Garland Heralds Return of the Obama Justice Department — Radical as Ever By Andrew C. McCarthy
Biden is not so much presiding over Obama’s third term as he is the doddering passenger riding in first class while Obama’s faithful pilots navigate.
I t appears that the Justice Department under soon-to-be attorney general Merrick Garland will be the Biden administration in microcosm. Judge Garland, like President Biden, is the “pragmatic moderate” sign you hang on the front door, to give mainstream America confidence that the woke Left is not running the asylum. On paper, Garland, like Biden, has the right credentials for that job. When you observe him up close, though, as we had a chance to do during his confirmation hearing this week, that confidence takes a big hit.
Naturally, it’s important to set expectations accurately. This is a left-wing Democratic administration. Even if Garland were as advertised, you are out of luck if you were expecting a constitutionalist Justice Department, one that is solidly pro–law enforcement, deferential to individual liberty, and committed to equal protection under the law.
Biden is not so much presiding over Obama’s third term as he is the doddering passenger riding in first class while Obama’s faithful pilots navigate. Democrats did not yearn for a President Biden; they yearned to beat President Trump and restore the status quo ante. Biden’s job is to give his people what they want: Obama policy and practice.
Consequently, this Justice Department is going to be political and racialist. Garland may not strike you as either of those — in that stealthy way, he’s perfect for the job.
The judge emphasized that his top priority is domestic terrorism. But not all domestic terrorism. It is domestic terrorism as Democrats are defining it — viz., white supremacism, as instantiated by the rioting at the Capitol on January 6.
I’ve previously detailed how Democrats are laser-focused on domestic terrorism as a political narrative more than an enforcement priority. If it were the latter, they would not be stressing white supremacism (used interchangeably with “neo-Nazism”) and soft-pedaling other iterations of insurrectionist violence — particularly the radical Left’s still-ongoing mayhem, which dominated 2020 and is poised to surge next month when Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis cop charged with murdering George Floyd, is scheduled to be tried.
The Biden/Garland Justice Department will be in lockstep with the Democrats’ anti–white supremacism march, whose strains have sounded through the House’s Trump impeachment article, the Senate’s Trump impeachment trial, the Democrats’ proposed Domestic Terrorism Prevention legislation, House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s push for a blatantly partisan 9/11 Commission–style inquisition into the Capitol riot, the continuing presence of thousands of U.S. troops in our nation’s barbed-wire capital, and Garland’s confirmation hearing. The point is to brand Trump supporters as white supremacists. Relatedly, it is to portray as “insurrectionists” those congressional Republicans who, in their rash opportunism, supported Trump’s counter-constitutional attempt to void electoral votes from states Biden won. Those are the Republicans targeted by the impeachment article’s invocation of the 14th Amendment’s Section 3; expect progressive-interest-group lawsuits to challenge these Republicans’ continuing in office, dovetailed with hearings steered by Pelosi’s Democrat-dominated “commission.”
Garland proclaimed that leading the prosecution of the rioters is at the top of his to-do list. In testimony that would have been hilarious but for the subject matter, Garland sputtered that, on the domestic-terrorism scale, the days of explosive attacks by radical leftists on a Portland federal courthouse just did not rate with the hours of rioting by Trump supporters at the Capitol. After all, the former only happened at night, while the latter was a “core attack on our democratic institutions.”
Garland knows better. During the Clinton administration, he was a stalwart in the Justice Department’s response to jihadist attacks, to Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal courthouse, and to the need for a dramatic overhaul of American counterterrorism law. There is, moreover, additional reason to be sanguine that, for all the politicized hullaballoo about white supremacism, the Justice Department on Garland’s watch will exercise national-security vigilance. Lisa Monaco, who was a top Obama White House counterterrorism and homeland-security adviser, has been tapped to be deputy AG. She is an experienced federal prosecutor and serious national-security thinker who, like Garland, will draw strong bipartisan support in the Senate.
Still, it is Biden’s policy that they will be enforcing. Garland was clear that he sees the Justice Department’s role as driving the president’s policy if there is a plausible legal basis for it. And in the Biden administration, what’s deemed plausible is apt to be driven by the woke Left.
Hence, we come to Biden’s two most troubling DOJ nominees.
At the all-important Civil Rights Division, Biden has appointed Kristen Clarke, a radical with a history of racist and anti-Semitic commentary. At Harvard, where she led the Black Students Association as an undergrad, Clarke publicly contended that blacks were superior to whites physically and mentally because their brains contain higher amounts of neuro-melanin. Blacks are also spiritually superior, she said, though she elaborated that this is not an attribute that can be “measured based on Eurocentric standards.”
