By admin 
The people who are outraged over the hot microphone moment at Tuesday’s Sacramento City Council meeting, where Vice Mayor Karina Talamantes and Mayor Kevin McCarty discussed ways to remove people from the chambers, are missing one, very important detail:
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The person they were trying to remove deserved it.
I’m not sure where people got the idea — because it certainly isn’t part of the First Amendment — that you can stand up and hurl obscenities, threats and insults at elected officials for as long as you want, and they just have to sit there and take it. But that seems to be the status quo at city council meetings these days. (My theory is people are angry at their government in general, and our most accessible form of it is at city councils, school boards or other local governing bodies.)
The city council chambers, like any other house of the people, belongs to all of us. Which means we each get time to speak and say whatever we want. But that time is not an unlimited license, and ideally, it comes with a modicum of civility.
That implicit within the chambers protects everyone else, and their right to speak. Shouting them down or otherwise being disruptive is anti-democratic. When someone, who has been repeatedly warned, refuses to sit down and acknowledge it is someone else’s time to speak? Well, things go off the rails very quickly.
The public’s anger over a bad vote — such as the one directly influencing Tuesday’s events — is always righteous. But no one’s mind was ever changed by being called names or threatened. That kind of behavior dilutes an otherwise valid argument.
I actually agree with the points the woman who was disrupting Tuesday’s city council meeting was making, but I am disgusted by her behavior while making them. Not only does that not win anyone over to your point of view, it actively pushes them away.
Former Sacramento mayor Darrell Steinberg often had to deal with disruptions during his tenure on the city council, including protests that sometimes took over the chambers and a particularly persistent group of white supremacists who often took aim at his Judaism. During those moments, he would often turn his back to the speaker, but he still would let them speak.
“(The council is) subject to criticism. We all are. That’s part of what we signed up for,” Steinberg said. “But no one signs up for the kind of vitriol that occurs week after week in those chambers.”
“There is no excuse for being profane. There is no excuse for being abusive (or) for telling anybody that they have no value or worth,” he said. “They may have a constitutional right to say that but it’s not effective and it’s offensive.”
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Mayor McCarty told me, “all things being equal, it’s better to just have the council chambers cleared,” if a person or group is causing repeated disruptions, a tactic Steinberg often deployed as well. But that can take hours if people think staying makes some kind of statement.
After the chambers are cleared, the council returns to an empty room, and conducts their business with only the media present and a video stream, thereby keeping the meeting open to the public, as required by law.
But I’m not sure I entirely agree with that.
I understand the desire to remove the disruptive person from the chamber with as little fuss or physical altercation as possible, but I think the protocols born out of the COVID pandemic inured public officials to conducting their meetings via video feed.
The whole point of an open meeting is that people (who aren’t causing repeated problems) have a right to be present in the room where it happens.
McCarty said that, after the hot mic incident, it’s clear to the Sacramento City Council that they need to revisit their policies around how to remove disruptive people from the chambers. He told me he’s searching for a way to ban people who cause repeated disturbances for up to a year from attending council meetings. I think that’s a little excessive.
I hope they will remember during their conversation that this is a delicate high-wire act between their duty to conduct business, and the people’s right to express their views.
And I hope that people who agree with the woman who was disrupting Tuesday’s meeting to the point of nuisance will stop idolizing her behavior as any kind of effective protest.
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But I’m not sure which group I have less faith in, to be honest.