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City councils in the United States routinely try to ban or censure criticism of other individuals ("personal attacks") during their deliberations. For example, in some cases chairs have gavelled down council members who attempted to criticize some person or other, or even set up "ethics committees" to make formal censures of council members who criticize or make "personal attacks" on other people such as town employees, other council members or whomever. In general, all these kinds of actions are First Ammendment violations, at least according to the ACLU. (You can do a web search to find news of various lawsuits the ACLU has filed against town councils for doing such things.)

However, it is not clear to me what the remedy is in the cases. The news articles just say things like "last week the ACLU sued the City Council of Podunkville for restricting public speech blah blah" without explaining what the outcome sought was.

In such lawsuits what is the typical remedy the petitioner seeks? A court order enjoining the City Council from "doing that again"? Does not seem practical. Money? What exactly do they ask of the judge?

Cicero
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Here is a concrete example of such a petition. The demands, at the bottom of the petition, are

a) Find that the Defendants deprived Ms. Barron of her state constitutional rights; b) Enter an award against the Town and the Board for compensatory damages for the injuries Ms. Barron suffered as the result of those deprivations; c) Find that Mr. Kolenda defamed Ms. Barron and inflicted emotional distress upon her, either intentionally or negligently and award Ms. Barron compensatory and punitive damages; d) Find that the Board violated the Open Meeting Law; e) Enter injunctive relief requiring the Board to amend its meeting minutes to reflect Mr. Kolenda’s abusive comments and the Board’s failure to properly adjourn the meeting; f) Enter a Declaration that the Board’s public participation policy is unconstitutional to the extent that it disallows the criticism of Board members or decisions; g) Award Ms. Barron her reasonable attorneys’ fees for violation of her constitutional rights; and h) Grant such further and other relief as this Honorable Court deems just and proper.

In other words, money, injunction, and a finding of having violated the law. This kind of information is not generally contained in published appeals, so it is difficult to provide any meaningful statistics beyond these three general categories.

user6726
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So I think the fundemental problem here is that you are confusing the word "CENSURE" with "CENSORE" which do not mean the same thing. When someone is "censored" that means that they are prevented from discussing a topic or a particular issue (An editor will censor a newspaper article critical of products made by the ACME Company because ACME Company is a major advertiser in the newspaper).

Censure on the other hand refers to a parliamentary procedure where someone or something is disapproved of or condemned by a parliamentary body for any reason the body chooses to list and is non-binding on the party being censured and has no compulsory action to remove them from office or impose a punishment for their behavior on them.

Now, in your example above, in this regard, the threat of censuring someone for making personal attacks while they have the floor of a parliamentary body is a form of censorship of their speech, but it is within the bounds of the Constitution. While it's certainly could be an exception, most parliamentary body's procedures and rules of order (in the United States) derive from Robert's Rules of Order which itself was written as a book that was designed to apply the parliamentary rules of order of the U.S. Congress to non-legislative bodies such as cooperated boards or club meetings, board of director meetings, ect. As it so happened, a lot of sub-national governments adopted "Robert's Rules" because it was easier than making up their own rules. To the point that the phrase "Robert's Rules" is often used in the U.S. to describe parliamentary procedure in general, whether they are actually using Robert's Rules of Order or not.

With that in mind, both houses of Congress have rules that restrict the speech of members while in debate in the well (the center of the chambers where the person has the floor), with many of these rules preventing effectively preventing the ad hominin attacks on members of their own house (In the House of Reps, they also extend this to Senators) the President and Vice President, and even the states. Generally the idea is to debate the idea, not the person.

This isn't just a matter of congressional rules, but courts will also prevent this as lawyers who are opposing council in a case should not speak ill of each other for representing their clients, nor should any evidence be allowed in trial that unfairly prejudices someone to a jury.

Thus it carries that lower government institutions than the national or state levels would also hold these rules as the use of personal attacks are not conductive to the business of debating effective policy.

It should be pointed out that these restrictions hold only to those who have the floor in the the body's chambers. Outside of the chambers, in the halls of Congress, the gloves come off and attacks can get personal.

With that in mind, while censuring is used to rebuke people, it's rare at a national level because Congress has more powerful tools at their disposal. Each House my expel one of their own members with a 2/3rds majority vote and remove the President, members of the Cabinet and Judges by means of Impeachment. Typically, if you have the votes to censure someone, you have the votes to impeach or expel them too. Censuring only works if the person being censured would be shamed by the actions they are being rebuked for OR the constituents would be motivated to vote against them. And yes, it can be used to rebuke someone from engaging in further debate for a limited time (typically the finding of a violation of the rules of debate in the House or Senate will prevent the offender from receiving the floor for a period of time, so they can no longer officially debate a bill until the present debate is resolved. (They can still vote on the bill).

hszmv
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