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The Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act.*
One of the few liberal media sources to cover the bill called it the anti-Occupy bill, but internal Occupy-related media seem to be
largely ignoring it. The Tea Party is outraged by it, but nobody else thinks
it’s aimed at the Tea Party. The Senate passed it unanimously and Obama signed
it, but the few constitutional experts to review it are adamant that it’s
unconstitutionally vague. Even the House, over two votes, could only muster
three votes against it. And what is the bit in the title about “Grounds
Improvement”? Is that some kind of sick
joke?
The
bill in question carries the official title of The Federal Restricted Buildings
and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011. It passed 399 to 3 in the House in 2011,
was amended and then passed unanimously by the Senate in 2012, then the amended
version passed the House 388 to 3 in 2012. President Obama signed it on March
8, 2012. The “Grounds Improvement”
riddle is solved by reading the introduction, or by more careful explication in
the blog post from the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund
“H.R. 347: Get the Truth on the New ‘Protest Law’”. As the introduction to the bill itself
explains, it is an act …To correct and simplify the drafting of
section 1752 (relating to restricted buildings or grounds) of title 18, United
States Code. So it’s not the grounds
being “improved”, it’s the original law, which was enacted in 1971 and then
substantially amended in 2006.
What
many of the more hysterical postings about the passage of H.R. 347 fail to note
is that the dangerously vague and overreaching language they are objecting to
was present at least from 2006. But there was one noticeable “improvement” that
is a new departure. Despite blog posts to the contrary, the act does NOT make
infringements that were previously misdemeanors now felonies and it does NOT
add new scope to the powers of either the Secret Service or the Department of
Homeland Security. These constitutional failings and likely infringements of
First Amendment rights were already present in the 2006 rewrite to the federal
code. What the act does empower, potentially, is the easier prosecution of a
defendant who has committed one of the proscribed acts.
The
most significant change was to remove the words “willfully and” before
“knowingly” in the description of the crimes in the 2006 act. What this means
is, if the law itself or this change to the law is not struck down as
unconstitutional, that a protester, for example, does not need to be proven to
have known that their alleged trespass was illegal. As the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund
explains, “As amended, a conviction arguably only requires proof that a person
‘knowingly entered’ a certain area. This is an effort to lower the bar for
prosecutors who would, arguably, no longer have to prove that a person knew his
conduct was unlawful.” Or, as the Senate bill sponsor Sen. Richard Blumenthal
(D-CT) said, it will “improve the law enforcement tools available to the
Secret Service in its attempts to protect the President, the Vice President,
and others on a day-to-day basis by closing loopholes in the current federal
law.”
Loopholes? Tools? An interesting spin.
This law
has not really been tested for constitutionality yet, whether we are talking
about the new “improved” version where you don’t even need to know the action
was forbidden by the law, or the original law itself. Those commenters who
realize that H.R. 347 is an amendment to a law that was already a “bad law” in
the words of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund point to its vagueness and
potential for abuse. A self-described Constitutional scholar associated with
the Tea Party, KrisAnne Hall, although she does not mention that the language
she is concerned about was part of the 2006 law and not newly introduced in
H.R.347, does make a very important first amendment point in this article
quoted extensively by the Gainesville Tea Party
The protected right of the people peaceably to assemble is
something that has fundamental and historical foundations. Our founders
established a clear “no trespassing sign” in our first amendment to keep the
government away from this fundamental right. “Congress shall make no law abridging…the
right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a
redress of grievances.” Legislation in the Congress seems to
be treading on the grounds of this constitutionally restricted territory.
…
The right to orderly conduct government is NOT a
Constitutionally protected right. However we DO have the right to free speech
and the right to peaceably assemble. Our
Constitution establishes the fundamental principle rights to speech and
assembly are held by the people and the government must protect these rights,
not limit them.
But
again, this language was pre-existing in the U. S. Code. And although several
constitutional scholars agree that it is but one of several flaws in the
existing law, it needs to be tested before one can assert absolutely that it is
against First Amendment rights.
