Democracy can be messy, raucous – and civil

U.S. Rep. Adam Smith is treading where some fellow Democrats unwisely fear to go.

Smith, the seven-term congressman from Tacoma, is not backing down from holding town hall meetings despite the threat of more angry and rowdy protesters.

Some might accuse Smith of being a glutton for punishment. His last town hall meeting in July attracted a crowd of 250 and included shouting, heckling and personal attacks.

That’s par for the course this summer, as many Democrats and some Republicans return to their districts to find the hometown crowd whipped into a frenzy.

Rep. Brian Baird of Vancouver – who has held more than 300 town hall meetings since being elected 11 years ago – has said he won’t schedule in-person forums this month because of what he described as a “lynch mob mentality.” (Baird did hold a remote telephone town hall meeting Friday in which he fielded questions from more than a dozen people, none confrontational.)

Interest groups have long used town hall meetings to their own advantage, but this time the tenor has taken a definite turn to the outright nasty. The cure, though, is more time in the public square, not less.

The political calculus that advises against giving the opposition a platform doesn’t fit here because it assumes that the town hall dissidents are nothing more than the puppets of Republicans and the health care industry.

Some orchestration and even more scare-mongering is certainly happening, but the protesters also include a large contingent of people sincerely scared of what the government is planning to do in the name of reforming health care. They deserve face time with their public officials.

Done well, town hall meetings can even defuse the debate’s volatility. At a town hall over the weekend, Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Lake Stevens, “called for civility and for the most part got it,” according to one account on Crosscut.com. Another, at the conservative blog Sound Politics, noted that Larsen had clearly read the bill and was able to give specific and factual answers.

Elected officials engender civility by treating such citizens with respect and expecting the same in return.

That doesn’t excuse citizens from their own obligation to the public discourse. Yes, democracy can be “messy and raucous,” as one local organizer of town hall protesters put it – but the right of an angry few to derail a public meeting ends at the right of the remainder to be heard.

Protesters determined to shout down politicians and their fellow citizens should be shown the door. But they also shouldn’t be allowed to pre-empt the debate altogether.