In a hearing on Wednesday of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) sharply criticized what in reality is avowedly oppositional rhetoric from figures like Donald Trump and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) towards law enforcement. Both have attacked federal law enforcement agencies as supposedly politicized in the context of investigations around Trump, and both have — ironically! — also supported action to strip funding from key law enforcement teams.
The hearing featured Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as a witness. Swalwell asked about issues including the potential for rhetoric like what’s been seen from Trump to help endanger police. The former president’s lies could give extremists an excuse or, if simply convinced of the imaginary accuracy of the ex-president’s BS, a rallying cry for action.
“It concerns me that there is this anti-police rhetoric that’s happening among some in the MAGA Republican Party,” Swalwell remarked, after citing examples involving Trump, Greene, and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). “Because they vote against police funding that was included in the COVID relief package. They vote against police reform efforts that would put millions of dollars in community police officers on our streets. They vote and are against the union protections that allow them to collectively bargain.” Swalwell also brought up Republicans’ treatment of the Capitol riot, after which prominent voices — like, again, Trump and Greene — have stuck with participants in the violence over the officers injured that day.
Earlier in Swalwell’s allotted five minutes, he ceded some time to Mayorkas to respond to earlier Republican comments, and the Cabinet official used that time to destroy any GOP argument that authorities are somehow doing nothing to address the crisis of deadly drugs like fentanyl in the U.S. That sounds, of course, exactly like something that could take off among Republicans, some of whom have even ridiculously claimed that the southern border is “open,” an idea that does not have any meaningful relationship to reality at all, no matter GOP fervency. Mayorkas also noted that going after the supply of drugs isn’t the only concern, which instead coexists with the issue of demand, although the forum wasn’t really conducive to the Secretary expanding on the points he was making.
Still, there’s a litany of false representations about the border to which Republicans like to cling. Even Trump’s brazen lies that the border is “open” could help facilitate any crisis situation, since the comments could help foster confusion among those who genuinely don’t know that the border is definitely not in any real-world sense of the word “open.” Watch below:
