Alan Dershowitz wrote a piece in The Hill today calling out Democrats for abusing congressional investigations to target Trump for partisan purposes and compares them to the infamous Joseph McCarthy.
After explaining how McCarthy abused his congressional power to go after secret Commies, which Democrats opposed, Dershowitz says the shoe is on the other foot today:
THE HILL – It is quite fair to say that back in the day, virtually all liberals and civil libertarians, led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), wanted to impose restrictions on the power of Congress to investigate, subpoena and question individuals for partisan or ideological purposes. Now the shoe is on the other foot. It is the Democrats who are abusing their congressional investigations for partisan and ideological purposes. It is the Democrats who are putting forward the phony arguments about legislative purposes, such as the need for new laws and congressional oversight. It is the Democrats in the House who are determined to misuse their legislative power to gain advantages in the upcoming elections.
Dershowitz doesn’t just go after Democrats.
He also criticizes Judge Amit Mehta for a partisan ruling to enable these new McCarthyites:
The decision by Judge Amit Mehta to authorize broad congressional investigations of the Trump administration and President Trump himself, going back to well before he was a presidential candidate, could easily have been written by a right-wing judge in the 1950s. It swallows, whole hog, the claimed legitimate legislative purposes put forward by those committees now led by the Democrats. It goes even further and suggests that a court has no power to probe the real motives behind legislative investigations, so long as the claimed motives are plausible. Under this decision that goes against civil liberties, Congress could investigate any person for any reason as long as it pretends to be doing so for a legitimate legislative purpose. The decision is an open invitation for abuse of power.
And he unloads on the ACLU for a clearly partisan agenda, which stands in contrast to how they opposed congressional abuses like this from McCarthy:
During the 1950s, the good old ACLU would be in court challenging abuses of congressional investigatory power, but the current ACLU has one dominant agenda, which is to oppose Trump regardless of the means used and to raise large sums of money based on this agenda. So the ACLU will not side with Trump in court. It will never side with Trump in court, regardless of how abusive congressional committees may become and regardless of how many rights are violated. The ACLU is now part of the problem, not part of the solution, for this rampant abuse of civil liberties.
In Summary…
All civil libertarians, whether Democrat, Republican, or independent, should indeed be concerned about abuses of power by congressional committees. Today, Trump and his administration are the targets. Tomorrow, it may be Democrats. The next day, you could be the target.
Democrats are such blatant hypocrites. It’s so easy to see how they are quite often on both sides of political issues like this, depending on how it serves them.
For example, during the Obama years they didn’t give a damn about the huge scandals of the Obama administration like gun-running and Benghazi. Obama and Hillary not only left our people behind in Benghazi but left them for dead and our State Department Ambassador was killed, among others. They didn’t lift a finger to save our people but Democrats didn’t even care. In fact they always opposed Republicans who were trying to get to the bottom of what really happened, calling them racists and partisans.
But Trump, who has been vindicated by a two year investigation, is now the subject of daily rectal exams by Democrats. They are using every amount of power they have in the Congress to investigate everything about his past in order to destroy him, even though he’s done nothing wrong. It’s a disgusting abuse of power and Dershowitz is right to call them out for it.