Attorney general approves of treating pro-life activists like terrorists
Quin Hillyer
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Attorney General Merrick Garland proved himself an utter disgrace to the office Wednesday.
After six months of repeated questions from members of Congress about the astonishingly reckless and extravagant use of force to arrest a cooperative pro-life activist in front of his seven children, Garland, in a Senate hearing, provided a cowardly nonanswer about the incident. In essence, he said that the buck doesn’t stop with him, because he has refused for half a year to let the buck reach him in the first place. It was an egregious exercise of defiance masked as pusillanimity, or more likely, a malignant combination of both.
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The case, covered for months in national media outlets, involved Mark Houck, who, for years, has made regular trips to pray outside of a Philadelphia abortion clinic but without ever blocking the entrance. He was arrested after an exceedingly mild altercation with an older man named Bruce Love, who was escorting women into the clinic and who, according to witnesses, had accosted Houck’s son. The arrest came even though the law under which Houck was charged, known as the FACE Act, specifically was designed not to apply to volunteer patient escorts such as Love. In a Senate debate, FACE Act sponsors Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and David Durenberger (R-MN) both explicitly said that the act “does not protect the escorts.”
Local prosecutors declined to prosecute such a laughable “case” against Houck, and a federal grand jury rightly acquitted him despite the full efforts of Garland’s Justice Department to send him to prison.
Yet as abusive as the entire prosecutorial attempt was, that wasn’t as much at issue as the arrest itself. Heavily armed agents showed up en masse at Houck’s house shortly after dawn and arrested him in front of his children, some of them quite young. Houck’s wife said there were 20 or more agents, guns drawn like a SWAT team, rude and extremely frightening, with five of them aiming guns at Houck’s head. Photographs show at least several agents with significant-sized weapons. The Justice Department disputed the “SWAT” characterization of the arrest and vaguely said it wasn’t quite so dramatic, but it has offered few concrete details other than that.
Here’s the rub, which, thank goodness, did not result in a “rub out,” meaning a death: Houck’s attorney, having heard that federal prosecutors were considering charging his client with violation of the FACE Act, had called and specifically said Houck would appear voluntarily at federal offices for arrest purposes if that’s what they planned. The fact of his offer is not in dispute. Nor was there anything in Houck’s long record of pro-life advocacy, other than the minor scuffle in purported defense of his son, to indicate that he is anything other than a peaceful, law-abiding citizen.
Dozens of congressmen have written letters to Garland personally to ask, therefore, why it was necessary to send an armed dawn raid to arrest someone, who was already entirely cooperative, in front of his children. Repeatedly asked at the March 1 hearing, Garland deferred. It was as if, despite those congressional inquiries (which he by law should answer) and despite abundant editorial ink questioning the heavy use of force, he thought it not even worth his time to review the incident.
Garland said decisions about the use of force are “made at the level of the FBI agents on scene,” as if it’s not his responsibility to review such decisions when challenged on them, especially when he has been specifically asked to review them. He also dismissed the concerns by saying that the FBI disputes “how many agents, of the agents that were there, and what their roles were.”
But he doesn’t dispute, nor can he, the very fact that there were indeed multiple agents, that they did indeed bear big guns and riot gear, that they did show up with children getting ready for school, or, most crucially, that Houck had offered to cooperate entirely. Instead, Garland airily said that the FBI disputed the details and “that’s the best I can answer.”
Well, no. That’s not an answer at all. When a peaceful citizen offers to be booked voluntarily, but an armed team in riot gear shows up at his house instead, that arrest procedure is, on its very face, unnecessary, abusive, and possibly dangerous. The only, repeat only, acceptable response is to say, “That was an excessive use of threatened force, for which I apologize on behalf of the Justice Department, and of the sort I will not allow to happen again.”
Period, end of story.
With scared children running around, somebody could get killed if a sudden movement startles an armed agent. If the FBI won’t forswear such heavy use of force for ordinary arrests, somebody surely will eventually get killed. If and when that happens, then morally, if not legally, Garland would be guilty of being an accomplice to murder.
In which case, maybe a SWAT team should pound at dawn on Garland’s door.