Into the “People’s” House

I was in downtown Columbus yesterday. When there, I always liked to walk through the Statehouse (which is what the State Capitol Building is called).

Of course, I’m sure you all recall that they recently banned bare feet.

You can see my collected Statehouse blog entries here.

But here’s the quick recap, for any new readers:

After I was stopped by a State Trooper a few years back for being barefooted, they all figured out that they didn’t have a rule prohibiting it. This totally annoyed the Chair of the Board that runs the Statehouse, former Senate President Dick Finan, so they went about creating the rule.

With the help of a lot of you, we fought the good fight, but they’d already decided what they wanted to do. And they did it.

As part of the testimony and interactions with legislators, I talked about how wearing shoes caused me pain, so there was talk of how to get a waiver. So, I worked to get myself a waiver, and first used it at one of the meetings of the Board itself. I wrote about that in Statehouse Redux.

One big problem with the waiver system is that you have to know exactly when you are going to use the Statehouse. Before, if I was downtown for some reason, I could just decide on the spur of the moment to walk through. Which, quite frankly, ought to be the way it is with what they oh-so-hypocritically call “The People’s House”. Now, however, I had to send them the request a good week in advance and hope they’d send me back my “barefoot permit” in time.

I did test the system a bit. One time I knew I’d be there sometime in the next week, but unsure of the day. So I sent in a permit request for a whole week to see if it was approved. It was.

But yesterday was pretty much spur-of-the-moment, and it wasn’t clear just what I should do.

So what I did was print out a permit form, fill it out, and bring it with me when I headed downtown. My plan was to head directly to the office of the CSRAB for the Director to sign. If I was stopped along the way by a State Trooper, I could either wait there while somebody fetched the director, or maybe the Trooper would let me head there on my own.

Nobody stopped me (I have to admit I was wearing jeans, not shorts, so my bare feet were less obvious). I made it directly to the Director’s office.

And he wasn’t there. Additionally, the person staffing the desk was not about to take on the <sarcasm>heavy</sarcasm> responsibility of granting me my barefoot waiver. It turns out everybody was at a staff meeting, and the Director would return in about 20 minutes.

So was I going to wait?

I hope at this point you are thinking about how ridiculous this is. I’m simply a citizen exercising my right to access the seat of government, and in order to be “legal” I have to pre-plan a trip, and then wait until some functionary is available to allow me to do so.

I didn’t wait. I decided to wander around for a bit with naked feet and naked of the official governmental permission they required.

I did stay down in the basement, though (the Troopers are usually stationed one floor above). The basement has the museum (which is always fun to visit) and the gift shop (which is also always fun to visit—I didn’t buy anything this time, though).

The basement also has the “Map Room”, which is delightful to walk on with bare feet. It’s a map of the state of Ohio, with each county done with a different type of stone. Here’s a photo of it taken the day before the barefoot rule went into effect.

The Map Room in the Ohio Statehouse

I then returned to the Director’s office, and said, “I’m visiting the Statehouse today. I need you to approve this waiver.”

So he did. While doing so I asked him about allowing others besides him being allowed to approve it, so I didn’t have to wait. He told me there were others, but they were all at the staff meeting with him. I had just picked a bad time to try to get an instant waiver.

I also asked him about getting a permanent waiver. Nope. Wasn’t going to happen. (I didn’t really inquire about why he couldn’t do that.)

So now that I had my waiver I went up to the main floor under the cupola. A Trooper may have seen me, but he didn’t even ask to see my waiver. But I enjoyed looked at the artwork there, and walking on the tiled floor under the cupola.

In fact, I should mention that the whole Statehouse is a wonderful treat for the feet. There are bricks and tiles and marbles and the Map Room. It really is a pleasure to walk through.

But this is what I have to go through to visit “The People’s House”. As far as I can tell, a visit to the seat of government is a fundamental right, and they should not be able to infringe on it quite so lightly.

And it is an infringement—it was an unnecessary burden that they placed on me simply to visit, between having to plan in advance and waiting for either a reply or for personnel to become available. It also has a chilling effect (to use First Amendment language) on my ability to visit. I have not visited as often as I used to, just because of all the advance planning required. I’ve been downtown on the spur of the moment before and had to avoid entering the Statehouse.

Maybe next time I just shouldn’t bother with the waiver. I visited the place without being challenged at all, either before or after I got the waiver. When the barefoot rule was enacted before, they claimed that nobody would be arrested for violating it. So maybe I should not worry about it.

On the other hand, they are talking about increasing security at the Statehouse, with a checkpoint to enter. I bet it wouldn’t be so easy them.

But this is the point we’ve gotten to, where minor functionaries get to infringe on our lives in this fashion. Hey, I’m “People” too.