Categories
First Amendment rights

Shut Up, the City Council Explained

South Pittsburg council members are tired of criticism.

So they’ve outlawed it.

Officials in the “tidiest town in Tennessee” say that the negativity hampers their work.

According to Ryan Lewis’s report in Times Free Press, the policy, passed in December, forbids city employees, contractors, vendors and “anyone associated with the town in an official capacity who uses social networks” from publishing criticism “about the city, its employees or other associates” on such networks.

Only one council member, Paul King, voted No. The new law is “telling me what I can say at night. I call that freedom of speech. I can’t understand that.”

Jane DawkinsCity officials like Mayor Jane Dawkins (pictured) seem to conflate criticism as such, including merely untrue criticism, with “out-​and-​out lies,” and to regard censoring all criticism as an okay means of preventing alleged lies. But their blanket action goes way beyond any reasonable resort to defamation laws, which require more than mere putative falsehood, let alone putative negativity, to prove an actionable civil wrong.

Even if affected parties were assenting explicitly to the new policy, no agreement to forfeit one’s basic rights — whether freedom of speech or association, trial by jury, or any other — is properly enforceable.

The proper function of government is to protect these rights.

Not to violate them — even if officials are terribly annoyed by their exercise.

Every South Pittsburg council member who voted for this edict should be tossed out of office in the next election. If not sooner.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense

Pennsylvania Ballot Non-Access

Which major party works behind the scenes, illegally, to scuttle democratic processes? Well, consider Pennsylvania.

Ralph Nader has an $81,000 judgment against him, to pay off the legal costs of those who challenged his campaign in 2004. In early August, Nader petitioned the state Commonwealth Court to overturn that judgment, saying the whole thing was orchestrated — illegally — by Democratic legislators and aides in the State House. Conspiracy, he says.

He may have a case. In July, the state attorney general’s office filed criminal charges against a dozen people connected with the House Democratic caucus. Soon we’ll see how good the evidence for conspiracy is.

But don’t think it’s just Democrats who’d do nearly anything to keep a competitor off the ballot. This year, the chair of the Cumberland County Republican Party, an attorney, is suing the Libertarian Party for putting up former congressman Bob Barr as its presidential nominee. You see, when Pennsylvanians signed the petition, another name was on it. A paper candidate.

The plaintiff calls this fraud. Of all things.

Of course, since this minor party hadn’t held its national convention yet, the placeholder candidate was just a pro forma thing, to comply with an idiotic ballot access law that should be ruled unconstitutional anyway.

Yes, folks, the people who run both major parties look at election laws pretty much like the Borgias looked at pharmacology: Something to use to bump off the opposition.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.