Remember 2011?
To some, it probably seems like a more innocent time — before the riots and assassinations and other excursions into madness visited upon us this past decade.
But here in the upper Midwest, we were already getting a whiff of this nation's Orwellian future, which has turned into the Orwellian present.
A few months after conservative Scott Walker rode the Tea Party wave to win the Governor's office in Wisconsin, the county prosecutor in Dane County — home of Madison, the capital — ordered a series of early morning high-speed no-knock kinetic SWAT raids. Not on terrorists, mind you — on Republican activists. The clear motive was to intimidate Republicans, to show them who was really boss in Wisconsin's capitol:
In the pre-dawn hours of Oct. 3, 2013, heavily armed deputies raided the homes of independent political activists across the state of Wisconsin who agreed with the government union reforms enacted by Gov. Scott Walker. The raids were to seize records related to political activities and were orchestrated by a partisan district attorney under color of two poorly drafted and misguided state statutes.
Until now, one of these laws restricted political speech through campaign finance regulations. The other (still in force) gives prosecutors the power to undertake open-ended inquisitions targeting suspected criminal activity — or against political enemies.
Sounds pretty Kangaroo-Court-y to me.
And the Wisconsin Supreme Court - "progressive" now, but conservative back then - agreed:
The Wisconsin Supreme Court has just ruled 4-2 that the law restricting political speech is “unconstitutionally overbroad and vague.” According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the court ordered that “the special prosecutor and the district attorneys … must cease all activities related to the investigation, return all property seized … from any individual or organization, and permanently destroy all copies of information and other materials obtained through the investigation. All unnamed movants are relieved of any duty to cooperate further with the investigation.”
That was 2015. When the Mackinack center concluded:
The Wisconsin speech raids are perhaps the ugliest example of this ongoing assault. In effect, the abusive actions of a partisan DA were a continuation of the union-organized tantrums on the streets surrounding the Wisconsin state Capitol in Madison in 2011 when Gov. Walker's reforms were enacted. But unlike those boisterous public demonstrations, this political actor had the power to dispatch men with guns on secret raids to silence those he disagreed with.
Before Trump, and before the Trump Derangement pandemic that followed, it may have seemed like it.
But the Fourth (not to mention the First) Amendment was saved.
For a while, anyway.
Democrats retook the initiative in 2022, going after then-former-president Trump, walking all over the notion of due process to get at their bête noire:
In August 2022, the FBI raided the private residence of a former president of the United States — the man who'd go on to win the next election — over a dispute about paperwork the National Archives wanted back. The case built on that raid didn't exactly age well: A federal judge tossed it entirely in July 2024. Along the way, agents went through his wife's closets (prompting my question above). Democrats didn't call that an escalation. Oh, no. They solemnly called it accountability. Oh, they LOVED that word for a while. They printed "no one is above the law" on everything short of a special collection of commemorative plates to be sold on street corners where "No Kings" protesters would be driving their mobility scooters past.
But with this week's raid on Representative Ilhan Omar, they've rediscovered the virtue of restraint in law enforcement:
Her office wasted little time issuing its own verdict: “outrageous abuse of power.” It insisted she’d done nothing wrong and accused the Trump administration of targeting a political opponent.
Forget that investigations of Omar began under the Biden administration. If old pudding head is investigating a Democrat, any argument of abuse of power disappears behind a “Leering Center” sign.
The investigations appear to center on Omar's father allegedly lying about her age when immigrating to the U.S. - although persistent rumors say her business enterprises and accretion of some pretty serious wealth for a woman who was on public assistance a decade ago might also be a topic.
Then there’s another federal inquiry. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro confirmed her office is examining Omar’s financial disclosures. Omar and her husband originally listed assets potentially worth millions, then filed lower figures dramatically. Her office blamed an accounting error, and a nonpartisan congressional watchdog recommended dismissing the misconduct allegation.
At any rate, I'm glad we're all on the same page when it comes to due process.
Aren't we?
