Restraint Bill Attracts Pair of Opposites

Stop the presses. Hold on. Time out.

The proceedings in a legislative committee room Wednesday morning would have prompted anyone to do a double take: Archconservative Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach) and the ultraliberal American Civil Liberties Union were working together to pass the same bill.

Usually, Ferguson and ACLU lobbyist Margaret Pena are at each other’s throats, slugging it out ideologically over everything from whether to allow nudie magazines in street racks to the wisdom of castrating rapists.

But on Wednesday, they stood shoulder to shoulder against representatives of the law enforcement establishment on Ferguson’s measure to restrict police use of pain compliance holds on demonstrators.

Ferguson and Pena readily agreed to the alliance, which drew a titter from lawmakers at the beginning of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee hearing. They admitted that it does feel a bit “awkward.”

“Every time this bill comes up, the ACLU comes up to support me and I get a chiding and a laugh, especially from the liberals,” said Ferguson. “That’s what they were all laughing at this morning.

“It’s unusual,” he said. “I didn’t ask for their support, but it’s like a (broken) clock that can be right twice a day. Well, they’re right in this instance.”

Pena chalked it up to the old maxim that politics can make for some strange bedfellows. “In this business, sometimes your enemy this week is going to be your biggest ally next week,” she said.

“Sometimes people that are so far opposed to each other, at some point in time, the two ends meet,” she added. “And this is one of those times where the two ends have met.”

Extreme right met far left over Ferguson’s bill to make it a misdemeanor worth up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for any law enforcement officer who “knowingly and willingly” uses pain compliance techniques on passive protesters.

Ferguson is thinking about the kind of Operation Rescue, anti-abortion protesters who make Pena cringe. Pena, whose organization supports abortion rights, is thinking about the kind of peace marchers and anti-nuclear demonstrators that make the Marine Corps blood of Ferguson boil.

“What’s good for Operation Rescue demonstrators is likewise good for peace demonstrators,” Pena said. “When you’re talking about peaceful, passive demonstrators and forcing police not to use pain compliance techniques against those people, it matters little what they’re demonstrating for.”

The bill was held up for a minor revision and will probably be approved by the committee next week, sending it through a legislative gantlet with the political Odd Couple in tow.