Around dawn on September 23, the home of Mark and Ryan-Marie Houck in rural Kintersville, Pennsylvania, was swarmed by an FBI SWAT team serving an arrest warrant on a 48-year-old father of seven for violating the federal FASCIST Act, strike that, I mean FACE — “Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances” — Act while protesting in front of a Philadelphia abortuary.
During the raid, weapons were drawn and, according to Ryan-Marie, pointed at her. READ New Details of Outrageous FBI Raid on Catholic Activist Mark Houck Shock the Conscience for more details.
None of this was necessary as Houck’s attorney had contacted the US Attorney prosecuting the case and offered to have Mark turn himself in, if he was to be arrested.
The charges involve Houck shoving to the ground a 72-year-old “clinic escort,” who was directing abuse and obscenities at Houck’s 11-year-old son. The “clinic escort” was medevaced to the hospital, where he received a Band-Aid on one finger. The “clinic escort” had pressed charges in state court, and the case had been dismissed, making the armed raid on the Houck household all the more egregious. (Let me stop here to make a different point. I think most conservatives reflexively sympathize with law enforcement, and so we should. That said, if you take part in one of these KGB-style raids, you don’t get to claim, “I was only following orders.” You made an affirmative decision to participate. We hanged several hundred Germans who used that excuse.)
The entire operation, from the decision to make a federal case out of an incident that had nothing to do with abortion and to follow that federal case up with a weapons-drawn raid on a private residence, was contrived to create a narrative that pro-abortion protests are a danger to the nation. More pointedly, it was designed to warn other pro-life protesters that exercising your rights under the First Amendment would have dire consequences. The goon who accosted a young boy didn’t deserve a push to the ground and a Band-Aid. In a just society, he would have gotten a beat down and a few weeks in the ICU to study books on etiquette. But that’s just my opinion; please don’t take it as legal advice.
This is just one of many such prosecutions of pro-life protesters initiated by Merrick Garland’s Justice Department. Regardless of the circumstances, the charges in the indictments are calculated to produce the most draconian punishments possible. Houck, for instance, faces up to 11 years in prison for nothing more than protecting his son from some addled, old leftist.
As it turns out, what we are seeing is not solely the actions of vindictive federal prosecutors, though there is a lot of that; we are seeing a Department of Justice policy in execution.
Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said earlier this month that the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has faced growing “urgency” to work to protect reproductive services, in part by enforcing the FACE Act, following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
In remarks delivered to mark the DOJ division’s 65th anniversary on Dec. 6, Gupta said the Supreme Court’s decision “dealt a devastating blow to women throughout the country.”
The decision, she said, took away the constitutional right to an abortion and increased the “urgency” of the DOJ’s work “including enforcement of the FACE Act, to ensure continued lawful access to reproductive services.”
There was a quaint time when the Department of Justice concentrated on enforcing the law, not using its power to arrest and imprison people to implement a policy option that the Supreme Court has repudiated. They used to call it, let me think, “the rule of law.”
According to the article, 26 people have been indicted for FACE Act violations in 2022, as opposed to four in 2021. The trigger seems to have been a pair of December 2021 Supreme Court actions that hinted that state-sponsored infanticide would not survive. (See SCOTUS Oral Arguments: Signs Point to Roe v. Wade Being Nuked and Supreme Court Humiliates Biden, Refuses to Stop Texas Heartbeat Law, and Gorsuch and the Wise Latina Have a Public Spat for details on those cases.)
The Civil Rights Division has prioritized the prosecution of non-violent demonstrators to simply make an example of people they loathe — that would be “observant Christians.” They are doing this even though abortion is not a federally protected right. Its sole purpose is to attempt to intimidate pro-life demonstrators, fire up their political base, and keep the campaign cash flowing.
At the same time, Gupta’s inflammatory rhetoric directed at crisis pregnancy centers has set off a national campaign of vandalism and arson. The Department of Justice has yet to bring a single indictment in those cases, though the FACE Act covers the targets of these attacks.
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division enforces the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which “prohibits threats of force, obstruction and property damage intended to interfere with reproductive health care services.”
It protects both pro-life pregnancy centers and abortion clinics, as a DOJ official noted to Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, last week.
At least 98 Catholic churches and 77 pregnancy resource centers and other pro-life organizations have been attacked since May, but the DOJ has apparently not charged a single person in connection with these attacks. Meanwhile, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has charged 26 pro-life individuals with FACE Act violations this year.
Under Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice has returned to the lawless days of Eric Holder. At least Holder focused on macro issues, like running illegal guns into Mexico to kill Mexicans and create a factual base for sweeping gun restrictions. Garland is much more of the soulless apparatchik, who would have found a home in the NKVD, KGB, or Stasi. He is focused on wiping out political opposition using AstroTurf organizations like the “Patriot Front” and bulls*** conspiracies like the Gretchen Whitmer “kidnapping” to create a fake “white nationalist” enemy. He’s using the full power of federal law enforcement to hunt down people who trespassed in the Capitol on January 6, using unconstitutional methods–not because these people had any intention of overthrowing the government but because they would not kowtow to the elites running our elections.
As the Biden White House becomes weaker and a GOP Congress arrives to give at least the appearance of opposition, Biden and Garland will become more desperate to cover up their wrongdoing and to punish those who represent a political threat.
If we are fortunate enough to gain the White House in 2024, the first order of business has to be a purge of the Department of Justice and federal law enforcement agencies, and the arrest and prosecution, no matter how flimsy the grounds, of people like Garland and Gupta for their actions. It doesn’t matter if they are convicted because the process is the punishment.