Democracy needs a gadfly like this one in East Cleveland

“Sure, politics ain’t bean-bag. ’Tis a man’s game, an’ women, childer, cripples an’ prohybitionists ’d do well to keep out iv it.” — Finley Peter Dunne’s fictional Chicagoan Mr. Dooley

This by-now trite judgment — politics is not for the fainthearted — certainly described democracy in East Cleveland, Ohio, when William Fambrough tried to participate in it last year. As the fragrance of this year’s political squabbles dissipates, consider his experience as the object of a city government’s harassments.

He outfitted his step van, which is akin to a Fedex delivery truck, as a sound truck, adorned it with a poster of a candidate challenging the incumbent mayor and drove around his community making his political preference clear. The mayor apparently was not amused.

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Now Fambrough, 74, is suing him and a slew of other city officials — police officers, lawyers — charging them with violating his rights guaranteed by the Constitution’s First, Fourth and 14th amendments: the right of free speech, the right to be secure in one’s possessions and the rights to due process and equal protection of the laws.

Fambrough is represented by the Institute for Justice. His 50-page complaint paints a picture of petty nuisances that, cumulatively, constitute a whopping affront to the Constitution.

The little-enforced, or never-enforced, ordinances that were used to silence Fambrough

(and thereby deter other inconvenient speakers) mostly concerned his van. According to the complaint, the police, in a series of visits, insisted that it was parked illegally at his home — although he had been parking it there for more than 15 years. And although police ignored similar vehicles similarly parked in the neighborhood. The city could produce no evidence of the particular parking ordinance being enforced in the previous six years — other than against Fambrough, who says he was told by a police officer “this is coming from my boss.”

Sound trucks have been common in U.S. politics since the advent of amplified sound; Fambrough used one when he campaigned in 2019 (unsuccessfully) for the town’s school board. In other campaigns, he had driven his van past police officers who never suggested it violated the noise ordinance. This time, the mayor’s administration insisted it did. But when asked for proof of supposed calls complaining about noise, officials could produce none.

After multiple threats to tow his van, the police did, even though Fambrough had offered to drive it away. The towing did more than $6,000 worth of damage to the van, the complaint says, making it incapable of further campaigning.

Fambrough is an activist, a gadfly and perhaps an acquired taste. The government officials, who, he says, told him to “stand down” or else, are the reason we need people like him.

The shoddy behavior directed against Fambrough is not just redundant evidence that people with power sometimes misbehave in order to keep it. (The mayor was reelected.) The important lesson is that there is no substitute for the judicial supervision of democracy. Only courts can enforce the principle that although politics ain’t beanbag, neither is it a cockpit without rules, or with rules that can be violated with impunity.