New Jersey recently provided a glimpse into the future of the First Amendment if thin-skinned politicians are given greater control over political speech, not to mention those engaging in political speech.
NJ.com, a site providing news stories from around the Garden State, recently offered the following story:
Mayor Dave Roberts pulled out the political big guns yesterday to take down a billboard that offended him.
Jersey City real estate firm Metropolitan & Waterfront Residential Brokerage paid for the billboard outside the Hoboken PATH station that read: “Cut your Hoboken property taxes 47%. We’ll help you leave.”
The sign, which was up for only a day, referenced Hoboken’s state takeover and subsequent massive tax hike…
After hearing from Roberts and others, Jaime LeFrak – a principal of the LeFrak Organization and a Jersey City waterfront developer who has a one-third interest in Metropolitan & Waterfront – ordered the billboard removed, a process he said would take about a week.
But Roberts was not about to wait that long.
The mayor called NJ Transit “several” times yesterday and the agency removed the billboard from its property last night…
Before he called NJ Transit, Roberts phoned Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah Healy, Hudson County Executive Tom DeGise, and U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez…
The company developed the billboard after getting calls from people who wanted to leave Hoboken.
“There’s no false advertising. We stated a fact. It may not be a fact that they want out in the public,” said Tom Pichi, director of sales at Metropolitan & Waterfront.
Indeed, it’s pretty clear local politicians didn’t want that fact being bandied about where citizens might be informed and educated, and perhaps even start to question just what their elected officials have been up to over the past several years (decades?) in Hoboken that would require such drastic action as a state takeover and a 47% increase in property taxes.
Some may argue that because the speech was commercial in nature, rather than political, that there really isn’t any First Amendment concern, or at least not as great a concern as there would be if this was a billboard put up by a political party campaigning against those in office.
But that rings more than a little hollow – while the intent of the sign may in fact have been commercial, it’s pretty clear there’s a significant political speech aspect going on here. The billboard didn’t simply raise awareness of extraordinary tax hikes, but also helped to bring into the conversation the notion that people can “vote with their feet” by moving out of a jurisdiction they believe is poorly served by elected officials.
The other obvious defense, that this was simply a request to the billboard owner to “voluntarily” remove the billboard, also shouldn’t satisfy fans of the First Amendment. Mayor Roberts wasn’t calling about removing a billboard promoting, say, tobacco use or a strip club, he was specifically trying to remove troubling speech with significant political content.
He wasn’t content, apparently, with making a simple phone call to the developer and asking him to remove or modify the billboard. Instead, he felt it was appropriate to call a U.S. Senator, the mayor of the city the developer was located in, as well as another powerful local official. Clearly, he was building political pressure to place on the billboard owner.
And who knows what sort of pressure these politicians might have been able to use to intimidate the developer? It’s not hard to see how a mayor might be able to punish a developer by holding up or even denying permits for projects, or at least convey the message to a developer that this was a possible consequence of the political speech.
While Mayor Roberts’ actions may not immediately bring to mind the same issues that campaign finance regulations, the so-called “fairness doctrine,” and other obvious infringements on the First Amendment, it does give us a pretty clear idea of just how unwilling many elected officials are to tolerate political speech that troubles them, and the lengths they will go to in an effort to silence their critics.
Food for thought, for those considering the wisdom of “local advisory boards” to oversee talk radio, or getting the government more deeply involved in newspapers by converting them to non-profit status, or other measures that would ultimately lead to greater leverage by politicians over those engaging in political speech.
