Beep! Beep! Supreme Court rejects case of woman ticketed for honking her horn

WASHINGTON – Don’t honk if you agree.

The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a California traffic law that bans honking – other than to warn another driver − turning down a challenge to the law from a woman ticketed for honking while driving by a rally outside her congressman’s office in 2017.

Susan Porter had argued her beeps of support were protected by the First Amendment.

"The car horn is the sound of democracy in action," her lawyers wrote in their appeal.

But the court didn’t bite. The justices declined without comment to review California’s law.

Though they appear to be rarely enforced, similar laws are on the books in 41 states, according to court records. A New York law bars drivers from sounding a car horn for anything other than as a "reasonable warning." Missouri admonishes drivers to use their horns "for warning purposes only."

The Supreme Court is generally reluctant to question the constitutionality of laws that virtually every state has enacted, California’s lawyers argued.

Porter’s attorneys had said such requirements defy reality. During the pandemic, to avoid bringing large crowds together for a traditional campaign rally, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden organized drive-in rallies in which he encouraged people to "honk if you want to be united again."

In 2020, a convoy of truckers honked their horns outside the White House in protest as former President Donald Trump was delivering remarks in the Rose Garden.

At the time, Trump described the horns interrupting his remarks as a "sign of love."

But a three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit agreed with California that too much honking makes the horn less effective as a warning device to other drivers and pedestrians. It can be distracting, the majority said.

One of the three judges dissented, saying she would have allowed “political protest honking.”

The two others said it would be too difficult, if not impossible, for officers to enforce the law only when there’s proof that honking has distracted other drivers or disturbed the peace.

“To be sure, most non-warning honks do not create distractions resulting in accidents,” U.S. Circuit Judge Michelle Friedland wrote for the appeals court, “but we discern no plausible means by which California could permit non-distracting honks while prohibiting distracting honks.”

The law is different from noise ordinances adopted in many local communities. Those usually involve time or place restrictions barring drivers from leaning on their horns in a residential neighborhood, for instance, or in the evening. The California law Porter was ticketed for violating is categorical, meaning it applies at all times and places.

It carries a fine of $238.

In Porter’s case, her ticket was dismissed when the sheriff’s deputy failed to attend the traffic court hearing.

She’d been pulled over, according to the state, after honking her horn 11 to 15 times in a row in support of protests outside the district office of U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. (Before Issa was elected to Congress, he made a fortune as CEO of the company that makes the Viper car alarm.)

The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that speech protected by the First Amendment encompasses more than the spoken word. In a landmark 1969 decision, for example, a 7-2 majority of the justices ruled that students wearing black arm bands to protest the Vietnam War were taking part in protected speech. Seven years later, the court said that campaign contributions are a form of political speech.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Supreme Court lets stand California traffic ban on horn honking