Todd Rokita, the Attorney General for the state of Indiana, along with sixteen other state attorneys general, sent a letter to President Joe Biden and US Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding that the federal government stop intimidating parents who question curriculum policies at school board meetings.
“Over the last year, as legal officers, we have advised our constituencies of their constitutional right to free speech and encouraged public engagement to voice their opinions on important issues affecting their country, state, and communities, especially parents who have concerns about their children’s education. Your recent action seeks to chill lawful dissent by parents voiced during local school board meetings by characterizing them as unlawful and threatening,” the attorneys general wrote in the letter, led by Rokita.
In case you are not familiar with this story, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent a letter to Joe Biden complaining that parents were getting into heated arguments with school board members over teaching the racist critical race theory garbage to their children. They asked Biden to treat the parents who complain as “domestic terrorists.”
The letter was so outrageous that the Pennsylvania School Boards Association (PSBA) withdrew their membership with the NSBA.
The NSBA is not the Danbury Baptist Association and Joe Biden is certainly no Thomas Jefferson. Biden should have either ignored the request or replied in the same manner Jefferson responded to the Danbury Baptist Association’s letter by saying that state and local matters are not the jurisdiction of the federal government. But since we know that these days Biden has the brain power of a houseplant, and in his best days never uttered a word that forced the listener to go run for a dictionary, he went into authoritarian mode once again and handed it over to the radical leftist Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Garland issued a memo that was a direct product of the NSBA’s letter to Biden. Garland said the DOJ would reach out to local officials to create a working relationship with them to find a solution to the problem. First off, the only problem is Garland trying to worm federal jurisdiction into local matters by attempting to work with county sheriffs and other local officials. They should all tell Garland to take a long walk on a short pier. Garland may be a radical, but he’s not a moron. He knows he doesn’t have jurisdiction to get involved, but he tried to so anyway.
Garland got both barrels from the 17 top law enforcement officers from each state when they argued that his memo is “based upon a flawed premise,” and that it violates “First Amendment rights of parents to address school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff on educational matters by seeking to criminalize lawful dissent and intimidate parents into silence.”
One of the many problems with numerous Democrats is they never consider the ramifications of what they do before they do it. Everything is political to progressives and they usually react rather than respond. They don’t take the civil rights or Constitutional rights of the people into consideration when they attempt to go after people they personally see as enemies. That’s because for many radical Democrats, they don’t believe in those rights. They believe rights come from government and therefore, government owns them and doesn’t have to extend them in certain circumstances to certain targeted people. Rights do not come from government. Rights come from God to the people and the people loan them out to their elected government. For the atheists among us, rights come from nature, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, or whatever, but they do not come from government.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
That piece from the Declaration means you are born with certain rights that no government can legally take away from you. That statement in the Declaration of Independence is a belief that changed the world. Up until that time, the crown or monarch [the government] controlled everything, and a government strong enough to give out rights is strong enough to take them away. Progressive Democrats dismiss this idea and that is the fundamental disconnect they have with a majority of Americans.
The radicals at the NSBA claimed that due to an increase in “acts of malice, violence and threats against public school officials,” they asked the Biden administration to use the Patriot Act against the parents who complain. The Patriot Act was passed by Congress as a response to terrorism after the 911 attacks. The NSBA should be disbanded for that request alone. It shows they don’t have the slightest clue what our country is about.
The attorneys general blasted the letter from the NSBA, pointing out that they did not “document a single legitimate instance of violence.”
“To be sure, anyone who attacks or threatens violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, or staff should be prosecuted,” the attorneys general wrote. “However, in its letter demanding action, the NSBA fails to document a single legitimate instance of violence. And even if it did, there are sufficient criminal and civil remedies already available in all 50 states and territories.”
The attorneys general concluded that “the NSBA seems more concerned about suppressing speech with which it disagrees than real threats of violence” and that a “physical assault on a school administrator, board member, teacher, or staff is just that, a criminal assault and will be addressed under state law.”
When officials in government believe mothers complaining to local school board members is a danger to society yet have nothing to say about a summer of nightly riots that ended up with 25 people murdered and countless businesses set on fire, there is a serious disconnect with the American people and how our Constitutional republic works.
