Do we have the right to assemble and petition our government?

It’s only the First Amendment, and we all know that the US Constitution is the biggest enemy to our freedom. What were those Socialists thinking when they wrote that?

I think Joe Strummer said it best, “You have the right to free speech, as long as you’re not dumb enough to actually try it”. This will continue as long as most of the country chooses to remain complacent and marginalize movements like OWS that they are too lazy to learn anything about except what the mass media dictates they should know about it. Another quote that is appropriate for this is Mark Twain: “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it”. Too many now believe that patriotism is about supporting the government no matter what. It seems that people forget that the first patriots were rebels.

The Constitution protects against the government forming any law that violates those rights. They already fucked up by enacting laws that violate these rights. It’s only downhill from here..

Regarding the George W. Bush quote. From the author of the distrubutor of the quote Doug Thompson: “This is to let you know that the piece on Bush and the Constitution has been changed and reads:

‘This article was based on sources that we thought, at the time, were reliable. We have since discovered reasons to doubt their veracity. For that reason, this article has been removed from our database.’

“I no longer stand behind that article or its conclusions and have said so in answers to several recent queries. In addition, I have asked that it be removed from a documentary film.”

http://www.factcheck.org/2007/12/bush-the-constitution-a-goddamned-piece-of-paper/

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_7779.shtml

@bkcunningham True, but you can see how a man who actually said how much easier it would be if it were a dictatorship said not once but twice might lead people to believe that quote.
Thanks for the fact-checking though :)

Yes, you have the right to protest by assembly and by petition among others.

Too many people are mistaking the right to peacefully assemble with breaking all the rules of decency and respect for public land.

Renting a large meeting hall to sit or stand in an orderly group to discuss the government and how to bring about change is completely different from joining a large mob of people making a mess in the streets, who have no idea what they are doing or why.

@YARNLADY I guess you missed the groups that clean up after themselves… which is most of them.

@jerv What? A clean, orderly group is not newsworthy.

On the one hand, freedom means the freedom to do things, but not at others’ expense. I.e., you can do these things, but at your own expense. So if you want to meet, it might be fair to say that you need to hire a meeting hall and hold your meeting at your expense.

On the other hand, meeting halls aren’t cheap to rent. That’s almost like saying that only rich people have the right to peaceably assemble. Plus, meeting in a hall isn’t going to draw media attention and further your cause. The right to peaceable assemble implies the right to assemble (peacefully, of course) in public places where the public will hear your protest.

You are allowed to assemble and hold a protest on the National Mall in DC. You don’t need a permit if it is under 25 people protesting. Over 25, you apply through the National Parks Permit Office. I don’t know where anyone would get the idea that you can’t protest on the National Mall. It simply isn’t true.

I’m also curious who the woman from Denver was that you mentioned @ETpro. I couldn’t find any stories of the sort from Denver that you wrote about in your original question. I know that something similar happened to Naomi Wolf in NY.

But, Wolf had been attending an awards ceremony honoring NY Governor Andrew Cuomo, who was being presented with the “game changer of the year” award from the Huffington Post website. When she came out of the event, she allegedly told about 50 protesters that they didn’t need a permit to use a megaphone.

When police told Wolf and the group to clear the street, she allegedly refused and was arrested.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/19/naomi-wolf-arrested-occupy-wall-street

http://washingtonpeacecenter.net/permitprocess

@bkcunningham I think they might get that idea based on the actions of men with badges doing things up to and including physical assault at the Jefferson Memorial not too far away. Remember this?

The National Union of Students in the U.K. applied for permission to hold a protest march outside the Houses of Parliament. The Union expected about 3000 protesters – Margaret Thatcher was planning to cut student subsidies – and that is what they told the police. Actually some 30,000 turned up. I think this was in 1985 because that was the year they raised the fees for foreign students (I was not affected because I had paid my fees up front.)

I was living in Woodbridge, Va., just outside of DC, when Mary Brooke Oberwetter was arrested for dancing inside the Memorial. She filed a lawsuit for suppression of First Amendment rights. The federal appeals court in Washington unanimously upheld a dismissal of the lawsuit.

That ruling is supposedly what this group was “protesting.” In their ruling in the Oberwetter case, the court said dancing is prohibited, ...“because it stands our as a type of performance, creating its own center of attention and distracting from the atmosphere of solemn commemoraton” the regulations are intended to preserve.

