A Shabby Little Victory

SB 1100: A brief update

Back on April 4, I wrote about SB 1100, a bill before the California legislature that would have allowed local legislative bodies to remove peasants from their meetings if the peasants were revolting. The very next day, no doubt feeling the negative waves in the air from my personal distaste, the author of the bill pulled it for near-comical revision.

Remember that the bill was introduced because people were mean to government:

Two weeks ago, the bill would have defined those “verbal attacks” as disruption, allowing a presiding officer to order a peasant speaking at a public meeting to become orderly; if the peasant had failed to obey the order to stop speaking in a disruptive way and making verbal attacks on officials, insert own eyeroll here, the presiding officer would have had the authority to order the person removed from the meeting. (“I think you’re a shitty mayor.” “GET OUT.”¹)

The bill in its original form also would have made it easier to declare whole audiences of the nasty public to be disruptive, allowing presiding officers to eject the public from a public meeting and conduct the public meeting without the public. Yes, that’s an awkward sentence. It describes as awkward idea.

The revised form of the bill, introduced on April 7, sort of solves the First Amendment problem of coding verbal attacks against officials as inherently disruptive. But it does it by making the bill something pretty close to meaningless. For example, here’s one of the things the bill would now define as disruptive behavior at a public meeting of a local legislative body:

So, yes: If this bill passes, you can no longer prevent local legislative discussion by beating your city council with a baseball bat, or by wrestling the mayor into a headlock. STOP TALKING ABOUT PASSING A NEW BUDGET OR I’LL KILL YOU ALL, also potentially considered disruptive. Finally, someone is getting around to banning that.

As to the rest of it…

This strikes me as tautological word salad that will torture the courts if they have to interpret it: Disruption is defined as engaging in behavior that disrupts. But I increasingly suspect that the courts won’t ever have to deal with the challenge of interpreting this one, if you see what I mean, nudge nudge.

What remains is the quite revealing premise that started the ball rolling. Go back to the last paragraph of the news story I linked at the top of this post:

"The Town of Los Gatos takes the safety and security of the Mayor, Council, and all members of the community very seriously," Prevetti said. "This is one of our highest priorities as public servants and we are using all legal means to protect our elected officials."

One of the highest priorities of public servants is protecting elected officials; one of the highest priorities of people in government positions is protecting people in government positions. The role of government is to serve government.

Maybe they should just build moats.

1. “Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system!”