Marching Toward the Republican National Convention

After months of negotiations and legal wrangling, Federal District Judge Joan Ericksen issued a disappointing decision in the suit between the City of St. Paul and the Coalition to March on the RNC and Stop the War. At issue was the Coalition’s request for a preliminary injunction regarding the proposed march route, time and duration. The ACLU-MN and the National Lawyers Guild argued the City’s proposal, dubbed a “recipe for disaster” by the City’s own police union head, violated the Coalition’s First Amendment rights. Despite a traffic engineer’s analysis that concluded that the City’s proposal could accommodate, at best, 28,000 of the expected 50,000 plus crowd, the Court accepted the City’s broad, generalized security concerns at face value and refused to order any changes to their proposal.

In this day and age, we all understand that security is a significant concern surrounding events such as a national political nominating convention. But the Constitution requires government restrictions on speech to be narrowly tailored to serve those interests. Judge Ericksen seemed to understand that when she opined that

[s]ecurity measures that were used – and upheld – for one large gathering do not thereby become the baseline for all future large gatherings. Were it otherwise, a sort of ‘security creep’ would come, by increments, to overwhelm the First Amendment.

Unfortunately, the Judge failed to heed her own warning and went on to cite speech restrictions in place at past political conventions to justify her acceptance of the City’s proposal. There was little or no analysis as to whether the restrictions were actually calculated to meet risks or, as we argued, the City had given logistical issues such as parking for busses precedence over protections for free speech. Had the City done its logistical planning around the requested march route, they could have accommodated both.

The most disappointing part of the court’s decision was the complete failure to ensure that the City’s proposed march route will be safe for the marchers. While the Court seemed to be concerned that the City-imposed march duration would not accommodate the numbers of marchers that the Coalition is expecting, the decision failed to meaningfully address the issue. Instead, the Court left it to the City to make good on representations they made to the court about their willingness to make changes to the duration of the march.

We are still reviewing our legal options and will be deciding on our next steps in the days to come.