California Legislators Fall Back on the Tuileries

In California, a new piece of legislation aims to switch off the First Amendment. It’s a grease fire of a bill, but the more interesting grease fire is the other one: the assumptions and interpretations that led the author to write the horrible thing.

Actual image of California legislator

First, the bill.

Senate Bill 1100 proposes to “modernize” the state’s open meeting law for local governments, “to meet the unique needs of our present day.” Can’t you already smell the bullshit? It’s in flux as it goes through committees, amended already and likely to be amended again, but the basic form of the thing is that it would give the “presiding officer” of a local legislative body — a city council, a county board of supervisors, a school board, the governing board of a special district — the authority to declare that a person offering public comment at a meeting is “disruptive,” the slipperiness of which is not a mystery, and to order an immediate end to that person’s comment. If, after a warning, the speaker doesn’t become orderly — if the horrible monster keeps saying mean things about elected officials — the bill would allow the presiding officer to order the person ejected from the meeting. In plain English, that means “dragged out by cops.”

More remarkably, the bill would allow a presiding officer to do the same thing with entire groups, declaring whole audiences at meetings of local legislative bodies to be disorderly, which would then allow the presiding officer to order the police to clear the room. And then the local legislative body could go on with its public meeting, its open session, in a room by itself, with the public locked outside. It’s the dream of the contemporary American ruling class, neatly captured in a single image: a few privileged souls making laws and passing budgets, alone, in a locked room. Onanism is the hottest kind of sex, declared the enraptured senator.

Now, on to the impetus for the idiotic thing. The bill was authored by Senator Dave Cortese — who is himself the son of a state legislator, in case you’re wondering what our social structure is in the 21st century — who represents a district in the Silicon Valley. The Silicon Valley is now a farm that mostly grows social poison, and Senator Dave doesn’t disappoint. He introduced SB 1100 after witnessing the terrifying “bullying” of a mayor in his legislative district:

Note that the premise is that a suburban mayor, who runs city meetings, is bullied and harassed at…city meetings, and you already know what this is: Some elected officials are angry and hurt because people show up at public meetings of a legislative body and viciously disagree with elected officials. Typical local headline: “QAnon Types Hijacking Los Gatos Council Meetings.”

The public, disagreeing with local elected officials, is “hijacking” the meetings of their city council. By commenting publicly during the, ya know, public comment portion.

I’m sorry I have to type this, and my fingers resent the effort, but people who live in a community, even people who hold views you find abhorrent, can’t — flatly, cannot ever — “hijack” meetings of their city council by speaking, even if they speak in passionate, insulting, angry, distasteful ways. Ever.

The Supreme Court, in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), described the “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.” If you’re a public official and you feel that people you don’t agree with are “bullying” you by speaking at public meetings, resign. Do it now. And then go drop dead, by the way.

What’s most remarkable about this premise that we’re facing a new crisis — that we need to give governments more power to exclude the public “to meet the unique needs of our present day” — is that elected officials live in a far milder climate than American elected officials have ever experienced. Thomas Hart Benton and Andrew Jackson brawled in the street, with friends and family in support, in an orgy of stabbing and shooting, after which Jackson spent years with a bullet fired by Benton’s brother lodged in his arm. After the brawl, after the shooting and the stabbing, Benton and Jackson were allies in the Senate. Andrew Jackson shook Thomas Hart Benton’s hand with a bullet in his body that was put there by Jesse Benton in a brawl that included Jesse’s brother Thomas. Also, the Vice-President of the United States shot and killed a former Secretary of the Treasury. Also, some people yelled at the mayor of a town in suburban California.

American political disagreement has looked like this:

But ohh, you precious thing, some local residents disagreed with you at a council meeting, it’s absolute bullying.

So we have to turn off the First Amendment, now. You can petition the government for a redress of grievances, but only if government thinks you’re nice.