Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts offered three key solutions Tuesday to stop the weaponization of government.
“The people who will go into the next conservative administration need to understand what’s at stake and be very well prepared to enact the directive of the executive,” Roberts said before a panel convened by Senate Republicans, after quoting President Ronald Reagan’s assertion that people are policy as the first of the three solutions.
Senators and other panelists raised concerns about the multiple federal and state prosecutions of former President Donald Trump. They also said the FBI’s targeting of pro-life activists, Catholics, and parents who speak out at school board meetings had prompted worries about a politicized Justice Department.
“I think I would home in on the FBI,” Roberts said, outlining the second solution to weaponized government.
“There are many agencies in government that are problematic,” Heritage’s president said in singling out the FBI. “That institution, which has many men and women who serve this country virtually and heroically, has been rotten at the top for a long time and Congress does need to assert its proper jurisdiction over the FBI.”
The problem isn’t limited to the Justice Department and the FBI, Roberts added, noting that educating America’s children also has been weaponized.
“The third thing is—I would have thought this far afield, but it has become one of the themes because we have talked about it—we have to turn off the federal spigot of dollars to rotten education, actually miseducation,” Roberts said. “The best way to do that is to close the U.S. Department of Education.”
During the discussion, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., said public schools have been “ground zero” for the Left’s propaganda.
“Since taking office, President Biden has used taxpayer dollars and resources to attack conservative parents on school boards, Catholics, and pro-life advocates,” Tuberville said. “One of Joe Biden’s policies was to redirect federal law enforcement and counterterrorism resources to go after parents who voiced concern at school board meetings about the propaganda being taught at their schools.”
Tuberville continued:
As someone who has spent 40 years in education, I know how important it is, I know how important it is that our students get a quality education. Our young people are our greatest asset, our number one commodity. The Democrats have succeeded in getting woke propaganda pushed in taxpayer funded classrooms.
Public schools in many parts of our country have become ground zero for the Democratic Party. Parents started waking up to what they saw during COVID. ‘What are they teaching our kids?’ So, [Attorney General] Merrick Garland directed the FBI to open an investigation into these parents who spoke up.
Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., a former Missouri attorney general, talked about the priorities of local Democrat prosecutors—some elected with the financial backing of progressive billionaire George Soros—as well as the Biden administration. The parallel for each has been a reluctance to prosecute violent crime and an eagerness to target political enemies, Schmitt said.
When Schmitt was Missouri’s attorney general, his office partnered with the DOJ’s Safer Streets Initiative during the Trump administration to cross-deputize his assistant attorneys general as assistant U.S. attorneys.
“We prosecuted violent crimes in the federal court system when we could. … Joe Biden comes in and the program is out,” Schmitt said.
The Missouri Republican said his office also participated in Operation Talon, an effort to deport previously convicted sex offenders who were in the United States illegally. Biden shut down the program.
“Of all the things we disagree on, you’d think we could agree on deporting convicted sex offenders here illegally,” Schmitt said.
He then talked about the Democrat-led prosecutions of Trump.
“It’s important to tie this back to Joe Biden. In November of 2022, after the midterm elections, Joe Biden gave a speech and said he was going to use all legal means necessary to prevent Donald Trump from ever being back in the White House,” Schmitt said. “Guess what happened after that? All these zombie cases were resurrected. [Special counsel] Jack Smith, [Manhattan District attorney] Alvin Bragg, [Fulton County District Attorney] Fani Willis, [and New York Attorney General] Letitia James got the green light and did his bidding.”
Other participants included Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan.; Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah; former acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, and America First Legal Foundation President Stephen Miller, a former Trump White House aide.
Lee is a constitutional lawyer and former solicitor general of Utah who has argued before the Supreme Court. A few weeks ago during a visit with heads of state in Central America, Lee said, one brought up the topic of the guilty verdict against Trump on 34 felony counts in the New York “hush money” case.
“He said, ‘First of all, we are supposed to be following you. Not you following us. We’ve had things like that in our country before. And now you’re doing it. But it’s supposed to move in the other direction,’” Lee recalled.
The Utah Republican said the Central American leader added: “If we did, right now, what your court system just did to Donald Trump, the United States would be imposing sanctions on us. It would not end well for us.”
Whitaker, acting attorney general at the end of the Trump administration, warned that this could be a key moment for America.
“This is our ‘If you can keep it’ moment,” Whitaker said, referring to Benjamin Franklin’s storied characterization of the creation of the new American republic. “Every citizen is going to have to demand [an end to political prosecutions], whether they agree politically with Donald Trump or any other figure that the full force of the federal government or state prosecution is being directed against. They need to stand up for the rule of law. We have almost 50% of our country that is unwilling to stand up for the rule of law.”