Hamilton County commissioners’ displeasure with the Occupy Chattanooga protesters’ around-the-clock camp-out on the lawn of the County Courthouse has been apparent for some time. Though their actions have been more measured, and more careful to avoid the use of force seen elsewhere against the Occupy movement, they now seem determined to end the camp-out.
They recently circumvented the Sunshine Law by taking an apparently illegal private meeting with County Attorney Rheubin Taylor to discuss their legal options. There was no legitimate reason to invoke the law’s confidentiality clause for a private meeting with the attorney for commissioners to discuss what amounts to a public policy issue — the correctness and method of their goal to eject the protesters’ from their campsite, and thus restrict the form of their protest.
Then they drew up a list of rules that they now claim have been somehow honored and observed through “tradition” for decades, and that they say the protesters are now violating. And now they’ve gone to federal court to seek a judge’s declaration that their planned ejection of the Occupy protesters under those newly contrived rules is legal under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
Their method for all this, of course, has the texture of a shameless sham prompted by their intolerance of an exceedingly peaceful, orderly and worthy protest in behalf of economic justice for the broad class of working Americans. There’s ample reason to doubt that a federal judge would sanction their intention to create and use post-facto rules to eject the Occupy protesters.
The protesters’ mission may be fruitlessly idealistic and their numbers relatively small, but their cause is as valid a political protest in the interest of 99 percent of Americans as any we have seen in many years.