Yesterday marked the 118th Congress’s first Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing into Joe Biden’s Justice Department, and the committee’s Republicans didn’t disappoint.

Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, and others grilled Attorney General Merrick Garland on everything from fentanyl to open borders to mandatory minimum sentencing, but the Republicans’ best moments were of a uniform type: the political weaponization and two-tiered judicial philosophy of Biden’s DOJ, whether regarding the safety of conservative Supreme Court justices or the selective persecution of pro-life advocates or the criminalization of concerned parents’ peaceful activities at local school board meetings.

We should first stipulate that after all’s been said and done at one of these hearings, there’s always been a lot more said than done. Still, by the time committee Republicans were through with him, the 70-year-old Garland was probably second-guessing his decision to join the Biden administration rather than join Joe in semi-retirement.

“You spent 20 years as a judge,” said Cruz, “and you’re perfectly content with justices being afraid for their children’s lives, and you did nothing to prosecute. … When rioters descended on the homes of six Supreme Court Justices, night after night after night, you did nothing. The department did nothing.” Cruz then asked, “How do you decide which statutes you enforce and which ones you don’t?”

Lion Ted Cruz MAULS AG Garland to absolute SHREDS for ignoring threats against Supreme Court Justices🔥 pic.twitter.com/ZTCjbnOOp6

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) March 1, 2023

Missouri’s Josh Hawley focused on the FBI’s treatment of pro-life activists and the Biden DOJ’s seeming anti-Catholic bigotry. As Newsweek framed it, Hawley “accused the Department of Justice of spying on Catholics, citing a case involving Mark Houck, a Catholic anti-abortion activist who was accused of assaulting a 72-year-old man who was escorting a patient into a Philadelphia Planned Parenthood clinic prior to the 2022 midterm elections.”

Our Nate Jackson covered the acquittal of Houck, whose case was particularly outrageous because he’d reportedly offered to turn himself in when he learned he was facing charges. Instead, a massive team of FBI agents raided his home with weapons and in full riot gear, thereby terrorizing Houck’s wife and young children.

“You used an unbelievable show of force with guns that I note liberals usually decry,” Hawley charged. “You’re supposed to hate long guns and assault-style weapons but you’re happy to deploy them against Catholics and innocent children. And then you haul them into court for a jury to acquit them in one hour. I just suggest to you that that is a disgraceful performance by your Justice Department and a disgraceful use of resources.”

When Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton got his chance, he quizzed Garland about the murder rates within the home countries of illegals ostensibly seeking asylum here due to the violence in their native lands.

Garland punted, understandably, so Cotton pointed out that murder rates are actually higher in many big U.S. cities than in the countries to our south that are being systematically emptied into ours via Biden’s policy of an open border.

“Should American citizens in places like New Orleans and Baltimore and St. Louis begin to seek asylum in countries like Honduras and Guatemala under your asylum principles?” Cotton asked.

Garland mumbled something about the governments of those countries being unable or unwilling to protect their citizenries, which, we’re to infer, gives those illegals — who now number some six million during the two years of Joe Biden’s presidency — a right to invade our country and avail themselves to our healthcare system and other finite taxpayer-funded services.

One point of seeming agreement between Garland’s DOJ and Senate Republicans materialized when committee chairman Lindsey Graham pressed the AG on whether the Mexican drug cartels, whose fentanyl is killing the equivalent of a full jet airliner of Americans every single day, should be designated as terrorist organizations.

Garland didn’t object, but he noted that such a decision would be up to the State Department. So the question is: What’s keeping Secretary of State Antony Blinken from doing so, and why hasn’t he been hauled before a Republican-controlled House committee to answer for himself?

As we noted recently, the U.S. is spending $200 billion on a proxy war with Russia, but the Biden administration seems utterly uninterested in fighting a war against a far deadlier enemy — an enemy that’s responsible for the deaths of 300 Americans every single day.

Perhaps the most comically tone-deaf of Garland’s remarks yesterday came when he complained that his DOJ didn’t have enough resources to do its job.

“It’s a question of the resources,” he said. “Not enough people. We don’t have enough money. We don’t have enough jails. We don’t have enough judges.”

Got that? Joe Biden’s weaponized and woefully biased DOJ doesn’t have enough resources to properly persecute its political enemies.

More resources, eh, Merrick? Roger that. We’ll get right on it.