Attorney General Merrick Garland testified before the House Judiciary Committee on October 21, and, as expected, faced challenges from GOP lawmakers on key issues. In particular, Garland was grilled over his recent decision to involve the Department of Justice in local disputes between school boards and parents regarding the teaching of Critical Race Theory. Still, the AG has provided no credible justification for what appears very much to be a case of politically motivated government overreach.
It seems the AG thinks it’s acceptable for the DOJ to intimidate parents who are angry that their children are being taught racist dogma because some teachers or members of school boards have allegedly received violent threats. It is a weak excuse indeed. If the FBI went after every person in America who threatened someone else with violence, it would need to hire maybe a hundred thousand additional agents.
Why, in the case of parents versus school boards, then, do the feds suddenly feel the need to intervene? If it is not to silence political speech, then it can only be because the DOJ considers parents’ berating of local education officials a potential threat to national security – that is, terroristic.
First Amendment Rights?
Garland insisted at his hearing that this is not the case, however. “I want to be clear,” he told the committee, “the Justice Department supports and defends the First Amendment right of parents to complain as vociferously as they wish about the education of their children – about the curriculum taught in the schools.” The AG added later that he “can’t imagine” a situation in which the actions of angry parents “would be labeled as domestic terrorism.”
The problem is Garland’s Oct. 4 memorandum on the subject of DOJ involvement in boards of education disputes came just days after a letter sent by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) to the White House suggested the protestations of enraged parents were “equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” Coincidence? That is unlikely. It would seem to be an exercise in cognitive dissonance to dismiss the obvious assumption that the AG – probably at the direction of the White House, even though Garland denied this – issued his memo as a response to the NSBA’s letter.
(Photo by Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images)
The man whom former President Barack Obama tried unsuccessfully to put on the Supreme Court doesn’t perform well in front of the camera, nor in the face of tough questions – or even easy ones, it seems. He stutters and stammers even more than former special counsel Robert Mueller which, as was the case with Mueller when he wrapped his ludicrous investigation into the non-existent Trump-Russia conspiracy, suggests a guilty conscience, a knowledge that what he is doing is neither fair nor apolitical nor constitutional.
Congressional Theater?
Of course, Americans learned nothing new from Thursday’s hearing. Congressional hearings – or those that are open and televised, anyway – have no point to them at all, other than to get public officials on record so their dishonesty or evasiveness can be revisited at a later date. Party politics aside, it’s always the same story; the government official being questioned will say whatever he or she believes the interrogator wants to hear, regardless of what is really going on behind the scenes. Since there are no serious penalties for lying to Congress – unless one is an associate of former President Donald Trump – it is often the case that little said during a congressional hearing is of much consequence. If politicians were not obsessed with grandstanding for the viewing public, there would be only closed hearings, and people like Merrick Garland would never have to worry about exposing themselves to a critical American public.
The question that remains is whether the DOJ will in fact take any action against concerned parents or quietly distance itself from the issue, having appeased the radical left by appearing to show concern.
~ Read more from Graham J. Noble.
