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The River Cities’ Reader’s July 2025 cover story was prompted by two civil rights activists who spoke during public with business at the Davenport City Council meeting on June 25, 2025. As of July 5, 2025 that video previously available the evening of the council meeting and for days afterwards at the city’s website is no longer available. The activist Tanawah Downing has published he and his partner Jessica Saxton’s remarks to the city council at their Facebook and that can be seen at www.rcreader.com/y/tanawah. Their presentation June 25, prompted the Reader to secure an interview with Tanawah Downing a couple days later.
River Cities’ Reader editor/publisher Todd McGreevy and advocate/litigator Tanawah Downing had a fascinating talk, which you can hear, enclosed; and it’s useful to keep their talking points in mind when one reads certain articles within Issue N° 1035, the July edition of the Reader.
Downing has a lot to say about the Supreme Court decision in the 1844 case of Hurtado v California, which he believes has had a disproportionate, deforming influence on American jurisprudence. The Court’s ruling essentially said that state governments can deny recourse to grand-jury hearings to defendants in criminal cases — and, in so doing, deprive those defendants of their Fifth- Amendment rights. Downing maintains that Americans will only ever become full citizens in the eyes of the law when their recourse to the Fifth is wholly untrammeled on the state and federal levels. It will be such an occasion when that day is finally enshrined by the high courts that it might warrant its own holiday for its celebration.
McGreevy’s editorial concerns the increasing inaccessibility of the Scott County government and its public servants, which, in due course, translates into a lack of accountability when it comes to assigning responsibility for, oh, say, the collapse of a building before one’s very eyes after all opportunities to prevent it have been elided. Where Is Scott County’s Local Grand Jury When You Need Them?
In this interview turned podcast, the two discuss McGreevy’s initial skepticism by the appearance on 25 June of Downing and his colleague, Jessica Sexton, at the Public with Business portion before the Davenport City Council. McGreevy’s critique is primarily seeking back up documentation of the documents the two claimed had been served to the Iowa Attorney General and the Iowa Supreme Court. Their subsequent exchange of legal talk (again, enclosed) allayed his fears (mostly); and if Downing’s credit of divine intervention led Sexton and him to appear in Davenport to serve a public notice in accordance with USC Rules and Supreme Court Rules 17 and 20, then agnostics will have something to gnaw on in favor of a spiritual reality coexisting with the corporeal realm. From the evidence of his own eyes, though, McGreevy has seen so many instances of outside agents infiltrating City Council meetings in order to deflect the efforts of people/groups with legit Business before the Council that it’s not paranoid for an observer to ask, “Is This Crazy Bait?” Many of the documents McGreevy requested as back up from Downing are made available at the article linked previously. However, many are not.
What was shared with the Reader has been posted below.
Lydia Electrum’s own editorial “Erroneous Efforts to a Worthy Cause” was less forgiving of the two’s lack of legal credentials (neither has a law degree or practices law), and she dismisses their arguments as “erroneous and frivolous.” Even though the legal points they raise on whole are salient, the citizens of Iowa would be better suited by experts with direct experience in litigation, rather than the Don Quixote/Sancho Panza approach of Downing and Sexton.
– Remarks by Michael Helke