The wife of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) “has filed a criminal complaint against the organizer of a protest which took place outside the couple’s Virginia home” (photo, left), the Daily Mail reported on Saturday, February 6, 2021. Read story here.
The Daily Mail says video of the protest “shows about a dozen protesters chanting and shouting through megaphones before writing on the sidewalk with chalk and walking up to the couple’s doorstep,” but adds police responding to the scene “described the protesters as ‘peaceful” and merely dispersed the crowd without any arrests. But Hawley claimed in a tweet, “They screamed threats, vandalized, and tried to pound open our door.”
Patrick Young, an activist, organized the protest because, the Daily Mail says, he was “angered by the senator’s plans to object to Electoral College counts.”
(Note: Lots of other people are upset with Hawley over this, too; some of his past supporters and donors have walked away from him, including his former mentor, retired Sen. John Danforth, who now says supporting Hawley in the 2018 election “was the worst mistake I ever made in my life” {source here}.)
The protest was conduced on January 4, two days before the electoral vote count that was interrupted by the Capitol insurrection which left a police officer and 4 other people dead and sent terrified members of Congress scrambling to “safe rooms” inside the beseiged building.
None of this justifies protesting outside someone’s personal residence. I’m against haranguing public figures at their homes, on planes, or in restaurants. No matter how much others may disagree with them — Hawley is full of crap — they’re still people with families, entitled to private lives like the rest of us, and what they do in their public lives shouldn’t spill over into their private lives.
There’s a time and place for peaceful, lawful protest. It blunts the protest message when the protesters themselves step over a line.
However, the question for the legal system is whether Young committed a crime. The First Amendment severely limits the ability to prosecute people for political expression. He can’t be prosecuted for the protest, per se. (Yes, I realize Republicans hate dissenters, and would like to jail them all, but they can’t under our Constitutional system. Maybe they’ll be able to do that someday if they succeed in overthrowing our democracy and installing a strongman at the head of our government, but not this time.)
The charges would have to be for something like disturbing the peace, trespassing, or property damage. Chalk on a sidewalk isn’t property damage. The video below shows people going on Hawley’s property and knocking (or pounding) on his front door; they possibly can be fined for trespassing (a misdemeanor). However, to convict Young of trespassing, it has to be proven that he went on the Hawley’s property himself.
Basically, my position on this is that Erin Hawley has a legitimate complaint, is entitled to pursue it, and the legal system is responsible for resolving it according to the law. And it is the law, and the facts of the case, that should determine a legal outcome; not how Sen. Hawley feels about it, characterizes it, or what he tweets about it.