Gagging Paul Jacobs

Paul Jacobs (a libertarian columnist and a regular in my rss viewer) is in jail for exercising his constitutional rights and failing to know ahead of time that legislators would reinterpret the wording of their laws specifically to make it impossible for him to exercise those same rights.

From Free Paul Jacob:

Let me address the so-called charge against me. I’m accused of violating the Oklahoma statute requiring petition circulators to be residents, a residency requirement currently being challenged in federal court. There seems little justification for this underlying law other than to restrict and hamper the petition process. I believe it will ultimately be struck down as unconstitutional.

Twice in the last quarter century—in Meyer v. Grant and in ACLF v. Buckley—the U.S. Supreme Court struck down similar restrictions, like regulating petitioners’ pay and requiring petitioners to be registered voters. As the High Court put it in Meyer, government cannot “reduce the available pool” of people to assist citizens in communicating with their fellow citizens and petitioning their government.

But regardless of how the courts ultimately rule on the constitutionality of the residency requirement, everyone I worked with on the TABOR petition sought to follow the statute as written. As an advisor to the petition drive, I worked to help Rick Carpenter and Oklahomans in Action obtain the best petition services at the best price, and then to monitor the drive’s progress.

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I was then informed that under Oklahoma’s statutory residency requirement, people could move to Oklahoma and immediately declare residency, and thus be qualified to circulate the petition. The petition company felt enough people could be recruited to move to Oklahoma to gather enough signatures to bring the question to the ballot.

When I inquired as to whether the state officials had been asked for their guidelines on what constitutes residency, I was told that the petition company had indeed sought—and received—the advice and approval of officials in the Secretary of State’s office. Indeed, two separate individuals with National Voter Outreach spoke to government officials to determine the rules on residency. They were told that people could indeed come to Oklahoma, declare residency, and begin circulating a petition.

In good faith, the company acted on this information.

I also asked the folks at National Voter Outreach whether there had been any challenges of petition drives on the basis of residency, and whether any ruling on same had been issued by the Oklahoma Supreme Court. I received a copy of the court’s decision in a challenge to an initiative to ban cock-fighting. In that decision, circulators were challenged for being “out-of-state” circulators because they had moved to Oklahoma during the petition drive and because many lived in hotels during their residence in the state. According to the information I received, every circulator in the cock-fighting ban petition who declared him or herself a resident was ruled to be qualified to circulate the petition, regardless of how long he resided in the state or whether he lived in a hotel. The only circulator disqualified had listed an out-of-state address on the petition form.

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Let me say it again: constitutional or not, we obeyed the statute.

So, why the prosecution? I am told by many friends in Oklahoma that this outrageous prosecution is, sadly, very much in character for the Oklahoma Attorney General. They inform me that while Drew Edmondson shows an uncanny ability to miss the corruption taking place right under his nose by members of his own Democratic Party—such that a federal investigation must now be conducted—he tosses decency and common sense straight out the window to persecute his political opponents.

I just though you might want to know what your First amendment rights were actually worth.

Update: As Epifanio suggests, you can find out more about Paul Jacobs situation at www.samadamsalliance.org.