Republicans decided to pursue the investigators.
Aware that they can’t get them off the trail of many conservatives — including, and perhaps most importantly, Donald Trump —, they decided to complicate the investigations, raising so much dust that the public has a hard time telling fact from fiction.
This week, Republicans in the House of Representatives acted promptly to approve the formation of the so-called Selected Subcommittee on the Instrumentalization of the Federal Government, which is intended to investigate agencies that, according to their version, have been launching targeted attacks on conservatives.
As The New York Times reported, “The panel is so broad in scope that it could become the Republicans’ primary tool for attacking the Biden administration, potentially sparking clashes over access to highly confidential information and details of criminal investigations.”
But let’s be clear: Republicans are employing a fundamentally Trumpist tactic — accusing others of what one is guilty of. It was Trump, not the Democrats, who tried to instrumentalize the federal government against its enemies.
The former president’s second White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, told the Times that the then chief told him several times that he wanted the IRS to investigate his political enemies.
Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, in a memoir published last year, wrote that Trump wanted the Pentagon to court-martial retired military leaders Stanley McChrystal and William H. McRaven, who had criticized him.
According to the book “Frankly, we Did Win this Election: The Inside Story of how Trump Lost”, by Times reporter Michael C. Bender, during Black Lives protests Matter in 2020 the then president repeatedly pressured law enforcement officials, saying “the right way to deal with these people is to crack their heads”.
And all of this happened well before the violent uprising of January 6, 2021, which he helped to incite.
The FBI and the Justice Department, institutions that sometimes hamstrung Trump when he was in power, are now investigating him and others who may have committed crimes in his service or out of loyalty to him. Evidently, these investigations drew the ire of the politician and left many Republicans worried about their own guilt in notary.
Thus, following the true Trumpist playbook, they accuse anyone of corruption who investigates the possibility that they were corrupt. They manipulate conspiracy theories and turn them into real contempt.
I believe the Republicans are trying to create a counterweight to the damning evidence and testimony brought to light by the January 6th committee. They intend to manufacture an equivalence.
As part of its effort to punish agencies that seek to hold them accountable, the law and order party intends to go after the police and the judiciary. This shows that the support given to the Blue Lives Matter movement (blue lives matter, in defense of the police) was nothing more than a farce. They just wanted to protect officers who disproportionately kill black people.
For them, the police have always been an instrument to control and repress the “other”. When the police and justice tried to control and repress them, they complained, saying it was an injustice. How dare the Department of Justice apply the law impartially?! That wasn’t the plan. That was not the intention.
Another tactic Republicans have begun to use in recent years is to co-opt virtue, stealing the language of civil rights, invoking past righteous causes to justify their own corrupt efforts.
Republicans are comparing their new board—what Democratic Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts correctly characterized as the “Insurrection Protection Committee”—with the Churches Committee of the 1970s. This was a legitimate, bipartisan investigative effort that brought it surfaced a series of federal abuses committed by agents who targeted civil rights organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, activists protesting the Vietnam War, and individuals such as Martin Luther King.
The new commission is not a Committee of the Churches — it is a coven of conspiracy theorists.
Reportedly, she will start by going after federal agents who have tried to quell rowdy and sometimes violent protests against progressive school board policies, for which they are reportedly labeling some of the parents of students involved as “domestic terrorists.” (As the Associated Press has pointed out, there is no evidence that this ever happened.)
This, too, is a Trumpist tactic: linking Trump’s problems with those of his followers, to create the impression that they are all comrades in arms, fighting a common enemy.
But I think that the Republican complaints against the federal police and justice bodies have deeper roots than the problems of Trump and his accomplices. I believe they have their origin in the foundations of conservatism and the cancer that was allowed to grow in it.
Attorney General Merrick Garland told senators in 2021 that the greatest domestic danger America faces comes from “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocate the superiority of the white race.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas specifically highlighted: “The danger and lethality of the threat posed by violent domestic extremism is evidenced by the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol and other recent attacks in various parts of our country, including to government buildings, federal employees and communities of color”.
Later Republicans would start talking about ousting Mayorkas for his approach to border control, but the fact that he drew attention to the link between violent domestic extremism and the angry Trump mob that stormed Congress must have intensified their thirst for blood, your desire to overthrow him.
One of the first things that happened under the new Republican majority in the House was that Texas Republican Representative Pat Fallon filed impeachment motions against Mayorkas. This is indeed instrumentalizing the federal government.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
