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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Tennessee hit the headlines last week with the expulsion of two members of its House of Representatives.
With CF 20-0990, Los Angeles may have gone a step further by letting bureaucrats remove elected officials at will, without recourse and without due process.
In Los Angeles, the move to suppress voters’ rights has started small, as a tag in an ordinance signed by Mayor Karen Bass on March 29th.
Ostensibly it was a rule to ensure equity training throughout the Neighborhood Council system but Raquel Beltrán, the ex-General Manager of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, and Elise Rudin of the Los Angeles City’s Attorney’s office fought to keep a clause in that was anything but empowering.
Neighborhood Council issues rarely hit the national and international news. But insidious mission creep against grass roots democracy can carry on unabated unless Angelenos take a stand.
Not only should Neighborhood Council board members but every stakeholders who believes in democracy must demand a Bill of Rights to ensure that our voices and values continue to be heard loud and clear at City Hall.
As currently written, the General Manager of the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment can dismiss and remove from office duly elected board members based solely on the General Manager’s administrative discretion.
How can a Neighborhood Council get anything done if board members can’t talk out of fear that they will be ratted out to the General Manager, when any word or gesture could be called out as a micro-aggression and make them subject to expulsion?
Expel them. For speaking their truth, but perhaps not in a civil enough manner to please everyone. So dies freedom of speech, not in a heroic ultimate battle but in the death of a thousand paper cuts, each one inflicting less pain than the one before but just as deadly in the end.
Allowing a bureaucrat such authority does irreparable harm to the function of Neighborhood Councils whose members may be unduly intimidated to perform their electoral mandate or simply, as appears to be the case this year, dissuade people from running and from speaking up for their fellow stakeholders, the very purpose for which the system was created.
Karen Bass may not see this as a clear and present danger, but a number of people involved in the Neighborhood Council system see it as a slippery slope towards the muzzling of those who speak up for Angelenos at a time when our City Hall has better been known for corruption than good legislation.
Unlike prior expulsions – federally of secessionists at the start of the Civil War, and federally and at the state level of people convicted of a crime – these were two men who stood up for their constituents, who joined them in protesting the lack of a strong response to stop the mass school shootings, the latest being the one in Nashville that had killed three 9-year-olds along with three adults.
On April 6th, last Thursday, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives in the state of Tennessee expelled Justin Jones, a Nashville community organizer, and Justin J. Pearson, a community leader and advocate from Shelby County in the Memphis area, and almost expelled Gloria Johnson for violating “decorum” by speaking from the floor on March 30th without permission.
Nashville students, parents, and others demonstrating against the shootings had gathered at the Tennessee Capitol to express their grief, filling the galleries of the House chambers.
When it appeared clear that there would not be an opportunity to speak on why so many people were in attendance, the two neophyte male Black Democrats and one older white female activist legislator took to the floor between bills to acknowledge their constituents’ presence and that they cared about the issue that brought them to the Capitol.
After 20 seconds, the microphone was cut and a recess called. The bullhorn was used during this recess to lead chants with the protesters so the actions for which the men were disciplined were not an actual disruption of a session in progress.
Echoing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Rep. Pearson declared: “I’m on the right side of history. It was worth it to me to break a rule to speak to the gun violence that is happening in our schools, in our churches, in our restaurants, in our grocery stores. We have got to talk about it and the majority of Tennesseans want gun sense legislation.
“Sometimes..., in order to be heard, in order to bring attention to an issue that is killing children and killing people in our communities, sometimes you have to take a stand...”
Taking a stand is what is known as freedom of speech.
Tennessee House Republicans defended their action as "the only path forward" in response to the trio's "disrespectful" actions.
Sounds suspiciously like the silencing of Neighborhood Councils by focusing on behavior rather than policy.
Over the weekend reports emerged that members of the Shelby County Commission were "being threatened by the state to take away funding, needed funding to run our schools, to run our municipalities" if they were to reappoint Rep Jones. Eerily reminiscent of some complaints heard from NCs as to how to direct the spending of their funds.
Politicians won’t change their course unless people rise up to challenge them. That is what democracy is all about.
Would the Republican leadership eject the Boston Tea Partiers for their disrespect for the Crown?
Raquel Beltrán has repeatedly asked CityWatch writers and NC board members not to criticize her. How does that help good government?
What we have here are abuses of power.
From the tweets of former President Obama: “This nation was built on peaceful protest. No elected official should lose their job simply for raising their voice – especially when they’re doing it on behalf of our children.”, “Silencing those who disagree with us is a sign of weakness, not strength, and it won’t lead to progress."
And after his expulsion, Rep. Jones pronounced: "Today is a very dangerous day for America."
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
