When you’re a politician, having to deal with people who frequently disagree with you and who probably don’t like you is part of the job.
But sometimes those people go from mainly being your rank-and-file political opposition to aggressive agitators who are up to no good, which is exactly the situation a group of Republican lawmakers found themselves in Wednesday during a Capitol Hill press conference where they voiced their opposition to a “global health equity” treaty negotiation going on between the Biden White House and the World Health Organization.
Reps. Clay Higgins (La.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.), and Paul Gosar (Az.) were among the Republican House members in attendance at the event, which did not go as planned after woke leftist Jake Burdett, a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders and “Medicare for All,” repeatedly yelled questions at them that had nothing to do with the event and as they tried to speak, making it near-impossible to hear what they had to say.
Higgins and some of the other male lawmakers repeatedly tried to calmly defuse the situation, with Higgins taking the lead and telling Burdett he would be glad to answer any of his questions after the politicians present had finished their speeches.
That only worked momentarily, as not long afterward Burdett could be seen bolting through and getting too close to Boebert and yelling questions at her about her divorce, at which point Higgins, a former law enforcement officer, had had enough. As shown in the below series of clips, Higgins removed Burdett from the immediate area. Moments later, the Capitol Police, who Higgins says were initially nowhere to be found, took care of Burdett:
Boebert also posted a clip, and thanked Higgins for his quick action:
In true activist left fashion, Burdett is of course claiming “assault,” which the mainstream media is running with while also using video from the perspective of the agitator’s allies and merely describing him as someone who was innocently there “just to ask questions” because of course they are.
As one astute commenter to the video observed, “Protesters confuse protest with a right to disrupt. Further, that was hardly assault. The speaker has a right to speak. The protester does not have the right to charge the speaker or push other people.”
I wish I could say I was shocked by the number of Very Online Leftists who declared that Higgins violated the man’s First Amendment rights and should be sued for assault but I’m not, because these are the very same types of people who apparently believe we should sit back and take it when a someone is having a mental episode on a subway, think a woman should surrender what’s hers when troublemakers claim it for themselves because racism or something, and believe it’s acceptable to harass and intimidate members of the Supreme Court at their homes.
Relatedly, absolutely no one will be surprised to find out that this wasn’t Burdett’s first brush with the law:
This isn’t the first time Burdett’s activism has gotten him in legal trouble. He was charged with illegal wiretapping in Maryland after illegally recording a meeting with a congressional staffer and live-streaming it on Facebook back in 2019. He accepted a plea deal which lessened his sentence to probation and community service.
As far as I’m concerned, Higgins handled that about as well as he could have considering how Burdett appeared to be rushing toward Boebert. That crossed a line, and Higgins was right to step in and take charge of the situation as any man should absent the presence of the police.