I don't know if Matt Gaetz will be an asset or a liability to the incoming Trump administration. He's hardcore, and he's certainly confrontational. But maybe that's just the kind of guy we need right now for an Attorney General. Maybe. Time will tell.
President-elect Trump might have seen in Gaetz some of the qualities he sees in himself. Maybe that's why he chose him to head up the DOJ. One thing I do know is that the Left is losing their minds over this, and that's always a good thing. As the adage goes, when you get flak, you're over the target.
Biden picked Merrick Garland and used him as a tool to push politics. He also picked Alejandro Mayorkas for the same reasons. Thursday morning, the roadhags on "The View" will no doubt begin shrieking about Gaetz "weaponizing" the DOJ against the Left, but they never said a peep about Biden doing it against the Right.
Remember, it's not a Police State when we do it. We're morally right. You're just garbage clingers and deplorables.
I hope that the incoming DOJ will charge Garland and Mayorkas with malfeasance and willful neglect because they were forceful and intentional in breaking and twisting the laws... the former with his croaky voice and floppy hair, the latter with his arrogance and earthworm-like head. These two appeared before Congress for years giving answers-non-answers and burning up the clock with evasive responses, gaslighting, and big tall fibs. Even Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), an actual Senate gentleman, lamented after Mayorkas had given a roundabout answer that answered nothing, "Do you see why so many of us on this side are frustrated with you?"
I hope Gaetz files charges against these two; they did much worse than turn in bad job performances. They intentionally corrupted the scales of justice to push progressive politics. This kills any democratic system. When you overwhelm the citizens with foreign nationals while forcing them to pay for their needs, when you establish a two-tiered system of justice, when you quash protest on one side but not the other, and when you lie and obfuscate before the elected ombudsman (Congress), you willfully destroy the foundational glue that holds a republic together. You cannot rightfully charge Donald Trump with stealing classified documents when he was the outgoing chief executive with powers to declassify, and then not charge Joe Biden for doing the same thing when he had no powers to declassify. You just cannot do it, no matter how much you gussy it up with nuance. Clear-thinking Americans simply won't have confidence in a system that permits that.
If the incoming AG serves these two guys up with arrest warrants, the Left will raise holy hell about weaponization this and retribution that. But as Tucker Carlson has famously said, "If the Left is lambasting you for something, you can bet they are doing it themselves." I think this will be the case. And I think it needs to be done anyway because if not, others will follow suit. If others follow suit, we become a banana republic. If we become a banana republic, we will devolve into chaos. Who wants to live in chaos? Who wants to live in Venezuela right now?
Behavior from civil servants, as we've seen from Garland and Mayorkas, can't be tolerated and it can't go unpunished. The Left never appreciates it when it does. Trump had an ironclad case against Hillary Clinton but never pursued it. They thought it would be bad for the country so they left it on the table. Hillary Clinton never appreciated the gesture and went on to call Trump Hitler, a Fascist, and a Great Big Nasty. The Left is like Hamas that way. They just see magnanimous gestures as weakness and continue to attack. You can pull out of Gaza 20 years ago, supply them with electricity, give them jobs inside your cities, and let them participate in your government and they will still blow up buses in Tel Aviv and call for your collective death.
And like Hamas in this way, the only thing the Left understands is power. Gaetz can prosecute these two and make them write lots of checks to their lawyers. He can remind both of these guys that they are going to take the fall themselves for going rogue.... unless they feel like telling the AG who instructed them to do what they have done. We'll see how far Party loyalty extends at that point, but the DOJ has to keep reminding the country that they are doing what the law requires. It might look like retribution but no, sometimes that's just what justice looks like. We're just following the law. If the Left wants to shriek and shout, the DOJ can calmly remind them that if they don't like the law, they can change it through the legal process we have available as a constitutional republic.
"But what about Trump? How can you lean on the law when your own president violated the law?" the Left will surely say. "You're hypocrites," they will say. And they raise a fair point. A credible DOJ cannot play favorites. Justice must be blind. I agree. I think that the Left put its collective thumb on the scale to go after Trump, but claiming that will only perpetuate the back and forth and it won't change minds. So, Gaetz could simply tell them that no sitting president can be prosecuted while in office, and after he becomes a private citizen the wheels of justice can do whatever they do. Easy peasy.
The basic goal is to get things back to a state of normalcy and predictability that we have been promised as citizens of this country. The law protects everybody. Justice is blind. The law applies to us all. It has to be that way or you don't have a country; you have a mob of people living in a place where there is no expectation of fairness. We might well live in a place where the powerful have the edge, but without the expectation of fairness guaranteed in the 14th Amendment, we have nothing.