Democrats’ Jan. 6 Fiasco Is Just Another Example of Conservatives Being Treated as Second-Class Citizens
Video of the Capitol riot is shown on a screen during the second hearing held by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol on June 13, 2022, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Jabin Botsford-Pool/Getty Images)
This week’s Jan. 6 carnival barkers never mentioned the name of Ashli Babbitt, a Donald Trump supporter killed by a Capitol Police officer during the Jan. 6 riots. The Jan. 6 carnival barkers also ignore that many Jan. 6 defendants are being denied the Sixth Amendment guarantee of a speedy and fair trial.
Both omissions by the Jan. 6 barkers are just the latest examples of a flagrant, two-tiered justice system that treats conservatives—especially anyone supporting Trump—as second-class citizens.
There were many troubling conflicts of interest at Michael Sussman’s D.C. Beltway swamp trial venue. A reported 3 of the 12 jurors were Hillary Clinton donors, and as Open Secrets reports, just 1.6% of U.S. adult women and 2% of men have given $200 or more in political donations. In other words, only the most truly committed believers put dollars behind their political ideology.
Given the District of Columbia has a much higher per capita of donors because of its professional political class, sure it might have been a little harder to find a non-Clinton donor, but given the hyperpartisan nature of the attacks lobbed by the Clinton campaign, these donations should have been grounds for jury dismissal.
On top of the tainted donors, trial Judge Christopher Cooper was Sussmann’s colleague at former President Bill Clinton’s Department of Justice during the 1990s. Attorney General Merrick Garland, appointed by President Joe Biden, officiated during Cooper’s wedding to Amy Jeffress, a former Obama DOJ official now in private practice representing none other than … Lisa Page, the infamous former FBI lawyer and Clinton booster.
Cooper also refused to grant prosecutor John Durham’s request to dismiss a juror whose daughter is a crew teammate of Sussmann’s own daughter. And Cooper limited the evidence and testimony prosecutors could bring.
In another instance of the DOJ’s double standards, former President Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, faced no repercussions after Congress held him in contempt for refusing to comply with its Fast and Furious investigation. Meanwhile, former Trump adviser Peter Navarro was put in leg irons during an ambush arrest at the airport for the same charge of contempt.
Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn was financially destroyed by a federal investigation, meanwhile fired former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe won back his taxpayer-funded pension even though McCabe admitted to lying to the FBI about a press leak. Former CIA Director John Brennan, a serial Trump antagonist, repeatedly lied before Congress. His penalty? A lucrative book deal and no leg irons.
And let’s not forget the 51 former “intelligence” officials who wrote an open letter calling the Hunter Biden laptop story (verified by even leftist media outlets like The New York Times) Russian disinformation. They’ve faced no professional sanctions, no stripping of security clearances, even though they refuse to apologize.
Obama’s Internal Revenue Service, thanks to bureaucrat Lois Lerner, targeted conservative nonprofit groups for harassment. This led to cleanup—a rare government remedy—by the Trump administration, which settled a lawsuit filed on behalf of more than 400 conservative nonprofit groups claiming they’d been discriminated against.
A repeated line by the left is that conservatives are a threat to democracy because they erode “democratic norms.” With norms like this ongoing pattern of botched justice, it’s no wonder the right has finally started to revolt and ask for equal protection under the law.
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Open letter to President Obama (Part 644)
(Emailed to White House on 6-10-13.)
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here.
The federal government debt is growing so much that it is endangering us because if things keep going like they are now we will not have any money left for the national defense because we are so far in debt as a nation. We have been spending so much on our welfare state through food stamps and other programs that I am worrying that many of our citizens are becoming more dependent on government and in many cases they are losing their incentive to work hard because of the welfare trap the government has put in place. Other nations in Europe have gone down this road and we see what mess this has gotten them in. People really are losing their faith in big government and they want more liberty back. It seems to me we have to get back to the founding principles that made our country great. We also need to realize that a big government will encourage waste and corruption. The recent scandals in our government have proved my point. In fact, the jokes you made at Ohio State about possibly auditing them are not so funny now that reality shows how the IRS was acting more like a monster out of control. Also raising taxes on the job creators is a very bad idea too. The Laffer Curve clearly demonstrates that when the tax rates are raised many individuals will move their investments to places where they will not get taxed as much.
