When Mr. Bush spoke about Social Security at a Denver museum, it was an official function open to the public. The two people who were ejected, Leslie Weise and Alex Young, said they had engaged in no protest or disruption and were excluded only because of the message on the bumper sticker.
As is its practice, the court gave no reasons for turning down the appeal in the case.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dissenting from the court’s decision not to hear the case, wrote that she could not “see how reasonable public officials, or any staff or volunteers under their direction, could have viewed the bumper sticker as a permissible reason for depriving Weise and Young of access to the event.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined Justice Ginsburg’s dissent.
A divided three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Denver dismissed the suit in January, with the majority saying the defendants were entitled to immunity from the lawsuit because there was “no specific authority” on the question of “how to treat the ejection of a silent attendee from an official speech based on the attendee’s protected expression outside the speech area.”
The dissenting appeals court judge, William J. Holloway, said the case presented an obvious violation of the First Amendment.
“It is simply astounding that any member of the executive branch could have believed that our Constitution justified this egregious violation of plaintiffs’ rights,” Judge Holloway wrote.
Justice Ginsburg said that no specific authority was needed, given a half-century of general precedent that applied “even to conduct startling in its novelty” — throwing people out of a public government event for views expressed elsewhere.
“Ejecting them for holding discordant views,” Justice Ginsburg said of the plaintiffs, “could only have been a reprisal for the expression conveyed by the bumper sticker.” Such official reprisal, she said, offends the Constitution.
Justice Ginsburg did say that the only defendants before the court in the case, Weise v. Casper, No. 10-67, were volunteers, who may be entitled to protection under a 1997 federal law called the Volunteer Protection Act.
“Suits against the officials responsible for Weise’s and Young’s ouster remain pending,” she wrote, “and may offer this court an opportunity to take up the issue avoided today.”