A left-wing judge ruled recently that a First Amendment lawsuit brought by Republican Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene can proceed against a pair of California cities even as he dismissed a critical claim against other liberal defendants.
The lawsuit stems from rallies Gaetz, a Fort Walton Beach Republican, and Greene scheduled in California in 2021 as part of the “Put America First” tour.
The judge ruled that cities that canceled the events may be on the hook for discrimination based on political viewpoints – a no-no under the First Amendment. Yet, liberal groups who pressured them to sabotage the rallies will not be held accountable.
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According to the ruling in March by U.S. District Judge Hernan Vera, a Biden appointee, Put America First contracted with a caterer to host a rally for Gaetz and Greene, a Georgia Republican, in July 2021 in Laguna Hills.
The rally was canceled after liberals unleashed a barrage of phone calls and emails protesting their appearance.
The organizer then sought to move the rally to a city-owned venue in Riverside. The provider met the same fate as the liberal protesters, including at least nine nonprofit activist groups, including the NAACP, the League of Women Voters, and LULAC, a radical Hispanic organization.
The night before the rally, Put America First tried again, cutting a deal with a private theater in Anaheim.
Yet as soon as the ink was dry, a city code enforcement officer called the theater and told the owners their conditional use permit would be “in jeopardy” if they allowed the rally to happen.
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The theater canceled the program.
Gaetz and Greene sued Riverside and Anaheim last July, alleging the cities conspired with the left-wing activist groups to shut down their rally illegally.
Judge Vera rejected the cities’ claims to dismiss the lawsuit. Gaetz and Greene, he wrote in his opinion, “adequately allege that the Municipal Defendants delegated to their respective agents the authority to cancel the rally (and/or ratified the relevant conduct after the fact) and that the event cancellations were expressly predicated on viewpoint discrimination.”
However, the NAACP, LULAC, and others were excused, even as he admitted that their pressure on the venues prompted them to cancel Gaetz and Greene.
Vera admitted that the events were canceled because “many members of the public, including some of the Nonprofit Defendants, made statements and threatened action,” and because of an “outcry and lobbying from members of the public.”
Yet he asserted that there was no conspiracy between the groups and the cities to shut down Gaetz and Greene.
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They were just exercising their protected First Amendment rights, he wrote, even as the cancellations occurred roughly a year after Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots left many cities in ruin.
Vera called that part of Gaetz and Greene’s lawsuit an “unprecedented and stunningly deficient pleading.”
“The Complaint—even charitably construed with all reasonable inferences drawn in Plaintiffs’ favor—is utterly devoid of any specifics plausibly alleging such an agreement,” Vera wrote.
“The gravamen of Plaintiffs’ claims against the Nonprofit Defendants is, both legally and literally, a conspiracy theory that relies purely on conjecture. And without an unlawful conspiracy, all that is left to aver against the Nonprofit Defendants are the unremarkable allegations that they exercised their own First Amendment rights to lobby for the cancellation of the event. That is protected.”
The case has flown largely under the media’s radar until earlier this week when the left-wing Daily Beast attempted to raise issues as to whether the GOP lawmakers were violating House ethics rules because no paper trail exists to show how the lawsuit is being funded.
The Daily Beast did not include any comments from Gaetz or Greene.
In this article, the website claimed it sent requests for comment “to spokespeople for the Gaetz and Greene campaigns but did not receive a reply”—even as it called Gaetz and Greene “two of the loudest members of Congress.”
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