There were only two issues on which Republicans and Democrats could agree during the House Judiciary Committee’s Constitution and Limited Government’s March 23 hearing on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) “chilling of parents fundamental rights” by branding them “domestic terrorists” in 2021.
All four of the witnesses providing testimony for the hearing agreed when asked by Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) that parents “have the right to see what their children” are being taught in public schools. The other point of agreement was that to date nobody has been arrested as a result of DOJ’s actions.
But even on the latter issue, partisan members of the panel disagreed vehemently about what the lack of arrests signified. Republicans, led by the panel’s chairman, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), cited the March 21 interim staff report of the judiciary committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
That report concluded that there were no arrests because “after surveying local law enforcement, U.S. Attorney’s offices around the country reported back to Main Justice that there was no legitimate law-enforcement basis for the Attorney General’s directive to use federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources to investigate school board-related threats.”
But Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the judiciary committee, cited the lack of any arrests as evidence to support his contention that Republicans investigating the response of DOJ and the FBI to the school board protests as “weaponization of government” were simply imagining a non-existent conspiracy.
“The Republican majority unfortunately is using this first hearing of the subcommittee to advance the spurious assertion that the Biden administration and the FBI are somehow chilling parents’ free-speech rights. There is scant evidence to back up the bogus claim of a wide-ranging federal government conspiracy to quell opposition to COVID-19 policies or so-called ‘Woke’ indoctrination by targeting parents who protested at school boards,” Nadler declared.
Three of the four witnesses for the hearing, however, left little doubt that they found the evidence described in the interim staff report strongly corroborated their own experiences in the field.
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