What did Vice President Mike Pence learn from the Trump years?
Perhaps, that his 2016 ploy to ratchet up his career backfired … when his running mate actually won?
Thank goodness, he followed normal procedures in January 2020, rejecting then-President Donald J. Trump’s pleas to send back to the states the Electoral College slates.
In a recent speech at St. Anselm’s College, the former Vice President advised fellow Republicans not to overreact to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. Mr. Pence insists that Republicans “can hold the attorney general accountable for the decision he made without attacking the rank-and-file law enforcement personnel at the FBI.”
That sounds about right, until you read the rest of Pence’s remarks. “The Republican Party is the party of law and order. Our party stands with the men and women who stand on the thin blue line at the federal and state and local level, and these attacks on the FBI must stop. Calls to defund the FBI are just as wrong as calls to defund the police.”
Has Pence lost “the plot”? The FBI has a long history of abusing the rule of law. While leaders are rightly blamed — J. Edgar Hoover used his agency to create a vast spy-and-blackmail network — they have not worked alone to do flagrantly unconstitutional things. After all, remember in October of 2020, the Bureau made headlines foiling a plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor. The plot was concocted by multiple agents, who worked mightily to entrap members of a citizen militia into going along with it.*
Pence surely remembers that the FBI agents who conspired against the Trump administration were breathtakingly partisan, lying and concocting documents to perform what amounts to an attempted coup d’etat.
It’s not a “law and order” outfit if its most consequential actions illegally serve partisan political purposes.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* These G‑men and G‑women were consenting adults — consenting not only to the politics of such entrapment, but also to engaging in sexual acts to get their way.
Note: Two defendants in the Michigan conspiracy case are now being retried, after the jury in their first trial could not reach a verdict.
Illustration assist from DALL‑E
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7 replies on “Thin Blue Nonsense”
FBI undercover guy gave one of the kidnappers a shotgun and told him to saw it off. Guy cut the barrel but it was still too long to be illegal. FBI had him redo it. They later busted him. Charged with having a sawed off/illegal shotgun.
Those ‘rank and file’ agents do the bidding of those on the 7th floor. Notice that only when some people began to talk seriously about reorganizing, if not completely doing away with, the FBI, suddenly, out of the blue some ‘whistleblowers’ appeared. The problem is they’re anonymous. At this point in time, there is simply no reason to trust anyone in the FBI who is not willing to speak on the record and provide corroborating evidence.
Where in the Constitution is the FBI authorized?
That is a rather good question. Article II § 3 Clause 5 invests in the President the right and obligation to enforce the laws passed by Congress. But if we look at the powers granted to Congress (in Article I), we see nothing about the matters to which the FBI attends.
The FBI was created (as the Bureau of Investigation) by the Administration and at the urging of Theodore Roosevelt (who like his successor despised the Constitution) after Congress had reined-in the Secret Service. (The Secret Service was left with powers for which Constitutional authorization may be found.)
See McCulloch v Maryland. That Supreme Court decision said that Congress had unenumerated power to create laws based on the ‘necessary and proper’ clause in the Constitution. It was not limited to those powers listed in Article I, Section 3. It was the beginning of the end of the 10th Amendment.
Yes, well of course what has been in the imaginings of Supreme Court Justices — and in the schemes of Alexander Hamilton — has been rather different from what has ever been in the Constitution of the United States of America.
They say that “stuff” flows downhill.
FBI is a good example.