And perhaps it will be very soon. When the 2006 law was
written, the country was under a Republican administration. There had been no
credit crisis, no austerity push (indeed, Federal spending was at an
unprecedented high, mainly due to the war in Iraq) and there was no Tea Party.
When the 2011 amendment, H.R. 347, was first proposed in 2011, it may have been
directed at the Tea Party. But more likely it was in anticipation of both major
parties’ upcoming national conventions, of a flood of Republican presedential
contenders under Secret Service protection, and also in remembrance of highly
volatile protests at G8, G20, NATO and other world “summit” meetings. It
certainly could not have been the “anti-Occupy” bill, because OWS had not
happened yet.
But it may be Occupy that tests it, for the next NSSE or
“National Special Security Event” (this is one circumstance that can invoke the
law, and includes all of the above as well as one recent Super Bowl) is the
NATO Summit meeting in May in Chicago.
And Occupy movements and affinity groups around the country and the world are
even now planning an overwhelming and highly committed protest presence at this
event, in most cases quite unaware of the constitutional challenge potentially hanging
over their actions.
*This article was originally written for print publication in a small Occupy newsletter but for complex reasons was never published there. I have changed it slightly to embed the links.
 I have had this great blog post about the economy running around in my head. I have the left view, the right view and correct view (maybe). I have how we got here and where we may be headed and what to do about it. But somehow, with reading this cacophony of voices, I am unable or unwilling to add my own. So all I can do is share.
- Madeleine Bunting of the Guardian has a stunning critique of the "free market" myths, beliefs, and orthodoxies that were in a great part responsible for our current woes.
- John Cochrane, an economist of the Chicago school, is probably a "believer" and he has the traditional conservative case against the (original) US bailout plan (now largely superseded by events - was it really only a week ago?) but also the most succinct and understandable description of what the mortgage crisis is really about.
- Freakonomics has loads of good stuff; I especially liked Save or Splurge? by Daniel Hamermesh, because of the little vignette about his marriage. (DH and I have lost over a third - a third! - of our retirement fund.)
- Recently I joined (under my "work" persona) a website community for IT and banking industry professionals that has an excellent news feed, making me overwhelmed with cluefulness. It's called Finextra and some of the more energetic (than me) members have blogs.
- Back at the Guardian, Gary Younge, a resident USA-expert, links the economic meltdown back to the people and power, and the election, of course.
- Update: stop press! I just found this, which has got everything, with large type titles. No really, go read it right now, it's brilliant.
There is a lot of Obama blogging going on, and the media is in a tizz. I will post far less than I have read. The best is still this pre-hysteria piece by Gary Younge, a Guardian columnist whose task it is to interpret American politics and society for the chattering classes of Britain (and he does it pretty well, too.)
Also worth a look:
I have been following this story about wildfires in Greece. It is becoming very serious. There are real fears that along with property and lives that are being lost each day, the fires are threatening to destroy ancient sites of great importance. Fires are raging in half the country and the fire services are not even close to equipped to cope with the scale of the disaster.
From the Onion, of course:
"Oh, we wouldn't want to bother the U.S. government—they've got more than
enough on their plate as it is," Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said. "Most of the
potholes on I-90 are less than four feet wide. We get by just fine."
When this was originally reported earlier this morning, there was a claim that no "nuclear material" was in danger of being released. Now it appears that some radioactive water was released into the sea. True, it is apparently of negligible danger, but the thing is, every time there is a nuclear accident, the first news out is always absurdly positive, and the real truth takes from hours to months to make it to the surface. It does make one cynical.
This just makes me sick. Ok, I wasn't at the trial and I should not judge someone by the expression on their face and I am not one of these uber-feminists who believes all men are rapists or even that most men are. And yes, I have thought that the astonishingly high numbers of people who claim to have been molested by a relative, usually a father or grandfather, is a little questionable. But dammit - look at his face. And look at his words: "I have no idea why my daughter hates me so much as to falsely accuse me of raping her." Well, that's damned suspicious. It would be more believable if you could come up with a plausible reason. Lots of girls are angry when their fathers leave their mothers and it usually doesn't escalate to an accusation of rape, then a formal charge, then a dramatic and messy suicide. How likely is it that a 17 year old girl genius would jump out of a hotel window to certain ugly death just to score a point against her innocent but hated father? I just don't think so.