“Outside the Jefferson Memorial, of course, Oberwetter and her friends have always been free to dance to their hearts’ content.”

http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/748BE2DE8AF2A2A485257893004E07FC/$file/10-5078-1308285.pdf

Unfortunately, by Congress giving the DHS such sweeping power(s), our Constitutional Rights have already been put on very shaky ground. This has led to an increased ‘military attitude’ among our various law enforcement branches, where-by they are becoming forces for suppression instead of public service. The NYPD has used some very brutal tactics against the OWS protestors, to the point that they have actually been joined by military veterans who now recognize that our government (Congress) has been less than honest with them. I hope that the message that the OWS protestors are trying to emphasize is that the average American citizen has had enough of Wall Street’s greed & bank’s greed & big corporation’s greed. Things must change if this country is going to have a chance to survive.

@jerv Thanks. Reading the answers here, and considering the bias of those who supplied them, it is puzzling to me why those who claim to be strict constructionists and wrap themselves continually in the flag and the spirit of our Great Founders seem so disdainful of what the Founders actually wrote. They pick a few words and phrases here and there when convenient to support theoir ideology, but want no part of most of the Constitution.

@amujinx Well said. Great and very applicable quotes.

@Afos22 Unless enough of us stand up and say ENOUGH! I fear you are right.

@bkcunningham Thanks for pointing that out to me. Please retract that portion of the quote. I recalled hearing the quote on the news, and Googled it. The link I found on www.Wikiquote.org was posted innocently. But I trust www.Factcheck.org as an authoritative source.

I have to agree with @jerv though that Bush more than any President shreded the constitution. In fact, I wrote Obama a scathing letter denouncing his refusal to allow the Justice Department to investigate whether criminal charges were in order. My fear was justified. Obama liked the idea of having those extended powers.

@marinelife Think you for a simple, honest answer. I sincerely hope the movement can raise the money and support to take each and every one of these cases up through appeals.

@YARNLADY I’ve read the constitution many times. I’ve reviewed the First Amendent as recently as today. Somehow the Founders neglected to mention that it only applied to rented halls. Also, when you look at how they attempted to protest and assemble to petition King George, I think it is beyond clear what the Founding Fathers intended, and it wasn’t a bonanza for hall rentals and a way to shut off protests from public view. @HungryGuy explains what they intended pretty well.

@bkcunningham 25 people or less is not a reasonable restriction to the size of protests. It ensures that no effective protest of grievances will ever reach the Government’s distant ear. There is nothing in the Constitution about needing a permit to protest, and if the government you want to protest to is unwilling to give you a permit to do so, that violates the spirit and the letter of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution. I strongly suspect that you would be singing an entirely different tune had the Tea Party been denied permits for gatherings larger than 25 people, or told they must rent a hall somewhere.

@bea2345 Good job for showing up to lend support when you had no personal interest in the fight.

@bkcunningham I agree that a single person dancing in the midst of daily activities might reasonably be considered a public nuisance and not a political protest. But that’s not what we are talking about here, is it?

@Linda_Owl Amen to that. If this movement succeeds, that’s one of the wrongs we need to right. THe whole idea of a Department Homeland Security sounds like something Hitler or Stalin would conceive, not a part of the government of the USA.

@ETpro I doubt the founding fathers anticipated occupiers with zero sanitary facilities camping out on public property for weeks on end. This is not intended to be an assembly, but rather is repeatedly described as civil disobedience, and therefore does not fall under the amendment.

@YARNLADY Somehow I doubt that the Founding Fathers anticipated modern plumbing, so the the sanitary facilities they would expect are about what they are now for the OWS protestors. Just because the anti-OWSers say it is civil disobedience don’t necessarily make it that either. Those involved in the protests are peaceably assembled and petitioning, and I think the Founding Fathers (who you might recall were rebels themselves) would probably support them and say that this type of action is exactly what the first amendment was created to protect.

@YARNLADYSorry, but I have to agree with #amujinx.

Disobedience of WHAT? If the press started calling eating disobedience, would you starve yourself to death? Remember, the press is now owned almost exclusively by huge multinational corporations who are the target of this protest. It’s no surprise they will spin their coverage to discredit the protesters in any way they can. They want the same corporatocracy Wall Street is striving for.

@ETpro They want the same corporatocracy Wall Street is striving for. So do the protestors, only in their favor instead of the other way around.

@YARNLADY Corporatocracy – A type of government in which huge corporations, through bribes, gifts, and the funding of ad campaigns that oppose candidates they don’t like, become the driving force behind the executive, judicial and legislative branches.

The definition of corporatocracy, since you either misunderstand what it means or you don’t actually know what it means. You are completely missing the point of OWS if you believe that those protesting want that system in any form, even if it favors them (because it wouldn’t favor them for long just by definition).

@YARNLADY To expand on what @amujinx said, Democracy is when a nation is run by the people, regardless of economic status. What the Occupiers want is Democracy… and not the type where only corporations are considered people.

Remember when only white, male landowners were allowed to vote? We basically have that now in that what we say matters less than what money says; dollars mean more than votes, and right now, 50%.of the voters control 2% of the votes.

Yes we do have the right to petition our government. In recent years, however, our government has taken the dangerous unconstitutional turn to assuming the right to shuttle any inconvenient petitioners off to Freedom of Speech Zones. Isn’t all of America a freedom of speech zone?

But concerning the Occupy movement specifically:

I agree with @amujinx in that what the Occupiers want is Democracy. It is slowly occurring to a broad American demographic of all political leanings that there has been a hijacking of American democracy and that control of the government no longer lies in the hands of the the American voter. The only dispute among this demographic seems to be who is the culprit: the government itself, or the Big Money from Wall Street which is said to have wrested control of the government from the voter? (There is evidence that many Americans from the far Right through the spectrum to the far Left are agreeing it is the latter, as shown by their distrust and anger at the Federal Reserve Bank, our central banking system, and the Bank’s possibly unconstitutional power to create money and then loan it to the American government, its questionable management of the American money supply in a supposedly free market system, its domineering role in the bailouts, and its refusal to be audited.)

The Occupiers obviously have laid the corpse of their grievances at the door of Wall Street and a growing number of Americans are quietly watching to see how this plays out, many in silent support.

Americans are awakening to the fact that we cannot have a democracy by the people and for the people with a mainstream press that spews infotainment in lieu of investigative reporting, a Washington lobbying structure that is weighted thoroughly on the side of the corporatocracy, and election campaign financing that converts perfectly good candidates into whores of an oligarchy.

Add to this an inefficient educational system that no longer teaches critical thinking, guaranteeing somnolent constituencies unequipped to derive fact from fallacy.

Change those things and we may get our democracy back.

For all practical purposes, there is only one political party in the United States and it has no interest in representing the people.

Our democracy has all but been stolen from us. Our elected representatives work for the interests of corporations that fund their campaigns and not for the citizens that elected them to office.

Not wanting Wall Street money to dominate our government does not necessarily make the Occupiers anti-capitalists any more than being anti-fascist in the 1930s automatically made a person a communist. Most Americans, if asked, would not want any entity other than the American voter to control their government, whether it be socialist, fascist, or corporate—none of which are run on the fundamental American tenet of universal suffrage. Most Americans believe in Democracy. Most Americans don’t begrudge a person who becomes wealthy, whether it be through hard work or even inheritance, but when that individual along with like-minded peers unduly influence the government in order to maintain and perpetrate their wealth at the cost of the individual voter’s right to self determination, a line has been crossed. What the Occupiers are saying is that they believe there is a preponderance of evidence that this is the case.

What they are saying is simple and as American as apple pie: Power to the People.

@YARNLADY Sorry I wasn’t clearer. No, the Occupy Wall Street movement doesn’t want corporatocracy. They want and end to it. I had been speaking of the media you are listening to, and how they denigrate the protesters. The media is the “They” that wants the same corporatocracy Wall Street and big multinational businesses want.

@YARNLADY This video explains what Occupy Wall Street is about far more eloquently than I can.

@ETpro Sadly, I doubt that will change the minds of those who already believe that OWS is just a bunch of lazy Socialists looking for a handout :(

@jerv Ideologues are evidence proof. Their minds are already made up, and they don’t want to be confused with the facts. But not everyone that falls for the corporatist Big Lie machine running on Faux “News” is an ideologue. Some have just been conned, and when shown evidence of that, will quit falling for the litany of lies that claim that refusing to support this trend is class warfare where the poor are attacking the rich. As the chart shows, the shoot-and-loot crowd is not the working class.

@ETpro True, it does do some good to get the facts out there because many people are either on the fence or just unaware.

Police raid on occupy Oakland. It’s like a war zone!

@Afos22 Very sad. Watching the videos, it is beyond clear the police are flat out lying in their account of the confrontation. And let’s not forget that the protesters were in the park exercising their constitutional rights. Any law against that is an unconstitutional law.