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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Justices Won’t Hear Bush Bumper Sticker Appeal

(CN) - The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned down the appeal of two friends who were booted from a George W. Bush speech in 2005 because they arrived in a car with a "No More Blood for Oil" bumper sticker.

Without comment, the justices refused to consider Leslie Weise and Alex Young's claim that their removal from Bush's March 21, 2005 speech in Denver violated their First Amendment rights.

The 10th Circuit ruled in January that the pair had failed to establish that their mere "presence at the president's speech was protected."

Weise and Young were asked to leave the speech after Secret Service agents spotted the bumper sticker on Weise's car.

Weise and Young sued a White House volunteer and a Secret Service agent over the incident, but lost in federal district court and again on appeal.

Because the high court refused to hear the case, the 10th Circuit dismissal stands.

"I cannot see how reasonable public officials, or any staff or volunteers under their direction, could have viewed the bumper sticker as a permissible reason for depriving Weise and Young of access to the event," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in a dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

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