Do you people think it should be legal for protesters to disrupt the function of government or block ingress or egress at say.. the upcoming NATO summit? If you do, then the thing to call for is the repeal of 18 U.S.C. § 1752, which has been in place without incident since 1971, not the repeal of this very minor amendment to it – reverting it to a nearly identical form.

Keep in mind this law does NOT outlaw protesting at such events, only intentionally disrupting the government business or blocking access to the event.

First, the text for the revision proposed in H.R. 347 comes from the version the Senate Committee was working on as of Nov. 17, 2011.

Second, the language I cited for 18 U.S.C. § 1752 is the current language on the books. The history of its revision is irrelevant to the conversation.

Third, the current version of H.R. 347 as it is in the Senate omits the word “willfully” in three different places compared to the existing law. The proposed revision of H.R. 347 single use of “with intent” is still negated by the inclusive use of “or” in the “or so that, such conduct, in fact” language.

You should learn to read. Learning to comprehend wouldn’t be bad either. In short, you’re entitled to your opinion even if you are full of crap.

Have a nice day.

Thanks!

Great article. It was cool to see this morning that you have been quoted and linked by the Constant Weader [AKA Marie Burns (who also is a columnist at the New York Times eXaminer; found at http://www.nytexaminer.com)] on her blog http://www.realitychex.com see The Commentariat–March 6, 2012.

The G8 summit has been moved to Camp David though a summit related to multi-national security will be held in Chicago. If protesters show up anywhere near Camp David the law in question thus becomes more relevant.

You still haven’t explained why terrorism is now being used as both the threat and procedure for solution.

When discussing the procedure by which a threat to the public is addressed, the cold war is not an inappropriate analogy. Never during the cold war was the threat of danger to the citizens used as political leverage to dismantle the wholesale rights of those citizens.

We knew the threat of burning children was real and ever present. We slept well knowing that in the event that the citizens were burning above ground our banking records would be safe and secure deep in a salt mine in Hutchinson Kansas, just past those golfing trophies in the elevator lobby. Yes Mark, it got to the point where we had no problem letting babies burn while preserving golfing trophies.

Why? How could it get that distorted? Simple; because the procedure, Mark, was to preserve our form of government and the liberties protected therein no matter what the threat.

Now it’s the opposite. Terrorism is ‘the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes.’ It is also defined as both ‘a method of governing or of resisting a government.’

Where we once ignored the threat of harm to the citizens so as to keep the bigger picture, i.e. our form of government and the liberties protected thereunder, in focus, our government now uses those threats in a terroristic way — as leverage for a political agenda.

The world has always been unsafe and it will always be unsafe. Not even when the atomic clock read two minutes to midnight did our government use the threat of impending danger as leverage to curtail our liberties; it did not use terrorism as a form of governing. Now it does.

It’s not the threat that’s harming this country Mark, it’s the procedure by which the threats are dealt with; the procedure of leveraging terror far more than any terrorist could dream of. The procedure of employing terror as a form of governing.

Since I have no intention of violating a rope or a posted restriction, my personal worries only extend to the “unwitting” defense.

Granted, there may be those who feel they must oppose this, even posted, restriction. I would approach it more tangentially.

The last thing I want is for them to have an excuse to pull a JFK on BHO. You may know from “JFK and the Unspeakable”, specifically the testimony of Abraham Bolden, how the Secret Service used to vilify Kennedy in their drunken poker games, saying “if somebody takes aim at him I’m jumping out of the way” as well as making Bolden’s life hell as the first ever African American presidential Secret Service agent.

So I’m willing to put up with requirements of civility — at least for now. I just don’t want to be scammed into jail.

I’m imagining I can make the case that, in the imagined example, I didn’t know it was restricted, because there were no visible signs of same, wouldn’t have violated any such restriction, and that the text excludes such inadvertent offenses.

But I’m going out with my placards in any case on the first decent day, which will be Thursday. Here is me on Monument Square last summer: http://www.proudprimate.com/Placards/Debt%20Crisis%20Materials/Debt%20Crisis%20Materials_files/image002.jpg

“With respect, I’m unconvinced.”

And that is your right. With respect, I’m unconvinced by your assertions about the subject not being affected and that the usages are of equal value.

The purpose of the article wasn’t to persuade others to my point of view, but rather foster debate on the bill, the use of imprecise language in general and the potential impact on civil rights. Some see a threat, others don’t. What creates this reasonable divide? Imprecise language. That you agree with me or not is secondary in my mind to the point that you (and others) are thinking about the issue in the first place.

No, I’m saying that either one is OK, because they don’t affect the subject of the sentence. Their effect is limited to the predicate.

With respect, I’m unconvinced.

“granting an exclusive disjunction”

Therein lies the rub. You have to assume one usage when the other is not only rationally permissible, but it yields a contrary result. To assume that a prosecutor or a judge is going to go with the grammatical usage over the logical usage is a risky assumption at best.

“knowingly, and with intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions, engages in disorderly or disruptive conduct in, or within such proximity to, any restricted building or grounds when, or so that, such conduct, in fact, impedes or disrupts the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions”

” as completely separated from the predicate as can be in a sentence, thus untouchable by disjunctions “over there”, trans-verb.

Just as parenthetical sections of a mathematical equation are sacrosanct, there are limits in language that cannot physically bleed into one another.”

The whole structure of the sentence is a digression of alternative states based upon the predicate. Their number and distance from the predicate do not invalidate their relationship to the predicate. The disjunctions still apply. How they apply is the issue: exclusively or inclusively. The overall poor and rambling construction of the sentence is stipulated, but usage of “or” will still change meaning. Only one of the “or” need be read as inclusive to create a problem and that “or” is the “or” in “or so that, such conduct, in fact”. The key indicating that this “or” is reasonably interpreted as the inclusive “or” lies in the conditional “in fact” – a determination of fact based on outcome and not intent. With all the other applications of “or” in the sentence – “impede or disrupt”, “business or official functions”, “disorderly or disruptive”, “in, or withing such proximity”, “building or grounds” – there is an implied “either”. There is no implied “either” for “or so that, such conduct, in fact”. It seems to me to be arguably inclusive usage on its face.

You bring up a valid point linguistically, but I think it is based upon assumptions about prosecutor’s and judge’s usage that cannot be relied upon in the face of ambiguity. The law is as much an exercise in applied psychology as it is in applied linguistics (among other things).

In fact, looking at it more closely, I now see that the whole of the predicate, which begins with the verb, i.e., “engages”, is on the far side of the mountain from the cis-verb section, where “knowingly, and with intent to impede or disrupt” are as completely separated from the predicate as can be in a sentence, thus untouchable by disjunctions “over there”, trans-verb.

Just as parenthetical sections of a mathematical equation are sacrosanct, there are limits in language that cannot physically bleed into one another.

My non-lawyer but rather-involved-language-student (Latin, Greek academically, French, German, Spanish, Hebrew &c. on the side) two cents.

and thank-you,
I know the fear of the 1% is survivable and will not prevail,
I’ve seen the movie

that wasn’t a chime, that was an Uber Gong!

(I’m just catching up….)