January 06, 2003
Council to Get Antiwar Resolution
Speaking of the number 600, that number of Portland residents also attended a forum yesterday on the pending war against Iraq, at which the first public commitment was made as to a proposed City Council resolution:
By the end of the two-hour forum, Portland City Commissioner Erik Sten and Multnomah County Commissioner Maria Rojo de Steffey publicly committed to introducing anti-war resolutions for their colleagues to consider.
Anti-war advocates urged Sten to introduce such a resolution last fall.
However, skeptics in the community "twisted" the debate from a discussion of whether the United States should go to war to whether local government should weigh in on foreign policy, Sten said.
If the debate stays focused on war, "I would be very proud to sponsor that resolution," Sten said.
This announcement conceivably poses a problem for another proposed City Council resolution, being pitched by the Portland Bill of Rights Defense Committee (a group for which I am an organizer), which would pronounce the City of Portland to be opposed to abuses of civil rights and liberties under new law enforcement authority such as that instituted by the USA PATRIOT Act.
Why does the forthcoming antiwar resolution potentially endanger the civil liberties resolution? Because early conversations with Sten's office suggested that the Commissioner would likely choose one resolution or the other to "champion" but not both -- and the prevailing wisdom thus far has been that he was the only likely member of the City Council to sponsor either one.
Interestingly, there has been some word from inside City Hall that when it came to a civil liberties resolution, the Council would most likely prefer a text which had some practical effect and was not merely rhetorical. An antiwar resolution, of course, has no force except a rhetorical one.
Which is not to say that I oppose an antiwar resolution (although my civil liberties group takes no official stance as an organization), but rather to argue that if the Council is going to take up a purely rhetorical resolution on war with Iraq, there's no legitimate reason to avoid a resolution about the USA PATRIOT Act and civil liberties. In the latter, at least, the City can (and, indeed, should) instruct local officials to abide by local and state protections if those protections should come into conflict with requests by Federal law enforcement.
So for the moment, until more specific word comes out of City Hall, the civil liberties resolution is likely now up in the air.
Comments (1)
The One True b!X on 06 Jan 2003
There's more on this event from the Portland IndyMedia Center.