Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium’s the message” and, based on slanted “mainstream media” coverage from Los Angeles, it’s clear the medium’s slanted.  Consider how it framed the handcuffing of California senator Alex Padilla.

The images posted over and over on social media show the California Democrat being hustled out of a press conference, made to “assume the posture,” and being handcuffed, all the while he was shouting, “I am a sitting U.S. senator.”

Well, let’s look at the event from a different camera angle.

Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem was in the “City of Angels” to discuss the devilish antics going on there and how the federal government was responding to restore law and order.  She organized a press conference to explain the government’s position.  She was speaking in the middle of her press conference. 

Along comes Padilla.

Padilla is clearly approaching the podium with his “questions.”  It’s not his press conference, nor is it question-and-answer time. 

It is clear that Padilla intended to interrupt Noem’s press conference.  It is clear that he intended to commandeer the press conference for some performative politics.

Could you do that to any senator’s press conference?  Really?  A commonplace joke on Capitol Hill used to be “What’s the deadliest place you can be?  Anywhere between Chuck Schumer and a camera.”

Just ask yourself: If you walked into a Senator Padilla press conference, unannounced, ready to begin posing questions in the middle of his presentation, what do you think would happen?  You have two choices: (a) The Capitol Police would shove you out and maybe zip-tie (their preferred restraints) your wrists.  (b) Senator Padilla would stop, get a chair, invite you up, and yield the rest of his presser to your “questions.” 

If you said (a), you have good contact with reality.  If you said (b), please cut back on the midday margaritas.

None of the senators hyperventilating about the “treatment of a sitting United States senator” would tolerate you doing the same thing to him.  None.  If you tried it, they’d consider it a security breach — which it is.

Padilla wants to sanitize his bullying his way into a press conference by claiming he was exercising “oversight.”  Oversight does not mean that a privileged solon can anytime, anywhere suddenly act as if he is holding a one-man Senate “oversight investigation” to which everybody must defer.  After all, any reader has even more justification to do the same thing to him: We pay his salary, and he works for us.

Of course, you know that won’t happen — or shouldn’t.  As the Bible and The Byrds remind us, “there is a time for every matter under heaven.”  That includes letting other people have their say at their press conferences. 

Once upon a time, the least immigrant kid would have known that, which makes yelling, “I’m a United States senator!” more one’s self-advertisement for boorishness than for his imperial “oversight” authority.  Padilla, who would lecture us about “norms,” clearly thinks they don’t apply to him. 

The fact that this occurred and that, by day’s end, the Democrat Senate caucus was singing one song makes one legitimately ask how much of this is “coincidental” happenings versus coordinated political kabuki theater, designed to influence narratives against immigration law enforcement.

Traditionally,. “the bully pulpit” referred to the capacity of the president to use his position to push a cause or shape a way of seeing things.  Padilla has a different notion of the bully pulpit: commandeering somebody else’s event and turning it into his pulpit, for him to expound his message, either by interruption or arrest.  That seems now to be the modus operandi of blue California.

The real danger is that such bully tactics undermine rule of law and dissolve civil norms that ought to govern rational political discourse, especially where there’s disagreement.  But the bullies are not about political discourse.  They’re about delegitimizing the president’s agenda, painting it as “authoritarian” so as to dismiss any consideration of its merits.  It’s interference, pure and simple.

I mention “interference” because — in separate action — the House Judiciary Committee Tuesday cleared Rep. Chip Roy’s bill to repeal the FACE Act.  The FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances) Act is 1994 legislation pushed by Democrats to “protect” access to abortion facilities.  The bill bans “interfering” or “physical obstruction” of entry to an abortion facility.  Interference means “restricting a person’s freedom of movement,” obstruction “rendering impassable ingress or egress.”  Engage in those activities, and even if your act is “exclusively ... nonviolent,” you can get up to six months in jail and/or a $100,000 fine.  The Biden-Harris administration prosecuted several grandmothers under its provisions.

If those norms about “interference” were in force in L.A., half the “nonviolent protest” crowd would be in detention.  One would think a federal immigration law enforcement agent should have at least the same level of protection from “interference” as a for-profit abortionist. 

But suddenly, “interference” means something different here — including physically blocking ICE agents.  Including trying to interrupt and take over a Cabinet secretary’s press conference.  Well, it’s still interference and not oversight — even if you are a “sitting United States senator.”  As Mr. Padilla’s party would no doubt tell  us: “nobody is above the law.”

Image: Alex Padilla.  Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.