Our local congressman, Ben Cline, a MAGA Republican, is fully on board with Donald Trump sending troops to Los Angeles to suppress protests against his immigration raids, tweeting on Monday that “(i)t’s time to restore order and hold those responsible for these attacks accountable.”
“(A)ttacks,” presumably meaning, political attacks, against bad policy.
“Restore order,” presumably meaning, keeping a few hundred people in a metropolitan area of 10 million from exercising their First Amendment rights across the street from a federal detention center.
ICYMI
For a different perspective, we turn to U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who, speaking with reporters on Wednesday, called the use of troops to suppress dissent “an unprecedented and illegal action.”
“He wouldn’t deploy the Guard despite being requested to do so by the mayor of DC to protect the Capitol on Jan. 6. Eventually, Vice President Pence had to give an issue for the Guard to be deployed to protect the Capitol from violent insurrectionists. President Trump wouldn’t use the Guard then. Why?” Kaine said.
He wasn’t asking, by the way.
“Because the protesters, violent protesters, attacking police officers, were Trump supporters,” Kaine said. “But when people are protesting in Los Angeles against Trump immigration policies, he uses the heavy hand of the military, thousands of Guard members and the United States Marines, against protests that are largely peaceful in nature.”
The problem here being, Trump watches Fox News all day in lieu of doing actual work, and Fox News is making those few hundred protestors at the detention center in downtown LA look like Fallujah.
The immigration raids in the LA area that began late last week were a made-for-TV spectacle from the get-go, with Dr. Phil McGraw, who is famous for being famous, embedded with a unit of ICE agents to get footage for whatever streaming TV thing he’s doing now.
The Trumpers are doing everything they can to reverse the awful polling numbers for the POTUS in general and for their immigration roundups in particular.
Enlisting Dr. Phil and being fake tough on the protests with thousands of troops doing nothing in LA is all designed to try to keep Maw Maw and Paw Paw on the team.
That they’re ripping the Constitution to shreds in the process is just collateral damage.
“You’re not only allowed to protest, you are guaranteed the right to protest, and to the extent that there are bad apples, that’s what local law enforcement is for,” Kaine said. “In fact, if President Trump really believed that additional assistance was needed, he could have sent in federal law enforcement. He could have asked FBI agents, DEA agents, U.S. Marshals, other law enforcement agencies, the Bureau of Prisons, the Department of Homeland Security. If there was a need for additional law enforcement presence, he has a lot of federal tools at his disposal, but he chose not to do that, and he chose to send in the United States military to stand with weapons, facing off against the American public.
“We shouldn’t be allowing President Trump to act like a king. The military is not his palace guard to flatter his ego or carry out operations against his political opponents,” Kaine said.
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Chris Graham