______________________
We can fix the IRS problem by going to the flat tax and lowering the size of government.
Did President Obama and his team of Chicago cronies deliberately target the Tea Party in hopes of thwarting free speech and political participation?
Was this part of a campaign to win the 2012 election by suppressing Republican votes?
Perhaps, but I’ve warned that it’s never a good idea to assume top-down conspiracies when corruption, incompetence, politics, ideology, greed, and self-interest are better explanations for what happens in Washington.
Writing for the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney has a much more sober and realistic explanation of what happened at the IRS.
If you take a group of Democrats who are also unionized government employees, and put them in charge of policing political speech, it doesn’t matter how professional and well-intentioned they are. The result will be much like the debacle in the Cincinnati office of the IRS. …there’s no reason to even posit evil intent by the IRS officials who formulated, approved or executed the inappropriate guidelines for picking groups to scrutinize most closely. …The public servants figuring out which groups qualified for 501(c)4 “social welfare” non-profit status were mostly Democrats surrounded by mostly Democrats. …In the 2012 election, every donation traceable to this office went to President Obama or liberal Sen. Sherrod Brown. This is an environment where even those trying to be fair could develop a disproportionate distrust of the Tea Party. One IRS worker — a member of NTEU and contributor to its PAC, which gives 96 percent of its money to Democratic candidates — explained it this way: “The reason NTEU mostly supports Democratic candidates for office is because Democratic candidates are mostly more supportive of civil servants/government employees.”
Tim concludes with a wise observation.
As long as we have a civil service workforce that leans Left, and as long as we have an income tax system that requires the IRS to police political speech, conservative groups can always expect special IRS scrutiny.
And my colleague Doug Bandow, in an article for the American Spectator, adds his sage analysis.
The real issue is the expansive, expensive bureaucratic state and its inherent threat to any system of limited government, rule of law, and individual liberty. …the broader the government’s authority, the greater its need for revenue, the wider its enforcement power, the more expansive the bureaucracy’s discretion, the increasingly important the battle for political control, and the more bitter the partisan fight, the more likely government officials will abuse their positions, violate rules, laws, and Constitution, and sacrifice people’s liberties. The blame falls squarely on Congress, not the IRS.
I actually think he is letting the IRS off the hook too easily.
- It has thieving employees.
It has incompetent employees.- It has thuggish employees.
- It has brainless employees.
- It has protectionist employees.
- It has wasteful employees.
- And it has victimizing employees.
But Doug’s overall point obviously is true.
…the denizens of Capitol Hill also have created a tax code marked by outrageous complexity, special interest electioneering, and systematic social engineering. Legislators have intentionally created avenues for tax avoidance to win votes, and then complained about widespread tax avoidance to win votes.
So what’s the answer?
The most obvious response to the scandal — beyond punishing anyone who violated the law — is tax reform. Implement a flat tax and you’d still have an IRS, but the income tax would be less complex, there would be fewer “preferences” for the agency to police, and rates would be lower, leaving taxpayers with less incentive for aggressive tax avoidance. …Failing to address the broader underlying factors also would merely set the stage for a repeat performance in some form a few years hence. …More fundamentally, government, and especially the national government, should do less. Efficient social engineering may be slightly better than inefficient social engineering, but no social engineering would be far better.
Amen. Let’s rip out the internal revenue code and replace it with a simple and fair flat tax.
But here’s the challenge. We know the solution, but it will be almost impossible to implement good policy unless we figure out some way to restrain the spending side of the fiscal ledger.
___________________________
At the risk of over-simplifying, we will never get tax reform unless we figure out how to implement entitlement reform.
Here’s another Foden cartoon, which I like because it has the same theme asthis Jerry Holbert cartoon, showing big government as a destructive and malicious force.
_____________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
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