The Oregon trial

Portland remains adrift

APPARENTLY it’s not just right-wing wacko conservative commentator types who think the feds have a point when they arrest violent protesters outside a federal courthouse in Portland. Maybe a judge in good standing doesn’t want his office burned down, either.

A federal judge (a federal judge!) in Portland, Ore. (in Portland, Ore.!) has denied a request by Oregon’s top law enforcement officer to restrict the actions of federal agents protecting federal property there. While we’re putting things in parentheses and giving them exclamation marks, let it be noted that the attorney general for the state of Oregon sued the feds on the side of protesters who have allowed things to often spiral into violence, in the words of NBC News. That says a lot about Oregon politics, but nothing good.

No liberty-loving American wants jackbooted thugs working for the federales kicking people in the street. But, as the federal judge noted, that wasn’t the issue in this lawsuit.

According to dispatches, the attorney general of that bluest of states sued to get a restraining order “not for injuries that had already happened, but to prevent injuries by federal agents in the future.” (The Associated Press.)

Oregon, the judge said, didn’t have standing, and rejected the request for a temporary restraining order. Lawyers who know about these things said it’ll probably help in the next lawsuit to have somebody who actually had something of a constitutional right denied them.

The front-page story in this newspaper Saturday said protesters in Portland were “targeting” the federal courthouse there. Which is why the head of Homeland Security sent in agents in the first place. It’s part of his job to protect federal property.

NB: This is a completely different situation from Chicago and Philly and the other crime-ridden cities to which President Trump promised more police help soon. That’s a different editorial for a different day.

For anybody who wants to eliminate the rule of law in this country, what better way than to go after police, who enforce the law, and the judiciary, which interprets the law? We wonder how many people targeting Portland’s federal courthouse also carry Defund The Police signs.

FOR THOSE who would like to educate themselves on the matter, as opposed to picking a position on one side of the Trump administration or the other, we’d refer you to the actual order written by the federal judge, Michael W. Mosman, an appointee of George W. Bush. He’d make a good editorial writer.

For the record, “parens patriae” is Latin for “parent of the nation” which would sometimes allow a state to act to protect citizens.

Here is the core of Judge Mosman’s order:

“One of the most difficult tasks for law enforcement in a free country like ours is to support robust protests while still maintaining order through lawful methods. This is even more challenging when the subject of the protests concerns police tactics. It is not unusual, following major protests, for some of the people involved to allege that the police crossed a line—a constitutional line—in the course of their interactions. “It is also common for these interactions to result in lawsuits, with protesters contending the police violated their First and Fourth Amendment rights and seeking redress by money damages and injunctive relief. There is a well-established body of law paving the way for such lawsuits to move forward in federal court.

“This is not such a lawsuit. It is a very different case, a highly unusual one with a particular set of rules. In the first place, although it involves allegations of harm done to protesters by law enforcement, no protester is a plaintiff here. Instead, it is brought by the State of Oregon under a rarely used doctrine called parens patriae. In the second place, it is not seeking redress for any harm that has been done to protesters. Instead, it seeks an injunction against future conduct, which is also an extraordinary form of relief.

“Under the governing law for such cases, the State of Oregon must make a very particularized showing in order to have standing to bring a parens patriae lawsuit, a task made even more challenging by the nature of the remedy it seeks. Because it has failed to do so— most fundamentally, because it has not shown it is vindicating an interest that is specific to the state itself—I find the State of Oregon lacks standing here and therefore deny its request for a temporary restraining order.”

And that, as they say, is that. Or should be. But with politicians on the left coast—from governors to attorneys general to mayors—trying to get to the left of the leftist mob, surely appeals are on the schedule.

And so are more nightly protests that, as the media reports, often go sideways into arson and other violence.

Police—at the local level, state level, and federal level—are hired and trained for good reason, no matter what you might hear elsewhere. When they cross that constitutional line, as Judge Mosman noted, lawsuits are next, and should be. But they shouldn’t be prevented from doing their jobs because of what they might do to some person, somewhere, in the future.

If every attorney general in every state had more common sense, that wouldn’t need to be said.