On Saturday, Ronald Reagan Washington Nationwide Airport (DCA) posted a warning on X, previously referred to as Twitter. “TRAFFIC ALERT,” it read. “Expect delays around the airport due to a group in vehicles exercising first amendment rights in roadway. Use caution and expect slow moving vehicles.”
The submit was a reference to a caravan, with a number of automobiles flying Palestinian flags, that claimed each lane as they inched alongside the roadway to the airport, reportedly inflicting hefty visitors delays.
It’s actually a driver’s free speech prerogative to fly their flag of selection. That has nothing to do, nonetheless, with obstructing visitors, which is fully irrelevant to the First Modification.
One legally confused submit from an airport in Virginia does not essentially say a lot when seen in a vacuum. However the assertion is indicative of a bigger development, as freeway blockades proceed to choose up steam throughout the nation. In January, pro-Palestine activists reduce off entry to the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg Bridges, together with the Holland Tunnel, throughout rush hour. We have seen related demonstrations in Seattle, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. That record just isn’t exhaustive. And DCA just isn’t the primary airport focused by protesters: In late December, for instance, demonstrators obstructed visitors outdoors Kennedy Worldwide Airport and Los Angeles Worldwide Airport throughout one of many busiest journey weeks of the 12 months.
A settlement in New York basically seeks to sanction the follow. “Where an FAA [First Amendment Activity] temporarily blocks vehicular or pedestrian traffic or otherwise obstructs public streets or sidewalks, the NYPD [New York Police Department] shall whenever possible accommodate the demonstration,” reads a proposed settlement between the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New York, the Authorized Help Society, New York Legal professional Normal Letitia James, and the NYPD in response to lawsuits pertaining to the police’s dealing with of assorted protests in 2020.
The settlement continues to be up within the air; the police union is attempting to combat it. However there’s something richly ironic in regards to the state’s high regulation enforcement officer trying to present the general public a inexperienced gentle to interrupt the regulation. And the ACLU, additionally concerned within the settlement, acknowledges in its personal steering that detaining folks by blocking a roadway just isn’t a authorized, First Modification–protected exercise.
“The right to peacefully assemble and protest is sacrosanct and foundational to our democracy,” stated New York Legal professional Normal James in September after the settlement was unveiled. “Too often peaceful protesters have been met with force that has harmed innocent New Yorkers simply trying to exercise their rights.”
James is appropriate that freedom of expression is essential and central to the American venture. It is also not a drive discipline by which persons are shielded from different guidelines. If I need to get folks’s consideration by, say, driving 120 miles an hour whereas sporting a Palestinian flag, I can not inform the officer who pulls me over for reckless driving that I am merely exercising my free speech rights. The First Modification doesn’t give carte blanche to violate the regulation.
Activists could invoke the daddy of the civil rights motion, Martin Luther King Jr., when defending blockades. That is comprehensible. It is also misguided. As I wrote in 2022:
Although King did lead a protest from Selma to Montgomery, famously filling the Edmund Pettus Bridge, it was a march. It didn’t block interstate and freeway visitors indefinitely for the sake of it—a tactic King was not snug with, regardless of strain within the Nineteen Sixties to get on board. “Even though King didn’t come out and criticize it in public, in private he thought it was a misguided tactic,” stated Brandon Terry, assistant professor of African and African American Research and Social Research at Harvard College. “The NAACP thought it was ridiculous.” King reportedly posited that such a transfer pushed the boundaries of acceptable demonstrations and would come again to chew the motion politically.
Protesting is not meant to be handy. However you may discover it tough to persuade folks you are the great man when your blockades are hurting the weak folks you typically declare to face for, like this man who could have misplaced his parole, or this lady who went into labor.
Some people could disagree. That’s indisputably their proper, and I am grateful for that. Additionally not in dispute: It isn’t their proper to detain folks, irrespective of how righteous they imagine their trigger to be.