Thank Goodness Merrick Garland’s Not on the Supreme Court

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 5, 2021. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Commentary

Mitch McConnell is not always the most popular guy among conservatives or Republicans in general. Just today he’s taking incoming for caving on the short-term debt ceiling.

But we can certainly score one solid A+ for him during his tenure.

Back when he was majority leader, near the end of the Obama administration, he led the way in keeping Merrick Garland off the Supreme Court.

That was when Garland was being ballyhooed by every flack with a functioning laptop as a moderate. A fair number of Republicans even believed it.

Nowadays, of course, the adjective “moderate,” when applied to a Democrat, may conjure up a Joe Manchin or a Kyrsten Sinema, but just as likely conjures up someone to the left of Trotsky or near. It’s moderation as masquerade.

Merrick Garland, in his role as attorney general, has shown himself to fit well in the latter category.

Our current attorney general has supervised what could easily be called close to a Soviet-style incarceration of the “supposed” insurrectionists (sans guns) of Jan. 6. It’s still ongoing nearly ten months later.

And has the public been able to view the readily-available videos of what actually transpired that day in the Capitol in their entirety or even in significant part to make up its mind on its own? A resounding “Nyet!”

Now Garland is going several steps further. The onetime civil liberties advocate is facing off directly with free speech and the First Amendment, directing the FBI to investigate putative threats by parents against school boards.

Actually those parents weren’t threatening at all in any real physical sense, just exercising their Constitutional right to vehemently protest such execrations as Critical Race Theory in their children’s schools.

As author and former assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew C. McCarthy put it:

“Even as President Biden shrugged his shoulders over progressives’ harassment and intimidation of a sitting United States senator of his own party — a crime under Arizona law — Biden’s Justice Department was running roughshod over the First Amendment, threatening to investigate and prosecute parents for protesting against school boards and teachers who insist on indoctrinating children with the cultural Marxism beloved by Democrats.

“On Monday, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memorandum in which he wailed about the ‘disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.’ Clearing his throat with an empty nod to the inconvenient fact that the Constitution protects ‘spirited debate,’ Garland incorrectly — indeed, outrageously for someone of his experience as a Justice Department official and federal appellate judge — claimed that free-speech principles yield not only to ‘threats of violence’ but also to ‘efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views’ (at least, evidently, individuals not named Sinema or Manchin).”

AG Garland just ripped off his moderation mask to reveal the totalitarian face of the “progressive reactionary,” a term that might equally fit much of the Biden administration and certainly much of the Department of Justice as both Inspector General Michael Horowitz and Special Counsel John Durham have already revealed in varying degrees.

Meanwhile, many of us thought the answer to “bad speech” was “more speech.” That is what is implied by the First Amendment. What Garland demonstrates is the opposite—outright fear that what the parents are complaining about may actually be justified and therefore they must be squelched by brute force (the threat of—or actual—incarceration), not “more speech.”

But wait, as they say, there’s more (startlingly and ironically more).

Conservative Treehouse reported the following on Oct. 5, one day after Garland posted his memorandum:

“Well, well, well… This is interesting. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland recently instructed the FBI to begin investigating parents who confront school board administrators over Critical Race Theory indoctrination material. The U.S. Department of Justice issued a memorandum to the FBI instructing them to initiate investigations of any parent attending a local school board meeting who might be viewed as confrontational, intimidating or harassing.

“Attorney General Merrick Garland’s daughter is Rebecca Garland. In 2018 Rebecca Garland married Xan Tanner [LINK]. Mr. Xan Tanner is the current co-founder of a controversial education service company called Panorama Education. [LINK and LINK] Panorama Education is the ‘social learning’ resource material provider to school districts and teachers that teach Critical Race Theory.”

There are a lot of those, all over the country. Once again, in the immortal words of H.L. Mencken, “When someone says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.”

Well, not entirely in this case. It’s greed reinforcing retrograde social policy—or the two mutually reinforcing each other.

Smash the First Amendment and get rich.

McCarthy concludes his piece by warning us, with Garland at the helm of the DOJ, “It’s going to be a very long 40 months.”

Better that than decades on the Supreme Court.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.