Demand Free Press, Free Speech at Conventions

[Commentary] Now that the Republican National Convention is done, the rush to get on with the business of the fall campaign makes it easy to neglect the serious civil liberties and freedom of the press concerns raised by the arrests that occurred in St. Paul during the convention. But what happened on the streets of St. Paul is just as important -- and just as troubling -- as what happened inside the city's Xcel Center. More than 800 people were rounded up by police forces. Many of those detained were, by all account, merely exercising their first amendment right to assemble in protest against their government -- or, in this case, their governing party. Of those arrested, roughly two dozen were working journalists. When security forces paid for with more than $50 million in US tax dollars detain reporters and photographers who step out of the cloistered confines of the convention hall to tell the full story of politics and protest in a convention city, it is not just journalism that is under assault. The Constitution, itself, takes a battering.