READ MICHAEL GRAHAM ON TRUMP’S ‘BIG BROTHER’ REPUBLICANS,
Puts big gov’t power ahead of individual liberty
When the story of Justine Damond first broke — an unarmed woman in her pajamas gunned down by a cop in Minneapolis — I steeled myself for the usual response from my fellow Republicans: Some version of “the cop is always right.”
I expected to hear the 40-year-old Australian “spiritual healer” was, in fact, a threatening figure, that the officer was right to fear some deadly, DownUnder mojo. Or as the attorney for the shooter’s partner put it, “It was certainly reasonable to assume … a possible ambush.”
This knee-jerk defense of incompetent police work hasn’t materialized, likely because the shooter, Mohamed Noor, is a Muslim immigrant from Africa. It certainly isn’t because his behavior is indefensible. Some Donald Trump supporters have publicly defended virtually every shooting of an unarmed citizen by the cops, from Philando Castile to Walter Scott — the unarmed South Carolina man shot in the back as he fled.
Which is interesting if you believe that conservative Republicans are smallgovernment types who defend individual liberty as the highest priority. That was certainly my assumption … until Donald Trump.
President Trump proved he was smarter than me (and 16 other primary opponents) by embracing a much larger group of GOP voters: Big Brother Republicans.
Big Brother Republicans have no time for silly, theoretical debates about the balance between the individual and the state. They look out at America and see a nation that needs a good kick in the pants. Somebody needs to straighten these slackers out, to “yank a knot in your chain” as my dad used to put it.
It’s the “Leave Me The Hell Alone” party vs. the “Get Off My Lawn!” GOP.
And the “Get Off My Lawn” guys are winning. Bigly.
Just this week the Trump administration announced it is ramping up civil asset forfeitures. That’s when the government seizes your money and property because they think you’ve broken the law — even if you haven’t been convicted of anything. This seems like the sort of thing people who survived the Obama era’s IRS abuses would want to avoid.
We know the system is abused — Massachusetts had a high-profile case, in Tewksbury, in which law enforcement tried (wrongly) to seize an innocent family’s hotel before a judge finally stopped it. The Institute for Justice ranks Massachusetts as one of the two worst states when it comes to taking your stuff without proving a crime.
Which makes sense in a biggovernment, blue-state sort of way. But why is Trump’s attorney general announcing that the administration is going to do more of that? Does that sound like Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party to you? The guy who famously said the scariest words in the English language are, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help”? That’s not all. Regardless of how you feel about Massachusetts legalizing pot, there’s no doubt that the people have spoken and are ready to get tokin’. But the Trump administration is reportedly open to enforcing federal anti-pot laws in states where possession and production are no longer illegal.
Defending our cops — particularly from the violence-inspiring radicalism of #BlackLivesMatter — is one thing. But using police power to seize citizens’ property without due process — and making government rich in the process—is an utterly un-conservative approach to government.
And giving armed government agents the benefit of the doubt in tough cases is understandable. But defending them when they kill a citizen like Philando Castile because he’s exercising his Second Amendment rights is … well, it’s not a form of conservatism I’m familiar with.
Big Brother Republicanism believes, as Barack Obama did, that individual liberty just gets in the way of government power — power that should be used to pick political winners and losers.
The only difference is who gets to do the picking.