I knew after the short-timer councilor last week kept interrupting a public inputer while he was sitting in his jammies on the couch phoning it in, and my corresponding public input, the mayor decided to send the council the below letter reminding them he doesn’t understand prior restraint.
As you can see, he is saying he can remove or arrest people based on them being noisy, irrelevant or making personal attacks.
He is correct, do NOT make personal attacks on elected officials. Stick to the business at hand, and if they did something wrong within their council duties, you DO have the right to dissent them at a meeting, if they did something wrong in their personal lives, that is NOT within the business and decorum of the chambers.
Don’t make personal or violent threats. If you do, you will probably be arrested for making personal threats towards those on the dais or any city employee or member of the public present. The 1st Amendment doesn’t cover violent threats, and it shouldn’t.
As for slander, this one is a slippery. If what an individual is saying is blatantly false and obviously false, yes, you can ask someone to stop saying it. But I go back to prior restraint. How do you know what the individual was saying was slander?
How do you know if someone is irrelevant?
What is considered noisy and rude? Could grunting and groaning into a hot mic be considered noisy, disruptive and rude? Sure. So does that mean the city council can call to have the mayor arrested for not following decorum? Well according to his own letter, you could, since he is consistently rude and dismissive of most public inputers.
It is a 1st Amendment violation to cut people off simply because their voice is too loud or they are saying something uncomfortable about a city employee or elected official. State law and city ordinance does NOT supercede the 1st Amendment and as long as you are talking about city business or politics in general you cannot be stopped or arrested (a frequent inputer who constantly praises the mayor comes at least twice a month to tell us about another right-winger book he is reading. How is this relevant?)
You can be as rude and loud as you want to be.
If you have noticed, the mayor hasn’t arrested or banned anyone yet, I will tell you why, because he knows if that person decides to sue based on constitutional rights he would lose, big time. He reminds me of those Shih Tzu dogs, all bark and no bite, and at the end of the day all you have is a lot of dog hair to clean up.
