During Merrick Garland’s confirmation hearing, President Biden’s nominee for attorney general promised to follow up without hesitation on investigating and prosecuting those who planned and participated in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. He was right to do so.
Then, Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked an important question of Garland.
“In the previous year,” Grassley said, “there have been numerous attacks, not only on other institutions of the government like the White House and the federal courthouse in Portland but on hundreds if not thousands of police officers who were injured, as well as on fellow citizens and their businesses. The Justice Department opened over 300 domestic terrorism cases due to that violence and started an anti-government extremism task force. So, I hope you could commit absolutely, as you did for the Capitol rioters, that you will see those investigations of the 2020 riots and continuing antifa riots in the Pacific Northwest through to the very end.”
Garland gave the right answer. “We investigate violence,” he said. “We don’t care about ideology. … It doesn’t matter what direction it comes from, it doesn’t matter what the ideology is. We have to investigate it.”
This is well and good. But later, in an exchange with Sen. Josh Hawley, Garland engaged in some disturbing casuistry, arguing that because the storming of the Portland courthouse occurred at night, it was somehow less terroristic and less of an attack on the nation’s institutions.
Hawley, Grassley, and other senators must make sure that, as attorney general, Garland lives up to his commitment to treat all political violence equally.
The attack on the U.S. Capitol was a disgraceful incident without any possible justification or excuse. It doesn’t change the fact that antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters’ storming of the Portland federal courthouse was also a disgraceful attack on our republican system and the rule of law.
It doesn’t take away from the fact that leftists’ riotous storming of Colorado’s state Capitol building during the summer, which caused $1 million in damage, was also a disgrace.
It doesn’t detract from the fact that the burning of downtown areas in Minneapolis, Kenosha, and multiple other cities was a disgrace.
It doesn’t detract from the fact that mob violence against police, which caused several deaths last summer, was disgraceful.
This is not a “tu quoque” argument. This is not the dreaded “whataboutism” because it is not an attempt to justify anyone’s actions. Rather, we state plainly that there must be one and only one standard for political violence — that it is unjustifiable no matter who carries it out; that its instigators will be hunted down and arrested; that it will always be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
As Grassley pointed out in Garland’s confirmation hearing, the federal government has a laudably robust operational infrastructure for combating right-wing political violence. That’s good — we hope the government keeps it up and even strengthens it.
We also hope that it responds more adequately in the future to antifa, whose propensity for extremely violent and threatening behavior was already well-known by the time last summer’s violence began. It had already been demonstrated repeatedly in such places as Oakland, Berkeley, California, and Portland, Oregon. Multiple incidents in these and other cities presaged last summer’s violence and should have served as a warning.
These groups represent a threat to an open society and to democracy. Garland must see to it that they are monitored carefully and prosecuted vigorously, lest the nation experience another summer of violence in 2021.
