What Not to Bring to the 2012 Conventions

There is no city ordinance more outlandish than the city ordinance passed by a wild-eyed town about to host a national political convention. These temporary decrees are now a standard part of convention planning, dictating where – as an uninvited attendee – you may stand on the sidewalk, what you can have in your backpack, and which types of liquid you may reasonably keep in that bottle that looks an awful lot like a projectile.

The city of Tampa, host starting Monday to the Republican National Convention, passed a 20-page colossus [PDF] that’s set to expire a minute after midnight on September 1. Charlotte, which opens the Democratic National Convention two days later, will evoke an ordinance passed in January [PDF] that gives the city the right to enforce a laundry list of imaginative restrictions during large "extraordinary events" in town (the DNC is easily the most extraordinary to date, but the same restrictions were also invoked this year for the annual shareholder meetings of Duke Energy and Bank of America).