Why Not Arrest Governor Lujan Grisham . . . Pursuant to the Civil Rights Law the Biden Justice Department Is Using to Prosecute Donald Trump?

I could not agree more with Charlie’s excellent post, the upshot of which is that lawlessness begets lawlessness — along the lines of Thomas More’s reproof of William Roper in a Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. I wish only to add that lawlessness can also beget righteous prosecution.

Section 241 of the federal penal code is the civil-rights conspiracy statute — the same one, in fact, that Biden Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith has dubiously charged against former president Donald Trump in the federal election-interference case. In the pertinent part, Section 241 states:

If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same[,] … [t]hey shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both[.]

The progressive activists who run the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division in Democratic administrations see civil-rights statutes as their license to overhaul the nation’s police departments and other institutions under the guise of “systemic racism.” There is no reason, however, why a Republican administration could not invoke them for their proper purpose — protecting the federal rights of all Americans.

Obviously, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham (D., N.M.) and her subordinates have conspired to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate Americans in New Mexico in the free exercise and enjoyment of their Second Amendment rights. Indeed, her acknowledgment that she expects to be challenged in court underscores both her criminal intent and the fact that the rights she has decided to “suspend” are well established in constitutional law.

For all their Trump-era prattle about norms, Democrats have now established the banana-republic practice of exploiting the criminal law as a weapon in political combat. Moreover, what Grisham has unabashedly done in defying the Second Amendment’s prohibition on governmental denial of the fundamental right of self-defense is more clearly a civil-rights violation than what Trump allegedly did to injure voting rights (see, e.g., United States v. Gradwell (1917), supporting the proposition that the federal civil-rights statute does not reach allegations of voting interference that (a) stretch far beyond the law’s original purpose to protect then-recently enfranchised black voters, and (b) turn on interpretations of state law).

That being the case, shouldn’t Republican presidential candidates commit that, in the next administration, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division will target state officials who abuse their power by oppressing Americans in the exercise of such federal rights as bearing firearms — to say nothing of the parental right to control the care, custody, and management of their children’s upbringing against a radical state push for “gender affirmation”?