“So, Walmart has no rights?!”
The frustration flowed from Yakima Mayor Janice Deccio to a 911 operator. Her compassionate heart bled profusely for the long-suffering stockholders and executives of one of the world’s richest companies.
“Hi, this is Mayor Deccio. I know that this isn’t an emergency call, but I need to talk to somebody,” she told the dispatcher. “There are far rightwing petitioners at Walmart and they are not leaving after Walmart has asked them repeatedly to do so. And the police have not taken them off the premises.”
But, as the voice at 911 explained to the distraught officeholder, Washington State law requires that commercial property must make a public accommodation for First Amendment activity such as petitioning.
The mayor’s thirst for a police solution to these “far rightwing” petitioners went unquenched.
“Obviously, the extreme left is freaked out by these initiatives,” offers Glen Morgan on his We the Governed podcast.
He’s referring to six conservative-oriented initiatives being promoted by Let’s Go Washington and petitioned onto Washington State’s 2024 ballot.
“Four of these initiatives reduce taxes,” Morgan points out. “One of them allows the police to actually chase violent criminals once again. And the other one confirms that parents have the right to know what strangers are doing to their kids at school or in unsupervised medical settings.”
Deccio now claims that mystery constituents told her the petitioners were aggressive and threatening . . . something she didn’t mention that on the call. The fact that her 911 plea has been made public might have something to do with her change of tune.
And don’t even mention ideology! “I don’t care,” she contends, “nor even know what they were petitioning about.”
The mayor added: “No one told the group they couldn’t petition, and it was certainly not my intention to stop them.”
No, of course not — she intended for the police to stop them.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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2 replies on “Methinks the Mayor”
Laws in Oregon and in California also grant easements to petitioners. Indeed, in Oregon, indoor malls are required to allow petitioners to set-up tables and whatnot within them.
While the mayor’s call to police was inappropriate, and would have been inappropriate even had she not used an emergency line, these laws should not have been effected. They are the equivalent of declaring that, since people have a right to engage in religious ceremonies, homeowners must allow their yards to be used for tented revival meetings.
Again, liberty of expression, of religion, of assembly, and of petition all mean that what are otherwise one’s rights are not constrained because of their expressive content or because they result in gatherings.
Of course, these laws were passed at the behest of the political left. When political activism was mostly a leftwing phenomenon, they seized upon excuses to license it broadly, to the point that activists could occupy the private property of merchants. After all, the left persuades themselves that the means of production — which include commercial sites — are rightfully communal property (perhaps held in trust by business people or perhaps stolen by them), and the left lose themselves and others by equivocating with the word “public”.
Now, with a large share of the voters quite alienated, and far more activism from outside the left, the left find themselves hoisted on their own petard, and grasp for appeal to the rights that they subverted long ago.
This mayor is not getting good advice from her staff. This was a no win from the beginning and I would have told her that. I don’t care that it’s Walmart or that it’s political petitions. This mayor! If she conducts her whole day this way that Town must be a wreck. Well, any publicity is good publicity. Not.