Along with the formal structural constitutional checks and balances most children learn about in school, the First Amendment provides for a more fundamental check on abuses of government power: the right to free assembly and protest.

Six years ago The National Lawyers Guild provided a still indispensable assay of the panoply of hits these rights were taking in the name of fighting terror.

NLG’s report, The Assault on Free Speech, Public Assembly and Dissent, examined, in often excruciating detail, the deployment and refinement of techniques (many predating 9/11/01 but dramatically ramped-up since) such as checkpoints, rush tactics, pop-up lines, containment pens and mass “preemptive” arrests, through which federal, state and municipal law enforcement agencies, often abetted by the courts, were chilling and even criminalizing demonstrators by redefining them as “terror risks.”

Introducing the report renowned social critic Lewis Lapham wrote, in words even more resonant today than they were in the midst of the Bush era,

The American democracy depends less on the size of its armies than on the capacity of its individual citizens to rely on the strength of their own thought. We can’t know what we’re about, or whether we’re telling ourselves too many lies, unless we can see and hear one another think out loud. To the extent that a democratic society gives it citizens the chance to speak in their own voices and listens to what they have to say, it gives itself the chance not only of discovering its multiple glories and triumphs but also of surviving its multiple follies and crimes. Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.

Reviewing the state of the First Amendment at the end of 2009 in Reason Magazine, Radley Balko warns that we are continuing to slide down the slippery slope towards “The Criminalization of Protest.”

I’ve lived in the Washington, D.C., area for the better part of the last 10 years. So I’ve seen my share of demonstrations, although more often than not I just try to avoid the traffic nightmares they cause. Among the various classes of protests—pro-life, anti-war, environmental, and now tea parties—the most destructive are the anti-globalization marches. So when cops clashed with anti-globalization demonstrators at the Pittsburgh G-20 summit in September, it was easy to assume that most of the altercations represented justified police responses to overzealous protesters.

But a number of disturbing photographs, videos, and witness accounts told a different story. Along with similar evidence from other recent high-stakes political events, they reveal an increasing, disquieting willingness to smother even peaceful dissent.

Tags: dissent, First Amendment, free assembly

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 9:51 am and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.