That’s a really good idea!
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Antifa to the rescue!
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Act with decorum unless you’re, you know, a GOP member or something… then you can misbehave all you like and no one will arrest you and put you on trial for it.
Fuck this noise. Of all the “my free speech” arguments, POLITICAL speech in front of Congress is the speech that Amendment is most likely to be referring to. Her laugh was political free speech, a spontaneous moment during a lying sack of shits dissemblance about his history, and removing her, then arresting and trying her for it, stifles those rights.
Nothing could be clearer. Americans need to remove the blinders of “well only here, not there, and only in front of these people, not those, and only if they are not celebrities, and not teachers, and not, and not, and not…” We are allowing the most important, most fundamental right-so important is was the FIRST ONE ENUMERATED-to be chipped away at. Our political free speech is a guaranteed right, not to be limited.
Fuck decorum, my friend. Fuck it right up the tight little brown sphincter.
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Ah, now behold the totally amazing power of the internet; I believe that every one of Mr. Sessions public appearances from this time forward will be filled with hysterical laughter. It’s contagious! And inevitable!
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add “lying through your goddamn racist teeth” to the code of conduct rules, and we’ll just call the whole thing a wash.
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65 comments and one BoingBoing author and only one person has come close to the facts. I hate Trump and his racist cronies as much as anyone, but let’s please stop with the misleading and incomplete reporting on this.
She was not convicted for laughing. She was convicted for what she did after she was asked to leave. She refused, Then “grew loud and more disruptive, eventually halting the confirmation hearing.”
The jury found her guilt of THAT, not of laughing in the first place. Now, if you want to argue that government proceedings shouldn’t be closed to people who bust out laughing and, thus, she shouldn’t have been asked to leave in the first place, that’s anouther, greyer, discussion. But that doesn’t get the outrage clicks, does it?
This is not a “blame the victim” post. This is a “WTF has happened to BoingBoing” post. You used to care about truth. Yet, on the same pages where you rightly attack Trump for his lies you post this stuff?
This matters. Truth and facts mattter. Lying about something because you like how it makes you feel or for the clicks it will get you is wrong. If you argue that it doesn’t make a difference, I note that only ONE comment out of 66 bothered to point out the actual facts. The rest walked away with the exact impression you wanted them to get: someone was convicted for laughing.
Stop doing this.
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Except the prosecution said that the laugh was enough for a conviction and made it the centerpiece of the trial, and what she did after was after police provocation - which is a whole set of other issues. Both of which have been said in this comment section.
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She was convicted of the crime of laughing at the AG, and you’ll hold your outrage until the sentence? Being arrested ought to be enough for outrage. Being convicted is proof that “Freedom of Speech” is now just a racist dog whistle, not a fact of life in the USA. But let’s see if she’s given hard time before we get upset.
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So glad you clarified. Yes, of course people should be put in jail for a year if they get loud and interrupt a meeting. That’s only civilized.
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Especially if they interrupt a government appointment. The first amendment is supposed to be about letting people deliver hate speech for money, not about letting people speak out against the decisions of their government.
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Remove the blinders a bit further.
The Bill of Rights is only worth what the USSC says it is, and the majority was just decisively swung by “fascism forever” Gorsuch.
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As it turns out, Joe Wilson was 100% correct.
Actually she was convicted of disrupting a Senate Hearing. Basically contempt of court which is not protected speech. A jury of her peers found her guilty.
Is it shitty that she was brought up on these charges to begin with? Yes, but we have a process and I’m not willing to decry the death of freedom of speech until it has run its course.
A man was just banned for life from Fenway Park for using a racial slur. Freedom of Speech is not a racist dog whistle.
That Obama was lying by saying that the ACA does not apply to illegal immigrants?
The Congressional Research Service disagrees with you [PDF]:
Those without coverage will include those who choose not to purchase health insurance
and are subject to the penalty for non-compliance and those who are exempt from the individual mandate for religious or other reasons, as well as about 7-8 million illegal immigrants.
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Jurors said anonymously that her conduct after she was asked to leave led to her conviction, but it wasn’t what she was charged with. Juries don’t always understand the law very well.
Snopes gives it the story a “TRUE”.
I care about the truth, and the truth very much appears to be that she was convicted for laughing at her government. That’s true even if you don’t want it to be. I got that from the Snopes analysis and from quotes I read from the prosecutors in articles that said it was her laugh that was the disruptive behaviour.
Whenever I see “truth matters” it seems to be in a reflexive defense of those with power wielding it against those without power.
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Indeed. nothing untoward is allowed in the [Senate] (U.S. Senate: The Caning of Senator Charles Sumner)!
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That’s not how I’ve seen the first amendment applied in US law. The courts don’t look to see if the law was intended to prevent speech, they see whether it has the effect of preventing speech. A group of women held a topless protest against anti-toplessness laws. They were arrested for toplessness, not for protesting. But they successfully made a free speech argument - their toplessness was an act of expression because it was related to their protest. They were successful in that argument. The idea that there are rooms where the first amendment doesn’t apply is ridiculous. Ejecting a person for being distruptive may be necessary to continue with a proceeding. Arresting them for laughing at you is not.
I’m sure that scholars of American law will have opinions. I’ve read cursory first amendment analyses of this in news articles and none say the arrest is justifiable, some question whether even removing her was justifiable, since her laugh doesn’t seem to have actually disrupted the proceedings.
This is not at all comparable to contempt of court. If it were there would be no jury involved. The ability to enforce contempt of court is an administrative power of judges, not a law that you can be arrested for.
The story you cite supports rather than detracts from my point. When do we talk about freedom of speech? We talk about it for Yiannopolous, for Coulter, for guys being banned from Fenway park for being racist, for celebrities caught on tape for racist slurs. When a woman is arrested for laughing at the Attorney General, we are supposed to bide our time and trust the system. There are a few groups that seriously go after freedom of speech issues like the ACLU who are just as likely to defend Fairooz (they have) as Coulter (they have). But mostly I see “Freedom of Speech” and “free speech” invoked to defend the right of racists to be racist, not the right of people to “petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
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