Rep. Rashida Tlaib Emerges as a Voice of Reason and Nothing Makes Sense Anymore

So, if you’ve been following politics for the past few years, you probably didn’t see this coming.

I’m leading the call for national security powers to not be expanded in light of the attack on our nation’s Capitol that occurred two weeks ago, as such measures often lead to the erosion of Americans’ civil liberties. pic.twitter.com/K6IHTPQzne

— Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (@RepRashida) January 19, 2021

It’s hard to argue with that tweet as written: “I’m leading the call for national security powers to not be expanded in light of the attack on our nation’s Capitol that occurred two weeks ago, as such measures often lead to the erosion of Americans’ civil liberties.”

Lead on. We’re in a moment of great opportunity for the opportunistic expansion of government power, and weaponizing it for partisan causes. That’s not good. Pelosi seems to be leading that charge, which is also not good. She’s powerful, hungry for yet more power, deranged, and deeply out of touch with about half the country.

If you read through the letter, you’ll see some flawed reasoning and stolen bases in there. The signatories, which includes the “Squad” and other radicals, suggest that QAnon and others haven’t been cracked down on because of systemic racism.

Up to January 6, that horn guy and his weird pals hadn’t caused anywhere near the level of damage that six months of antifa and BLM riots caused in numerous cities around the country. We know that one fellow who’s been arrested in connection with the Capitol riot isn’t a Trump supporter at all. He’s a leftist agitator who leads a group (of as few as one, from the looks of it) called Insurgence USA. He’s one of many arrested. He wanted to yank Trump out of the White House without an election and “burn this sh*t down.” Most appear to be Trump supporters from the fringes, not the mainstream. But not all.

The leftist insurrectionists are still rioting and damaging Portland and trying to shut Andy Ngo down for telling the truth about them. Other leftist insurrectionists took over a major swath of downtown Seattle for a while. Others toppled statues and caused riots that burned out whole city blocks and destroyed minority-owned businesses and ended minority lives. Did they matter?

The signatories are probably fearful that any crackdown will, like the multiple torpedoes the left fired at Trump over the years, circle back on them and their allies. That’s not an unreasonable expectation. Several of them have made tweets and statements that can reasonably be construed as either encouraging riots or waving in a friendly way at riots as long as the rioters are of the left. Once you start the dragnets, you can’t always control who gets snagged in them.

And the letter does not in any way address AOC’s call to invade the southern states in the name of “liberating” them from limited government, relatively open economies, lighter regulations, and more general freedom and prosperity than our countrymen and women are allowed to enjoy in the blue states.

“It’s the only way,” AOC says. Sure, if you’re wound up for instigating civil war and genocide. Which no one should be.

There’s a reason, or several, that blue-staters keep moving to the red states. They’re liberating themselves, one U-Haul truck at a time. Whether they figure out why and then match that action to their voting records needs to be determined.

All of that note—and there’s more worth noting once you read the letter—it’s heartening to see Democrats oppose the expansion of government power—especially in this moment of mass hysteria without any meaningful leadership to counter it. Their equations are messy, but they got to the right conclusion.