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DC Circuit sides with minister in battle over Capitol steps protests
Filed 4h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk
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Tenebrous Brothers Carnival - Act Two
Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0
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A split D.C. Circuit panel ruled that Capitol Police cannot ban demonstrations on the Capitol's Eastern Steps for lack of a sponsoring member of Congress, siding with a Presbyterian minister who sued to pray there in 2021.
Judge Neomi Rao, joined by Judge Karen Henderson, found the steps a nonpublic forum but said the sponsorship rule let favored causes demonstrate while others were shut out entirely; the panel also vacated the district court's broader injunction under the Supreme Court's ban on universal injunctions.
Dissenting judge Judith Rogers argued the majority ignored decades of precedent and history, from the 1914 suffrage march to the 1990 disability rights protest, showing the steps were always a traditional public forum.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.
✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
Letting a sitting member of Congress decide whose cause gets the steps and whose doesn't is a fine way to guarantee the steps mostly host causes that already have friends in high places. The court didn't throw out the whole gate, it just said the gate can't have a doorman who only likes people he recognizes. Seems like a modest thing to have to say out loud about a building that used to let suffragists march right up to it.
