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Congress should investigate the Justice Department: But not to score partisan political points

Chris Graham
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The idea of Congress investigating how the Justice Department does what it does should not be controversial on its face.

We all learned in civics class in eighth grade that our government is a system of checks and balances.

If anything, we’ve allowed things to that respect get out of whack with the Supreme Court and whoever is in the White House at the moment alternatively asserting their primacy, at the expense of our third supposedly co-equal branch.

That branch, Congress, for its part, has allowed itself to be reduced to being the reality TV wing of American government, where good ideas go to die, as Democrats and Republicans pose for the cameras, focused only on scoring otherwise irrelevant partisan points in the battle to win the 24-hour news cycle.

So, on its face, when Republicans say they want to form a subcommittee to investigate the Justice Department, and invoke the historical example of the 1970s Church Committee, a bipartisan effort that led to the discovery of decades of abuses under long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, it could be something, reinforcing the co-equality of the legislative branch, that we all, those of us on both sides of the aisle, would want to applaud.

The devil is, as always, in the details, and the execution of the subcommittee by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is telling us that what Republicans have in mind is nothing like the Church Committee.

McCarthy has put the fox, Jim Jordan of Ohio, who is under investigation for his role in assisting former President Donald Trump and the Trump inner circle in their scheme to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election, in charge of the henhouse, styled by Republicans as the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

As the Church Committee’s findings in the 1970s tell us, there is a history of the federal government being weaponized against American citizens and politicians, with Hoover’s FBI illegally gathering information on civil rights leaders, journalists, union organizers, professors, anybody that Hoover, with no oversight, felt was a threat, either to the public order or, more to the point, his own accumulated raw power.

This went on for decades, dating back to the FDR administration, and just because a “stop” was put to the Hoover-era excesses in the 1970s, we can’t assume that things have been done on the up and up in the years since we first learned in excruciating detail how our government was being used as a weapon against many of us.

In that vein, if this new Republican-led effort were to be aimed at actually learning what the Justice Department, and also the CIA, NSA and myriad other intelligence-gathering agencies in the executive branch, might be up to, it would be something to be applauded.

Having Jordan lead the effort makes it feel like what’s really going on here is an attempt by House Republicans to throw shade at Justice for mere political aims, and the shame, if that’s the case, is that any future effort by a future Congress to actually exercise its constitutional power to keep tabs on the executive branch will look like another hack partisan witch hunt.

But who knows, maybe that’s another goal with what Republicans, who have spent the past half-century attacking the very legitimacy of American government, with, unfortunately, great success, are doing here.

They’ve already packed the Supreme Court with the would-be dictator’s appointed sycophants.

Now they have the Justice Department in their crosshairs.

Not that long ago, a cabal within the upper echelon of the GOP had us on the precipice of forever trashing the Constitution in favor of installing a would-be dictator.

Neutering Justice and Congress with a faux investigatory committee would be killing the last two birds with one stone.

Chris Graham

Chris Graham

Chris Graham is the founder and editor of Augusta Free Press. A 1994 alum of the University of Virginia, Chris is the author and co-author of seven books, including Poverty of Imagination, a memoir published in 2019, and Team of Destiny: Inside Virginia Basketball’s Run to the 2019 National Championship, and The Worst Wrestling Pay-Per-View Ever, published in 2018. For his commentaries on news, sports and politics, go to his YouTube page, or subscribe to his Street Knowledge podcast. Email Chris at [email protected].