OPINION:
“Shut it down 4 Palestine.” This is the cry of pro-Hamas protesters as they block highways all over the United States — in Washington, Rhode Island, Illinois — to shift U.S. policy toward Israel in favor of antisemitic terrorists.
This is not a peaceful cause. It champions a group that slaughtered more than 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7 and still holds more than 100 hostages, including babies. These aren’t peaceful protests, either. Their goal is to create chaos by preventing parents from picking children up from school, blocking ambulances from assisting the sick and injured, and grinding businesses to a halt. We cannot give these terrorist sympathizers a free pass.
Florida — as well as Iowa, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas — have taken state action against road blockers. But these efforts don’t apply to federal interstates, as we lack a federal law on the books. It’s time to change that. Our Safe Passage on Interstates Act, to be introduced in both the Senate and the House of Representatives as of Feb. 13, would criminalize any intentional obstruction of a highway that occurs without proper authorization.
Millions of Americans depend on reliable transportation to get to and from work and put food on the table. Millions also depend on firefighters, police officers and medical personnel to reach emergencies in time, and children need open roads to make it safely to school and back.
Unfortunately, blocking highways is one of the primary tactics that the progressive left uses to cudgel Americans into accepting its unpopular policies. Recently, the practice was taken up by climate activists, who blocked highways across the country to “save Mother Earth” — and ironically caused hundreds of vehicles to stall in the process, releasing a sizable quantity of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Pro-Hamas protesters are the latest to pull these stunts. Their website brags that “protesters have shut down highways, train stations, and bridges” — bridges that, as New York City Mayor Eric Adams notes, “people are … driving to and from, across … to go to their place of employment … [and to deal] with some real emergency-type issues.” But these protesters don’t care about that, just as their terrorist allies in Gaza don’t care about innocent lives in Israel, Gaza or elsewhere. For Hamas, “death, not life, is the prize.”
U.S. citizens are free to express support for terrorists who rape, murder and pillage innocent civilians, though it’s an abhorrent view that leaders, elected or not, should oppose and combat. But no one is free to disrupt the lives of tens of thousands of hardworking people, block emergency services, and hang commerce out to dry. That does not count as peaceful assembly, just as yelling “fire” in a crowded theater does not constitute free speech.
Criminalizing interstate blockage would give law enforcement further tools to maintain the peace and discourage these protests from happening in the first place. We hope our colleagues in Congress will pass this commonsense bill soon.
• Marco Rubio is an American politician and lawyer serving as the senior U.S. senator from Florida, a seat he has held since 2011. Mike Collins is an American politician and businessman serving as the U.S. representative for Georgia’s 10th Congressional District since 2023.
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