships, concerts, and the Winter Olympics, which have nothing whatsoever to do with government business, official functions, or improving public grounds. Every Super Bowl since 9/11 has been declared an NSSE.
And that brings us to the real problem with the change to the old protest law. Instead of turning on a designated place, the protest ban turns on what persons and spaces are deemed to warrant Secret Service protection. It’s a perfect circle: The people who believe they are important enough to warrant protest can now shield themselves from protestors. No wonder the Occupy supporters are worried. In the spirit of “free speech zones,” this law creates another space in which protesters are free to be nowhere near the people they are protesting.
Consider that more than 6,700 people have been arrested at Occupy events since last September. Thus, while these changes to the law are not the death of free speech, they aren’t as trivial as the administration would have you believe. Rather, they are part of an incremental and persistent effort by the government to keep demonstrators away from events involving those at the top of the political food chain.
Let’s start by recalling that political speech—of the sort you might direct toward Newt Gingrich or Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, both of whom merit Secret Service protection—is what the First Amendment most jealously protects. Demonstrators can almost never be muzzled based on what it is they want to say. The First Amendment also has a special solicitude for speech in what are called traditional public fora. There is a presumed right of access to streets, sidewalks, and public parks for the purpose of engaging in political discussion and protest. And while the government can always impose reasonable limits on demonstrations to ensure public order, that power comes with a caveat: It must never be used to throttle unpopular opinion or to discriminate against disfavored speakers. That is a powerful caveat: The degree of slack a court will cut any given restriction on public protest will rest on whether the government appears to be acting even handedly.
Restrictions that apply equally to all subjects and all points of view will usually be approved by the courts if they are narrowly designed to advance a significant governmental interest, such as public safety. But protest restrictions that discriminate based on subject or viewpoint must be absolutely necessary to serve a compelling state interest. Courts rarely permit them.
he changes in Section 1752 thus really do matter because they permit those in power to relegate their detractors to perform their political speech in remote locations, far from the public and the press. They do so in the name of protecting the security of the government official, despite the fact that their actual motivation for doing so has everything to do with the message of their opponents. Law professor Timothy Zick of William and Mary Law School published an outstanding analysis of what are known as “spatial tactics” in the Texas Law Review a few years back. When it comes to relegating demonstrators to obscurity, two approaches predominate: keeping protesters outside an expansive, sanitized bubble that surrounds the very event they have come to protest, or allowing them to come closer, but only within the confines of heavily policed “protest pens” that one federal judge likened to temporary internment camps.
Here’s one way the new legislation becomes doubly problematic: The exclusion zones imposed by Section 1752 have no natural or intuitive spatial boundaries. They can be as large as law enforcement claims is necessary to ensure the security of whoever the Secret Service is protecting. The “free speech zone” is a moving target, not a delineated area.
Brett Bursey learned that distinction the hard way. The 50-year-old brought an antiwar sign to an October 2002 Bush rally at an airport in Columbia, S.C. Police and Secret Service agents told Bursey to take his sign to a free speech zone a half-mile away or face arrest for trespass. He refused.
Bursey knew more about state law than the officers arresting him. Thirty years earlier, he had demonstrated against the Vietnam War when Richard Nixon visited the same airport, and demonstrators who refused to disperse were charged with trespass. The South Carolina Supreme Court threw out their convictions.
So, not unreasonably, Bursey thought he’d get the same result in 2002, and to a point, he was right. The state trespass charges against him were indeed dismissed on the strength of the precedent that he himself had helped to set a generation earlier. But four months later, he was charged with violating Section 1752. His conviction was upheld on appeal.
Bursey later described his experience to the San Francisco Chronicle. When he asked authorities if the problem with him staying in the area was related to the content of his sign, police told him that it did. As to geography: “The problem was, the restricted area kept moving. It was wherever I happened to be standing.”
