Our clients were ejected from a presidential appearance by President George W. Bush in Colorado in July 2004 because their car sported a “No More Blood For Oil” bumper sticker. The defendants in this case were former heads of the White House Office of Presidential Advance, whom we allege were responsible for creating and implementing a policy under which people peacefully expressing dissent at public appearances by President Bush were harassed and arrested. The ACLU of Colorado filed a parallel case against the officials who ran the event in Colorado.
In Colorado, the district court dismissed the case on the ground that it would interfere with the President’s message to allow people to attend his speech if they arrived in a car with a hostile bumper sticker, and the Tenth Circuit affirmed that decision (over a dissent) on the ground that it was not clearly established law that people couldn’t be ejected from a public event because of the views expressed on a bumper sticker on their car in the parking lot. The ACLU’s petition for Supreme Court review was denied over the dissents of Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor, who wrote, “I cannot see how reasonable public officials . . . could have viewed the bumper sticker as a permissible reason for depriving [the Plaintiffs] Weise and Young of access to the event.”
Our case in D.C. was then dismissed on the ground that the legal issue had been resolved in the Colorado case.
