Republicans in Congress are beginning to fire back at Attorney General Merrick Garland for siccing federal authorities on parents who object to policies made by their local school boards.
As The Free Press noted on Tuesday, Garland directed federal prosecutors and FBI agents to meet with school board members as a response to “an increase in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school board members, teachers, and workers in our nation’s public schools.”
“Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values,” said Garland, who so far has ignored the threat to U.S. Sen. Kirsten Sinema, who was accosted in a restroom by angry illegal immigrant activists, even though Sinema, like Garland, is a Democrat.
Garland’s order was handed down to placate the National School Boards Association, which in a letter to President Joe Biden equated raucous parents griping about policies like mask mandates and transgender and critical race theory indoctrination to “domestic terrorism.”
Yet Republicans are starting to stand with the targets of Garland’s muscle-flexing.
In his own letter to Garland on Wednesday, Sen. Tom Cotton noted, “It is never appropriate to use violence or threats of violence to achieve political goals.” However, these concerned parents “are merely exercising their constitutionally protected rights to speak freely and protect their children.”
“The Department of Justice’s endorsement of such outlandish allegations threatens to intimidate parents, chill free speech, and discourage lawful assemblies.”
At a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri ripped Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco for Garland’s maneuvering.
“If this isn’t a deliberate attempt to chill parents from showing up at school board meetings for their elected school boards, I don’t know what is,” Hawley said. “I am not aware of anything like this in American history. You’re talking about the FBI, using the FBI to intervene in school board meetings. It’s extraordinary.”
He added, “I think parents across this country are going to be stunned to learn, stunned, that if they show up at a local school board meeting – by the way, where they have the right to appear and be heard, where they have the right to say something about their children’s education, where they have the right to vote – and you are attempting to intimidate them. You are attempting to silence them, you are attempting to interfere with their rights as parents, and, yes, with their rights as voters.”
“This is wrong. This is dangerous,” said Hawley.
Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford told Newsmax on Wednesday that the FBI and the Justice Department should “be going after real acts of terrorism, not parents actually speaking out.”
“What they want is for parents to just go back in their spot,” said Lankford.
But, he added, “That’s a good thing for parents to be able to be involved. That’s a big reason why so many are pulling their kids out [of public schools], doing home-schooling, they’re sending them to Christian schools, they’re sending them to private schools, they’re engaging with public charter schools – because they don’t want this noise around their kids. They just want their kids to get a great education.”
Over in the House, Pennsylvania Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, who also appeared on Newsmax on Wednesday, said in response to Garland, “As conservatives, our speech is equated to violence. And that’s the big takeaway, from what you’re seeing, how the DOJ is handling these teachers and how they sat on their hands and still, to my knowledge, have not designated Antifa as domestic terrorists but want to put that label on concerned parents.”
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