Bursey might not have been convicted had he not engaged in a lengthy discussion with police regarding the legality of his actions, which helped to prove that his incursion was willful. A showing of that mental state is no longer necessary, however. In futzing with the intent requirements of Section 1752, Congress may well have had Bursey in mind.
It is tempting to dismiss the exile of protesters as a reasonable concession to security in what law enforcement would like you to believe is a new age of terrorism. After all, they will say, demonstrators are not being silenced; they are merely being denied access to the forum of their choice and the chance to amplify their own message by presenting it against the backdrop of the message they oppose. But that is precisely why we should be concerned.
Whatever they have come to say, the presence of demonstrators at these events carries a powerful message in and of itself that cannot be delivered as effectively in any other place. Being permitted to deliver their message in the same forum and at the same time as the speaker they oppose highlights the passion and commitment that animates the protesters. It underscores the existence of dissent, which is precisely what those who would sanitize the space around high officials would have us forget.
In short, citizen protests puncture the pretty, patriotic illusion of a focus-grouped, Photoshopped media event, and replace it with the gritty patriotic reality of democracy in action. That’s why the teeny cosmetic changes to Section 1752, which purport to be about new kinds of security, are really all about optics. They conflate dissent with danger, a Cold War habit which America was beginning to outgrow, but which after 9/11 seems to be a permanent part of the political landscape.
don't compete; coexist
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
Godfather.
i must have missed the line that claimed obama is a dictator.... :roll: :roll: :roll:
so, you have no problem with this change in the laws? it's ok that if a protestor is near, say even the super bowl, a basketball championship or even a concert (as long as the secret service were there), that is a federal crime punishable with up to 10 years in prison?? you don't have a problem with the free speech zone being determined at will without a set reference or distance? so you have no problem with this, either?
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
what do I have a problem with ? :think: ...not much as long as long this president we are stuck with would not keep trying to change the laws of my country to fit his dick-tator agenda, the guys an ass-clown this is America ,home of the free land of the brave (with the exception of a few) and country where with hard work you can prosper and spreading the wealth with people that don't want to work hard is bullshit,and singing this law about protesting is a direct hit on everybody, I'll be glad to see this guy leave office. there you asked and there ya have it
Godfather.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YrYue6lKgQ
i don't see it as obama trying to be a dictator, i see it as a pattern that has been going on for decades. at the most we only have obama for 5 more years, that is not a dictator.
i'm kinda surprised none of the obama supporters felt like weighing in on it, had this been bush they would be having aneurysms and frothing at the mouth but i guess like with everything else 'questionable' obama does they will just shrug and say 'meh, no big deal'
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
I miss Freedom Watch
It is terrifying when you are too stupid to know who is dumb
- Joe Rogan
It doesn't suprise me one bit.. His base doesn't give a shit nor does he about the " Constitution" much less individual sovereignty.. It's all about the collective..
Just look at some of his recent excutive orders starting with NDAA.
How he trashes our Supreme court like he recently did while standing next to Mexicos president.
When he went around congress claiming they weren't in session when in fact they were.
Deciding which laws he's going to follow based on what he thinks is constitutional or not and he even signed
into law.
Sorry I'm not going to provide links bcos for some reason my iPad will erase the screen when I open another and try to go back to this one. All you have to do is just google some of what I mentioned.
I mean hell go back and listen to that speech ha gave in Kentucky I think it was where he said that Capitalism doesn't work. And there are many examples. Just go back and compare his speeches and Reagan and you will see what a real leader sounds likewho loved this country and it's people for that matter and someone who despises it.
Obama,
He’s just told you that he’s rewritten the responsibilities of the president of the United States. This could of come out of the mouth of Hugo Chavez, Castro. Or any two-bit banana republic dictator on the face of the earth Unilaterally appointing people to positions when the constitution says he does not have the power to unilaterally appoint.“
Obama to Congress: I’ll decide what’s constitutional
Election season is here, and you might think President Obama would be going out of his way to show voters that he can be trusted with the powers of the presidency. But you would be wrong. Just a few days before Christmas, Obama served notice to all Americans that he will continue to abuse executive privilege by seeking new ways to vilify gun owners and further his anti-gun agenda.