I found this heart-rending NYT article about 30-year old Capt. Stephanie Bagley through Google News. It's just one of many on-the-ground reports from Iraq that paint a picture of despair and lost faith. In 2003 this blog and many journalists, historians and military experts speculated over whether Iraq would become GWB's "Vietnam". I don't believe things were ever this bad in Vietnam, not just from a specific body-count perspective (where Vietnam was much worse), but in terms of how quickly it all went wrong and how bad we will leave things when we leave. And certainly from the perspective of the morale of the soldiers, Iraq is the worst. With Vietnam, the leaders tended to question the motives behind the war after they got back home, if at all. But just to imagine a young person, in a position of command, with life-or-death responsibilities, who can find no way to believe in their mission but is impelled by duty to do it, it makes me weep. There has been a lot to make me weep in this terrible misadventure.
They say the Senate still "hangs in the balance" due partly to the wins by two independents. But one of those is Vermont's new junior Senator Bernie Sanders, formerly its only Representative, and before that the long-time mayor of Burlington. I think we can safely assume he will vote with the Democrats a lot of the time, though.
Klobuchar takes over the Senate seat vacated by liberal Democrat Mark Dayton. Part of the whole balance tipping deal.
As Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, "the most effective anti-poverty organisation in the world" is announced as winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace prize, Middle Tennessee State University is proud to claim him as one of their own. (He was a professor of Economics there.) Back in Tennessee, Yunus's work with the Grameen Bank has always been greatly admired - and influential. Numerous economics students from Tennessee have served internships with Grameen Bank in India, and some southern progressives are considering a programme based on it to help the refugees of Hurrican Katrina.
A quote from a British officer serving in Basra. Here is the whole quote, and its context:
Basra has become riddled with organised gangs, militias and death squads, and its police force is corrupt. According to senior coalition advisers, there are around 20 different security and police groups in the city, ranging from the directorate of education police to the justice police; the governor alone has 200 armed gunmen protecting him. Some of the police units are active in organised crime and have been infiltrated by militias, others work as death squads. There are also around a dozen religious militias.
"We are in a tribal society in Basra and we [the British army] are in effect one of these tribes," said Lt Col Simon Brown, commander of the 2nd Battalion. "As long as we are here the others will attack us because we are the most influential tribe. We cramp their style."
Gary Younge is so brilliant. Here is another wonderful commentary he's written in the Guardian, which has the best explanation about how electoral politics work in the US (without getting into the whole "third" party miasma - don't get me started!) This will explain, far better than I ever could, why people who are too poor to pay taxes love the Republicans, why the numbers don't seem to add up in the red state/blue state comparison (hint: they are ignoring someone - could it be? oh, no not again! - black people!!) and, most perplexingly to Brits who know a few Americans, how someone like GW can be elected and even popular.
Some provocative excerpts:
In his book What's The Matter With Kansas?, Thomas Frank described the tendency of working-class people to vote Republican as a form of derangement. He said that the working class had been hoodwinked into voting against its economic interests by "values" issues such as abortion and gay rights. There were two main problems with this argument. . . So what's the matter with all these analyses? First of all they seem to step over a huge elephant in the room - namely race. There is a reason why we are only talking about white working-class voters: black people, regardless of income, overwhelmingly vote Democrat. Indeed, were it not for black people, the Democrats would have won the presidency only once, in 1964. That was the year President Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights act, turned to an aide and said: "We have lost the south for a generation." We are well into the second generation now, and the racialised politics of the south seem to be influencing the rest of the country rather than the other way round.
"It's the stupidity, stupid." So says Mathew Yglesias, long one of my favourite political bloggers (now with Prospect magazine) and probably a fairly nice person, although I don't know him apart from his writing. Which is quite intelligent. The Stupid One? Oh, that's George W. Bush, of course. So profoundly not a nice person that words utterly fail me. I cannot write blogs about what a bad person the current "leader of the free world" is, but fortunately I don't have to. There are many others who do, and I admire, salute and quote them.
