Unlawful Assembly: Not A Real Thing In The U.S.

Come on people now
Smile on your brother.
Everybody get together,
Try to love one another
Right now

Today’s bit of unconstitutional-but-common legal shenanigans has been around for a very, very long time so we can’t blame it on the coup.

Which is … nice, I guess?

The very first amendment to the Constitution forbids the State from interfering with the peoples’ right to gather however we want to, as long as no one gets hurt.

It says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Let’s strip out the unrelated clauses to focus just on the bit we want today:

Congress shall make no law … abridging … the right of the people peaceably to assemble …

This is extremely clear; no carve-outs, no exclusions, no “unless they really want to”.

The State may not interfere with any peaceful assembly.

Now, the United States has never done a good job of actually following the Constitution, and on this issue it’s been spectacularly bad from quite early on.

To the extent that by now you could actually make an argument that, if anything, the U.S. has a “history and tradition” of ignoring the plain language of the Constitution.

Which is not great, actually.

What brought this topic up is an annoying wire service article in my local newpaper about the kids today and how they’ve rediscovered the idea of flash mobs and how the State is dealing with that.

TLDR: badly, and unconstitutionally.

But what’s most annoying is that the article doesn’t even mention the constitutional issue; the actual word “constitution” doesn’t appear in the article at all.

And that is a real problem.

This blog is public, and does engage in discourse, but it’s very small beans indeed.

Mass media like the newswire services are where most public discourse happens. What events they cover and the issues they include in their discussion are most of the public discourse.

This article is bad, and the authors and the Associated Press newswire should feel bad.

To ignore such a fundamental problem in the State’s response to a public social activity is journalistic malpractice.