Law suits by a pair ejected from a Bush speech a couple of years ago have led to a fascinating appeals argument asserted by lawyers for some of the people who ejected them.
Leslie Weise and Alex Young were removed from a Bush address on Social Security after a staffer for Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., pointed them out as suspicious because they had arrived in a car with an anti-war bumper sticker. Weise and Young sued, arguing that the ouster violated their First Amendment right to free speech.
Attorneys for Michael Casper and Jay Klinkerman, who were involved in removing them, have filed an appeals brief saying the ouster was legal. “The president’s right to control his own message includes the right to exclude people expressing discordant viewpoints from the audience,” states the brief, filed by attorneys Sean Gallagher, Dugan Bliss and others representing Casper and Klinkerman. [emphasis mine]
Say what?
Casper’s attorneys cited a case, Sistrunk vs. City of Strongsville, involving the first President George Bush. There, an appeals court supported the removal of a person with a Bill Clinton button from an event organized by the Republican Party.
The speech organizers were trying to “convey a pro-Bush message to the media by use of pro-Bush speakers and largely pro-Bush attendees,” they quote the case. They wanted to ‘send the media a message’ that Bush would win; to convey the message that ‘Strongsville Trusts George Bush.’ “
In other words, Bush (and, by extension, the folks “protecting” him) were in this case just exercising their First Amendment rights to, um, send (or “control”) a message that nobody disagrees with them. Anybody who actually did disagree was trampling Bush’s constitutional rights.
Huh?
It’s a very goofy argument (and one that the lawyers assert nobody in the White House was involved in framing). For one thing, in the Sistrunk case it was an ostensibly private GOP-sponsored event, whereas the current case deals with a public speech (taxpayer funded). The argument that the government can exclude people from the audience based on their political views seems to fly in the face of the First Amendment, especially if arguing that it’s being done to protect the President’s First Amendment rights to speak his own opinion (the First Amendment, of course, only protects someone from governmental suppression of their opinion, not from dissent by other people).
Taken to its logical conclusion, any attempt to publicly disagree with a statement by the President could be considered an attack on Bush’s civil rights, and any suppression of such dissent, would, by “controlling the message,” be justified by the First Amendment.
All animals are equal, in other words, but some are more equal than others. Yeesh.
I think this requires consideration of the context. It seems to me that within a Bush-sponsored event, Bush has the right to control the message if you regard the entire event as a ‘speech’. Without that additional consideration, I think we’re left with a logical paradox that no one can disagree with another person without violating their freedom of speech. That’s clearly not a good way to interpret the constitution.
I think this is super interesting, thanks for pointing it out.
At a privately organized event — e.g., a GOP soiree — it’s reasonable for the organizers to express whatever control over the attendees that they want. At a government-organized event, as this one was, restrictions apply, via the First Amendment. Even if the entire “setting” is a speech (which allows even broader expansion — “I want my entire presidency to be an expression of my vision for this great nation — so nobody can criticize or take away from that without trampling on my freedom of expression”), the context does matter.
Now, I suppose that might encourage (further) limiting presidential appearances to privately-sponsored settings — but at some point, I suspect courts might start considering that de facto a public speech. I’d hope.