Congress placed a provision in the $1 trillion omnibus spending bill for 2012 designed to bar the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from using any of its $30.7 billion taxpayer funds to “advocate or promote gun control.” However, upon signing the bill into law, President Obama issued a caveat of his own:
I have advised Congress that I will not construe these provisions as preventing me from fulfilling my constitutional responsibility to recommend to the Congress’s consideration such measures as I shall judge necessary and expedient.
In other words: “Congress may pass laws, but I decide which of its laws are constitutional and which I can simply choose to ignore.”
Of course, the Constitution doesn’t actually give the president this power, but Obama won’t allow a little thing like the U.S. Constitution get in his way. And in the present case, Congress is right to try to prevent him from using a federal health agency, not to mention our tax dollars, as a weapon in his ongoing war against the Second Amendment. As The Washington Times reports, NIH has wasted over $5 million since 2002 producing deceptive studies aimed at furthering gun control — including one study that tried “to prove that a home without firearms was essential to a child’s safety and well-being.”
Even more importantly, Congress knows that there is no scheme too radical, or dangerous, for the Obama administration when it comes to using federal agencies to push its anti-gun agenda.
Last month, email exchanges surfaced between employees at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE) that show the administration helped illegally transfer guns to violent Mexican drug cartels in order to manufacture a case for gun registration. Now gun dealers in four Southwest border states must abide by a new gun registration requirement, courtesy of BATFE, that forces them to register the sales of any law-abiding American who purchases more than one semi-automatic rifle within five business days.
Congress never passed any law like this. Rather, Obama’s BATFE orchestrated the deadly “Fast and Furious” gun-walking scandal to give cause for its unconstitutional gun-control edict. Given this, how hard is it to envision the Obama administration issuing a phony “health” study that maligns gun owners?
Obama may not have a majority in Congress, or the will of the people, behind his anti-gun agenda. But that isn’t stopping his administration from finding deceitful ways to evade Congress and build public support for gun bans, gun registration and other regulations designed to weaken and destroy our Second Amendment rights.
Chris W. Cox is the executive director of the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) and serves as the organization’s chief lobbyist.
when my son wanted me to buy him a new car.
Godfather.
I know i'm just messing with you but you know just as well that our rights have been getting attacked for the last 10yrs and why don't you beef about all the rights the GOP are allways trying to attack let's see oh yeah let's start with a WOMANS RIGHTS ....
I've had a beef with losing our freedoms for a looong time but this is the train ...
and I'm sorry but I don't see or understand this stuff about women losing their rights...sorry man I just don't see it.
Godfather.
I sign petitions all the time.
i've had beef when the republicans were doing it, too. see, i have been constant, the 'liberals' and 'progressives' on the other hand..... :roll:
they bitched for 8 years about bush but when it's their guy doing it they don't have a thing to say other than make excuses for him and try to rationalize why it's not obama's fault or ok.
and that's why nothing really changes in this country, the majority are too interested in being right than in actual progress. they'd rather point their finger at the other party while making excuses when their party does the exact same things. instead of dealing with it there's just deflection. "why don't you beef about what the republicans did 3 years ago???" i did, so did many others, where the fuck are they now? oh, right, rationalizing why they HAVE to vote for obama because that big, bad, mean scary republican might win and give us.....pretty much the same, the only difference is in the few crumbs they throw their base.
anyway, i don't think reagan was for americans, either. i think he was like most of our presidents for the past few decades - just a figurehead for a much larger agenda. it reminds me of that treehouse of horror when the two aliens pose as clinton and dole and when homer unmasks them before election one of them says "well, you have to vote for one of us, america is a two party system" and so they do.
little by little they take our rights away and as long as it's not the other party doing it we're fine with it.
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
Gotta silence those Ron Paul supporters.