I am in full-blown rage-at-the-news mode this month. It is all so appalling, or else it's just squalid and depressing, or else it's the sort of thing that would be funny if it were not disgusting. Amongst the things exercising my rant-cells:
You can listen to this while you read this post.
It all started innocently enough. I have a little blogette in the community project called Kitchen Gardeners International. I saw a nice two-page spread in the Independent this morning on seed saving, so I thought I would post about that in KGI. Unlike this blog, or at least, unlike this blog used to be, KGI is meant to be a rant-free zone. But in the course of looking for extra links on seed saving, I uncovered an atrocity. That is to say, it would be an atrocity if it were being enforced, but given the state of things in Iraq, I somehow doubt that it is. After all, what do religious fanatics and neighbourhood warlords care about either seed heritage or Monsanto's profits?
If you keep up with UK news, you will have heard early last week about Nottingham being declared "the capital of crime" in the UK. Jon McGregor is a brilliant young writer (first novel If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things reviewed by Deborama's books two years ago) who happens to live in Nottingham. He has published an article defending his city which is well worth reading. Deborama works in Nottingham and can testify that it is a very vibrant multicultural city which has a lot going for it. However, McGregor says he has never seen a gun there, even in the the hands of the police, and I have to say I have seen armed police around the train station numerous times. Also, there was a gunshot murder just across the road from an office I used to work in in the city centre, on the doorstep of a popular night club (since closed).
Get your latest Wal-Mart news here. Wal-Mart and its many transgressions has been a recurrent theme of this blog, another theme that I have been regrettably neglecting in recent months. I will try to do better.
Here's a story that you may not have heard at the time. Ex-VP Al Gore paid to airlift the patients of a hospital in New Orleans to Tennessee when they were stranded in life-threatening circumstances. (Gore has apparently been a little shy about the story, no doubt due to his unfair and atrocious treatment by the press in the past.)
In an interesting if chilling parallel, I was watching the new Andrew Marr show Sunday AM this morning and in the ritual reading of the newspaper headlines, one of the national tabloids had a front page story alleging that hospital staff in New Orleans engaged in mercy killing of stranded and terminally ill patients. I could not find a link for this on the internet (I'm sure it must be out there*) but I did find a lot of other stuff, including this powerful accusation of ethnic cleansing in New Orleans. Here's a quote: Buffalo-based columnist Michael I. Niman notes Sept. 8 how the feds effectively shut down citizen self-help rescue efforts such as [New Orleans resident Charmaine] Neville's:
The Â?too dangerous to rescueÂ? myth was also employed by FEMA as rationale for ordering rescue teams to stand down early in the crisis. Louisianans are a tough lot, and many private boat owners from areas surrounding New Orleans immediately entered the city as flooding began, creating an ad hoc rescue flotilla. Many survivors tell of strangers in small fishing boats plucking them out of second story windows or off of roofs, depositing them high and dry on highway overpasses. The Federal government put a stop to such heroism, while failing to replace the independent effort with one of their own. (Online at MediaStudy.com)
There appears to have been an overt policy of racial and class discrimination in the rescue effort. ThMilwaukeeee Journal-Sentinel Sept. 2 reports the ordeal of Kelli Nelson, an African-American Wisconsin native working as a nurse at Charity Hospital, New Orleans' largest public hospital and trauma center. She and other personnel and patients were finally airlifted out to San Antonio on the 2nd, after she stood on the roof with a big sign reading "Save the babies, please get us out of here." The city's big private hospitals like Tulane were evacuated days earlier. Trapped in the city, Kelli did manage to get out some chilling text messages to her friends and family.
"She says the situation has gotten worse," the friends relayed that Kelli had messaged them. "The evacuation was aborted... [T]hey had taken babies and mothers down to a boat to go to Tulane's helicopter pad and they were refused access to the pad... what a horror story.
"Does that mean indigent people have no rights...?
* Update: It was The Sunday Mail. I ended up buying the paper and reading it "offline". The pundits on the show pooh-poohed the possibility of accuracy of this story, but I have to say it had, for me, a ring of verisimilitude.
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