When Is It Okay To Handcuff A US Senator?

Yesterday in California, as you may have heard, US Sen. Alex Padilla interrupted a news conference where Homeland Gestapo Secretary Kristi Noem was explaining that, on behalf of Great Leader Donald Trump, federal forces would remain in Los Angeles until they can “liberate the city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and this mayor have placed on this country and this city.”

That’s the point where Padilla interrupted her, because, as he later told NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff, it was “just too much to take” when Noem said the people of Los Angeles and California needed to be “rescued” from their elected leaders. Padilla began asking a question that appeared to be about the handful of serious crimers who ICE happened to catch in its mass arrests in the city, but multiple agents grabbed him and dragged him out of the room, then forced him to the ground and handcuffed him.

We won’t get into the whole “He said – She lied” of it, because it’s all on video, except to note that Noem, the administration, and the entire rightwing spin machine is trying to make us not believe what’s right there in the video. In their version, Padilla “burst” into the room and “lunged” at Noem, which simply didn’t happen.

Padilla said in an NBC News interview that he had been in the room for several minutes listening to what Noem had to say — and that because it’s a federal building, he’d already been through security and was escorted at all times by “somebody from the National Guard, somebody from the FBI,” including when he went to the presser. No bursting, no lunging. We’ve cued the video up to the point where Padilla rebuts those claims and gives his account of what happened.

We’re certain that the press will continue to obsess for the next week over what “really” happened — unless of course something more insane happens in the next few days, which seems likely, what with Israel’s attack on Iranian nuclear sites and Great Leader’s Birthday Parade with all the tanks (or submarines) in DC.

Instead, we have some thoughts on when exactly it’s OK to drag a US senator to the ground and handcuff him or her. If you read the headline and subhead, you already know the answer so you can just go walk the newspaper or help the dog do today’s Wordle, so that would be very efficient.

We will freely admit that we have done only minimal historical research on the question of when sitting US senators have been handcuffed. We started by looking at the 2007 arrest of Larry Craig for his wide-stance idiocy in a restroom stall at the Minneapolis airport, but as far as we could tell from media reports and the original arrest report, it seems that Craig was actually very discreetly escorted by the undercover cops to an interview room without being cuffed. We also learned that “wide stance” was the phrase used by the cop who wrote the report, not Craig himself, who only said in a transcript of the interview “I’m a fairly wide guy.” Popular memory is a funny and sometimes unfair thing, huh?

And then, because we have a hella bad head cold, we had a long coughing fit and decided “screw history” because that’s kinda the zeitgeist these days anyway.

But we’re sure that other senators have been handcuffed before, but only when they were actually being arrested for some serious crime, and often not even then, as a courtesy. And none that we know of for the crime of “interrupting.” Not even for “aggravated interrupting.”

You may or may not be fascinated to know that the modern “swing-through” handcuff design was first patented in 1912, though other clumsier restraint devices have been around since Ancient Times, and that in an 1894 treatise, Inspector Maurice Moser of Scotland Yard

told of a French police officer who arrested a thief but found himself without handcuffs to secure him. Displaying some ingenuity, he cut off all the buttons on the man’s suspenders. Modesty made for the best handcuffs, as the suspect held tight to his trousers while escorted through crowded Paris streets.

We figured that would go over well with the scruffy pants-free / sans-culottes crowd of revolutionaries here, even if Insp. Moser was both a century late and early for that convoluted joke.

Also, we’ll add that in the most notorious incident of violence perpetrated against a senator, the 1856 caning of abolitionist Sen. Charles Sumner (R-Massachusetts), the assailant, Rep. Preston Brooks (D-South Carolina), wasn’t arrested at all after he repeatedly bashed Sumner in the head with a metal-topped cane, right on the floor of the Senate chamber, in revenge for an anti-slavery speech Sumner had given.

No handcuffs then, either; after leaving Sumner bleeding and near death, Brooks “walked calmly out of the chamber without being detained by the stunned onlookers.” The House introduced but couldn’t pass a censure resolution against Brooks, though he did resign, only to be reelected because your pro-slavery Southerners really loved a tough guy.

Yeah, no idea why that particular outburst of real political violence (WaPo gift link), which solidified Northern opposition to slavery and its proponents, came to mind this morning. Something about intolerable cruelty and oppression, maybe. Also, let me put in yet another plug for historian Joanne Freeman’s brilliant 2018 book, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War. Here’s Freeman discussing her book at the Chicago Humanities Festival shortly after it was published. We plan to huddle up with a cup of hot tea and watch the whole thing after this post goes up!

As to the particular circumstances under which it’s OK to assault and handcuff a US Senator, we think the likely answer from the New York Times might be “How has the lack of clear Democratic messaging on crime and immigration led to this sorry pass?” Also, the answer from the various spokesblondes would be “Why aren’t all Democrats in handcuffs, really?”

In conclusion, this is certainly an interesting time to be viewing American politics and our long history of rightwing political thuggery through a fog of cold pills and coffee, thank you for your attention to this matter.

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[WaPo (gift link) / NBC News on YouTube / OC Register / US Senate]

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