For a father to defend his children is the most natural thing on earth. To weaponize the power of the federal government against this nature is the very opposite of what our forefathers brought forth on this continent. Indeed, it is a twisted perversion of our founders’ vision, but that is what happened to Scott Smith and Mark Houck at the hands of President Joe Biden’s woke and weaponized Department of Justice. And that is why we invited them to the State of the Union — forcing Biden to face the victims of his disgusting abuses of power.
In October 2021, the Biden administration ordered the FBI to target school parents for — rightly — making their opinions known at school board meetings. We know this to be true. Attorney General Garland sent a
memo
ordering them to do so.
The result — a dad made national headlines for being upset that a school district covered up his daughter’s rape — a true, gross injustice perpetrated in the name of “social justice.” He was not only beaten and bloodied at the school board meeting for doing what any good dad would do; he was
smeared
by the National School Boards Association and Biden’s Department of Justice as a domestic terrorist. But the truth won out. In Loudoun County, where Scott Smith was bloodied, the since-fired school superintendent now faces three misdemeanor charges from a grand jury for his handling of the rape of Scott Smith’s daughter.
Following the leak of the Dobbs decision last spring, the Department of Justice kicked its prosecutorial assault on pro-life activists into overdrive. Last year, the Civil Rights Division, headed by Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, arrested 26 pro-life individuals for violating the FACE Act, the most ever. For context, the FACE Act is a now-weaponized law originally passed to protect abortion clinics from civil disobedience and protests. Meanwhile, abortion activists were allowed to freely protest outside of the homes of Supreme Court Justices, a literal assassination attempt against Justice Brett Kavanaugh narrowly failed, and over 78 pro-life groups and 100 churches were attacked. In response, just two pro-abortion activists have been arrested in relation to these attacks, a pitiful token action by this anti-life administration.
In Pennsylvania, Mark Houck —was recently found innocent by a jury of his peers regarding trumped up FACE Act charges brought against him by the Biden administration. Now declared innocent, Houck plans to press charges against those responsible for putting his family in danger and dragging his reputation through the mud because of this administration’s radical abortion stance.This all transpired not because these men were legitimate threats to society, but because they were politically inconvenient to this out-of-control administration and its allies. Fortunately for both men, and for everyone, the rule of law and the truth triumphed over the Biden administration’s efforts in both of these cases. But there is still much to do to ensure the woke and weaponized bureaucratic state does not get away with such abuses of power in the future.
In Congress, we must continue to hold the Biden administration accountable. First, by exercising the very power James Madison wrote about in Federalist 58, the power of the purse, which he called “the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.” Invoking this power means going beyond saber rattling at committee hearings and producing go-nowhere reports. It means going line by line through the federal budget – including the Department of Justice’s $38.5 billion budget – and determining whether the dollars extracted from the American taxpayer are advancing the public good or are simply perpetuating the very tyranny and woke bureaucracy at war with regular people — including Mark Houck and Scott Smith. Second, the House Oversight Committee, Judiciary Committee, and the newly established Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government must spend the next two years conducting thorough oversight of the Biden administration’s abuse of federal power.
In the meantime, both of these men — loving fathers and American citizens abused and targeted by their government — were in the House chamber Tuesday night for the State of the Union. Mark Houck and Scott Smith were eye-to-eye with the very man who turned their perfectly normal lives upside down for cheap political gain. As Biden spun voters lines about his accomplishments in the oval office, these two living testaments to the reality of his weaponized administration’s actions stared him right in the face.
