Garland plays dumb in testimony to Congress

 Andrew McCarthy:

Merrick Garland turns out to be a political hack.

The attorney general very much enjoys his reputation as a distinguished former federal appellate judge and wants to be seen in his current incarnation as a wise, moderate progressive. Those types, we should know by now, are always progressives first. Their “moderation” reflects not skepticism about statist goals but awareness of the need to maintain political viability by not overdoing the pace of Change! It is a moderation too feeble, too blah, to temper the passionate self-righteousness, extortionate tendencies, and deep pockets of the Bolshevik Left that now dominates the Democratic Party.

There was a reason Garland was an Obama/Biden nominee to the Supreme Court. Even if he is more law-and-order-oriented than his party’s increasingly anti-enforcement mainstream, he would have been a reliable vote on the cases that matter to the Left. And there is a reason President Biden named him attorney general. Given the radicalism of progressive prosecutors beatified by the Bernie Bros, Garland projects the very embodiment of law-enforcement gravitas.

In a 50–50 Senate, this made him an easy confirmation. The 20 Republicans who joined all Democrats in approving him were just thankful that he wasn’t Chesa Boudin or Kim Foxx. Like Biden himself, Garland was sold as the adult who could hold the crazies at bay, the “moderate” face of Main Justice — an effective damper on ambitious firebrands who enlisted in the Justice Department to prosecute a war on white supremacists (a.k.a. Republicans and conservatives).

Now, just as Biden has shed his centrist shell to march in lockstep with the progressive avant-garde, Garland is igniting DOJ’s firebrands, not dousing them. And, typical of how the game is played, when the AG gets caught abusing the government’s investigative power as a political weapon, he peevishly denies doing so with an “argument” that comes down to, “Don’t you know who I am?”

Yeah, we know. And that makes it worse because there is no doubt that he grasps how wrong he is.

For most of his congressional testimony over the past two weeks, Garland was simply overmatched. Democrats are waging a hard-edged culture war on their political opposition. The hard edge right now is the Justice Department’s enforcement powers — the investigative process exploited for purposes of intimidation. Garland, however, is not a wartime consigliere. On the AG’s now-infamous action memo rousing federal law-enforcement legions to battle against the nation’s parents, even a gifted demagogue would have a tough time defending himself. Garland is not that guy.
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Alas, this is 2021, and for Democrats, all opposition to woke-progressive indoctrination is another January 6 waiting to happen. Since today’s concerned parent is deemed tomorrow’s violent insurrectionist, the Biden and NSBA culture warriors insisted in their letter that there must be federal intervention using Patriot Act investigative measures — the ones Democrats have historically railed against when they are applied against actual jihadists.

Do not miss the choreography here. It would have been too contrived for Biden White House officials to write a letter to themselves demanding mobilization of the Justice Department. So they used like-minded progressives at NSBA as their cut-out, beseeching Biden for the deployment of federal investigators to suppress parental dissent. On cue, the Justice Department would then issue the threat, capitalizing on Garland’s judicial credentials to lend the abuse an air of propriety.
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There is more and the piece is worth reading in full to get the flavor of the sinister machinations of the Biden White House and the DOJ under Garland.  This may be one of the biggest political blunders in recent memory.  It came at a time when Democrats were also backing an out-of-control School board and administration in Northern Virginia lying about rape because it was inconvenient to their transgender policy preferences while at the same time criminalizing the victim's father for complaining about the rape.  The Democrat candidate for Governor of Virginia stepped in it by telling parents they have no business complaining about what the school boards were doing.  Are Democrats surprised that the polling in that race took a dramatic turn for the Republicans?