Though she does not exactly come off like a career in stand-up was an option, Clarke would like us to believe that she was just joking — resorting to parody in her umbrage over the publication of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve. People seemed to think she was pretty serious at the time, as she took pains to cite Richard King, a psychiatrist and melanin/pineal-gland scholar, as authority for the proposition that melanin is “the chemical basis for the cultural differences between blacks and whites,” and the reason why “Black infants sit, crawl and walk sooner than whites.” (C’mon, you know you were wondering!) On a related subject, Clarke certainly seemed serious when she invited a notoriously anti-Semitic Trinidadian academic, Tony Martin, to expound on his theories about the racism of the Torah and the “Jewish monopoly over Blacks” — and when she later asserted, in his defense, “Professor Martin is an intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact.”
Clarke is dedicated to the proposition that identity — racial, ethnic, sex (including, of course, sexual identification), sexual preference, etc. — trumps merit. She made that clear in a recent interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson (embedded in this Paul Mirengoff post at Powerline). She swaddles this noxious ideology in the euphonious argot of “diversity,” much as Garland, in his hearing, toed the Biden line of describing as “equity” the Left’s championing of discrimination against whites for the purpose of fighting “systemic racism.” Equity, in this construction, is the antithesis of equal protection under the law, that passé constitutional value it used to be the Justice Department’s mission to defend. Equal opportunity is out, disparate impact is in. Naturally, Clarke thus frets that if COVID-19 has hit black communities harder than others, it must be due to “racial bias.”
Clarke is a natural for the Civil Rights Division in this Obama redux. She is an apt successor to the radical lawyer who ran the division during the original Obama presidency, Vanita Gupta, who is moving up in the world. Gupta will be the Biden/Garland DOJ’s highly influential No. 3 official. For Gupta, race is the full-field explanation for all that ails America. Election integrity laws, such as requiring voter identification? Racist. Broken-windows-style, intelligence-driven policing? Racist. Police sharing of information on illegal aliens with ICE? Racist. Police establishment of task forces against gang crime? Racist. Police providing security at schools plagued by violence and crime? You guessed it . . . racist.
Okay, maybe I’m overstating the case. Gupta doesn’t think race explains everything. Some problems are caused by religious people, especially the pro-life kind. Cataloguing the radicalism, Carrie Severino recounts that Gupta was “troubled” when the Supreme Court narrowly upheld an exemption from Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate for the Little Sisters of the Poor. She was vexed when the High Court narrowly (and perhaps temporarily) prevented Colorado from forcing a Christian baker to design a wedding cake for a same-sex couple (after all, there were only a zillion other bakers who would gladly have done it, so obviously we need to crush one conscientious objector who thinks religious liberty is, like, a thing). She’d like to ban anti-abortion activists from public service while requiring taxpayers to pay for hormone therapy for trans prison inmates. She would force states and schools to permit boys who’ve convinced themselves that they’re girls to compete in girls’ athletic competitions, use the girls’ locker-room facilities, and so on. Prepare for a reprise of Gupta’s “Dear Colleague” letter as “significant guidance” (emphasis in original) to school administrators across the country.
She’d also like to pack the Supreme Court. She would undoubtedly favor the Left’s latest flyer: a proposed dramatic expansion of the number of federal judgeships now, while Biden has a Senate majority to assembly-line confirm them. And, if progressives succeed in persuading 82-year-old Justice Stephen Breyer to retire so they can slide a young firebrand into his seat, the 46-year-old Gupta is certain to be on the shortlist.
Otherwise, she’ll be helping run Garland’s shop. And at the confirmation hearing, Garland indicated that was fine by him. Pressed by Senator Mike Lee (R., Utah) on some of Gupta’s and Clarke’s offensive statements and radical positions, Garland said he had gotten to know both of them and found them to be people of “integrity.” Well, yeah, but no one is asking whether they actually believe the dogma they spout. The question is whether they are a good fit for a pragmatic moderate administration that, you know, is so very concerned with promoting national unity. Garland did not really answer that question . . . except to say that he found them in alignment with his own views.
If so, either they don’t believe what they’ve made careers out of saying (doubtful), or they are going to roll over Garland just like, the early returns show, the woke Left is rolling over Biden.
It’s going to be a very long four years.
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