"Town Hall" Story Keeps Growing

This from the Rocky Mountain News:

Members of Congress from both parties on Thursday raised sharp questions about the exclusion of political opponents from two taxpayer-funded appearances by President Bush.

Three people were ejected from the president's Social Security town hall meeting in Denver March 21 after they arrived in a car with a "No more blood for oil" bumper sticker.

The Denver incident happened after a list was discovered in Fargo, N.D., naming 42 people to be barred from a Bush speech there in February attended by 8,000 people.

North Dakota's two Democratic senators, Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan, on Thursday jointly called for an investigation into the list. And the state's lone congressman, Democrat Earl Pomeroy, was quoted by the Fargo Forum as saying the list now appears to be standard operating procedure for the White House, rather than an isolated incident.

This just gets worse and worse for Congressman Bob Beauprez, whose office was in charge of distributing tickets for the event. While it's entirely possible that his office had absolutely nothing to do with kicking people out, the stigma will be hard to avoid. Yet, he tried yesterday:

Rep. Bob Beauprez, R-Colo., said in a radio appearance on the Peter Boyles show about the incident: "This kind of stuff should never really happen . . . They've got every right to be there."

"Unless they did something wrong, there's no reason why they should be yanked out of there and escorted through the door," said Beauprez, whose office handed out tickets to the president's speech to about 1,000 people, including those three.

Beauprez said the event was set up by a White House advance team.

This could make for a pretty logical attack ad against Beauprez in a year, and he's doing his best to back away. We'll see if this one comes back to get him in a run for governor.

(*note: we are not blaming Beauprez for any of this, or even insinuating it. We only point out the perception, since the tickets came from his office, and perception is a hard thing to change).

Comments

[Nutz McButt]

Couldn't disagree more. Nobody really cares about this story outside of the media. What did Ari Fleischer say? Media is biased in that it favors conflict? Beauprez won't be hurt by this. If anything, he comes out looking above it all because he's publicly denounced it and also, possibly most importantly, he gave these three the tickets in the first place! If he was part of any Republican "conspiracy," wouldn't he just have decided not to give them tix?

[James C. Hess]

Fact: The three removed from the event were from MoveOn.Org, which is bankrolled by George Soros.

[Ed]

James,

How about sourcing that for us?

One suspects this is something other than "fact."

[Ter Ducken]

Yeah, prove that one, James.

[so]

so what if they were members of moveon? should nra members not be allowed at events being staged by dems? unless someone can prove they intended to be disruptive, which is either easy or impossible, their rights were violated. we have no thought crime here, and so long as they got the tix legitimately, i think they have a case.

[Obvious]

They were obviously going to interrupt the meeting. They were wearing the t-shirts to do so. And it had been going on in virtually every other Bush meeting. This shouldn't be in question.

Whether or not they should have been 'pre-empted' is another question, and a fair one. Most of us know it goes on, at the hands of both parties.

These 3 were just savvy enough to gain traction in the media that most aren't.

And I'm sure there will be an attempt to use it against Beauprez. But as was said before, and is not disputed, BB distributed the tixs to the event (and these 3) but had nothing to do with the security at a presidential event.

[Alfalfa]

Since when did wearing an anti-Bush t-shirt to an event constitute intent to disrupt? What if the person was going to show his anti-Bush shirt, but not disrupt the meeting by yelling, shouting, making a scene, etc. - should he still be removed? How do we know it wasn't his intent to simply sit there in a t-shirt from Nothern Sun and listen to what Bush had to say?

And, James, who cares if the people were members of MoveOn? Millions of people are members of MoveOn. In fact, you might want to be on the lookout, there may even be members of MoveOn lving in your community.

As Dr. Tongue would say "oooooo, scary, scary."

[don o. vann]

Don't know whose authoring this Town Hall tripe on the web -- with the oooh scary headline, "Town Hall Story Keeps Growing." In whose minds? The author claims this is ripe for a "logical attack ad" against Beauprez. It wouldn't be a "logical" ad, it would be a lame ad. Seems like you Dems ought to have better things to do -- like develop policy positions -- rather than fantasizing about childish attack ads. Guess not.

[Alva Adams]

The New York and Washington papers picked it up. It's growing, sorry.

[Maybe]

Maybe us Dems could hold a press conference to single out a group that wants the same rights as everyone else for political gain, then we could go on to compare this group to beastility, would that make you happy, sorry that we thought we still live in America were those in power can't just premptively remove those that might be a problem. Are we going to do away with that whole innocent until proven guilty while we are at it? They didn't do anything wrong and were removed.

[Roger D]

I love the fact that the party that likes to tout its libertarian roots seems to be the party most interested in restricting basic constitutionanlly protected rights, including: freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of speech....

A long held opinion in the courts (including the supreme court)is the prohibiton of prior restraint with regard to free speech. The courts have also consistently held that among the most protected speech rights are those of political speech.

Also, disruptive political speech is not in and of itself prohibited, unless it involves other criminal activity. Wearing a tee shirt, even shouting, is not necessarily criminal activity and is not prohibited.

The Rs posting to this thread should be seriously concerned about any attempt to prohibit the free exercise of speech. What goes around, comes around and the next time it could happen to you.

[thinkin]

Beauprez might just come out clean from this, but I guess the bigger question is: where is the maturity in the Republican Camp? Is that all we've come down to? Punk kids who have fantasies of A Right West Wing?