The federal government isn’t exactly a bastion of efficiency. In fact, entire late-night comedy routines have been written about the glacial pace of Washington. So how is it that Joe Biden’s Justice Department managed to snap to attention and mobilize against parents within hours of the National School Board Association’s complaint? That’s simple, one legal group says, if it was the president’s idea to begin with.

How much did the White House know about the NSBA’s campaign against local parents — and when did it know it? That’s the question on everyone’s minds as more people debate the attorney general’s unusually rapid and over-reaching response. “I can tell you from firsthand experience at the Department of Justice,” former Trump official Gene Hamilton said, “working with prior attorneys general in other senior levels of government… that type of a timeline simply does not happen ever. Organizations send letters. Members of Congress send letters all the time to the Department of Justice [and] to other federal departments and agencies. No one ever responds. No one ever reacts within a matter of a few days and issues departmental guidance based on the contents of a request from an outside organization.”

Hamilton’s organization, America First Legal, smelled a rat. They’re so convinced that the timing of the DOJ’s announcement is fishy that they’re pressuring the inspector general to investigate. In a letter to Michael Horowitz, the group points out that the NSBA’s letter to the president (which compared outspoken parents to “domestic terrorists”) was dated September 29 — five days before Attorney General Merrick Garland unleashed the full force of the FBI on local communities. The government doesn’t even process mail that fast! “Nothing ever moves in the government that quickly,” Hamilton agreed, especially when you’re talking about “massive cabinet agencies.” “Clearly, there was some amount of coordination involved here,” he warned. No one gets that kind of special treatment “without some kind of understanding or agreement beforehand.”

According to the people Hamilton’s group consulted from the inside, “Biden administration officials developed a plan to use a letter from an outside group (‘not the usual suspects’) as pretext for federal action to chill, deter, and discourage parents from exercising their constitutional rights and privileges,” they write to Horowitz. Even though the DOJ’s own staff warned that the federal government didn’t have the authority to punish parents, they were told that “this was a White House priority and a deliverable would be created.” Either the entire matter was precoordinated, America First Legal argues, “…[or] the normal clearance process and standard order both within the department (including legal sufficiency review by the Office of Legal Counsel, the Civil Rights Division, the Criminal Division, the Office of Legal Policy, and other components), and between the department and the White House Counsel’s Office and the Office of Management and Budget, were bypassed or corrupted.”

The only way the federal government could justify meddling in these local school board meetings was for someone to call for it. The NSBA’s letter, asking the administration to jump into the debate and crack down on parents, was exactly the excuse they needed. Deep down, the Democrats — including Joe Biden — know that radicalizing education is a losing issue for them. With every school board meeting, every irate parent, every administrative cover-up, their grip on the classroom is slipping — and they know it. The only way to stop the bleeding is to put an end to this uprising. If that means weaponizing the DOJ against moms and dads, they’ll do it. If it means abusing their power and ignoring the plain language of the Constitution, they’ll do that too. They’ll do anything because they know — the future of their party’s extremism depends on it.

“Garland knows this is dangerous nonsense,” NRO’s Andrew McCarthy pointed out. Anyone with his background and experience understands that the principle of free speech doesn’t yield to anything and or anyone. But then, McCarthy argues, “[the AG’s memo] was not a good-faith effort to inform. It was an abusive effort to intimidate.”

And let’s not forget: this isn’t Biden’s first rodeo when it comes to collusion. Remember, back when Barack Obama was president, the Democrats turned local retaliation against parents into an art form. In Minnesota, when moms and dads protested the radical LGBT indoctrination in their district, the Southern Poverty Law Center not only labeled the organization a “hate group,” they sued the parents and got Obama’s DOJ involved. As FRC’s Meg Kilgannon explained on Monday’s “Washington Watch,” “There are all kinds of organizations that are putting tremendous pressure on schools. We’ve talked about the Southern Poverty Law Center a lot and over the years, and they have a tremendous influence… but organizations like the National Association of School Boards also contribute to that.”

At the end of the day, this isn’t about violence or threats of violence. (If it were, Senator Josh Hawley, R-Mo., pointed out, the president would be taking America’s real crime problem much more seriously.) This is about shutting up parents so that the Left can continue treating schools like indoctrination camps. “There’s not even a half-hearted attempt to suggest that this was done for a legitimate law enforcement purpose,” Hamilton’s colleague, Stephen Miller, said. “It seems quite obvious that it is meant to chill free speech and intimidate parents into silence and into obedience.”

Fortunately, parents — as everyone but the Left seems to know — have no intentions of going quietly. And neither should anyone who cares about the future of this great nation.

Originally published here.

Tex Evasion: White House Fights to Stop Pro-life Law

Joe Biden may be the Left’s puppet on a lot of things, but abortion isn’t one of them. In the last two years, the one-time March for Lifer has become a true believer in the fringe wing of his party where destroying babies in the womb is concerned. His DOJ (when it isn’t trying to prosecute parents for speaking up at school board meetings) has been frantically fighting to stop Texas’s pro-life law from taking effect — with almost eerie determination.

In this game of legal ping-pong, the Biden administration has been angrily firing off briefs any time a court has agreed to let the law take effect. The latest chapter in this whole drama happened over the weekend, when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily lifted a judge’s ban on the law while the two sides slug it out in court. The Biden Justice Department was furious, insisting that the state’s decision to ban abortion at six weeks is “obvious[ly] unconstitutional” and, as such, shouldn’t be allowed to enforce the law while the lawsuit moves forward.

“If Texas’s scheme is permissible, no constitutional right is safe from state-sanctioned sabotage of this kind,” the Justice Department told the judges on the Fifth Circuit. “Partisans of one stripe or another might cheer these outcomes, but they should horrify anyone committed to the principle that this diverse nation is bound by one Constitution.” Of course, that’s tame compared some of the Left’s other beefs with the Texas law — like the hardships endured by “pregnant men.”

In USA Today, writers bemoan the new and allegedly unjust challenges that Texas’s six-week abortion limit puts on people who identify as transgender. In one of craziest arguments for dismantling the law, extremists argue, “Getting an abortion while trans was always hard. In Texas, a new law puts outsized burdens on them.” Like everyone else who stumbled across the story, Media Research Center’s Matt Philbin almost didn’t believe it. “A hearty congratulations to Texas ‘trans men and nonbinary people’ for really upping their victimhood game,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, the real victims — innocent unborn children — continue to be the object of Biden’s obsession, despite his church leaders’ disgust. If he claims to be a devout Catholic, Archbishop Joseph Naumann fired back at the president, “I would urge him to act like one…” And yet, eight months into this killing culture, Biden’s pro-abortion fixation rivals that of even Barack Obama’s. Nothing, not even the overwhelming opinion of the country he’s leading, seems to dissuade this president. Biden, who’s “far from governing as a ‘personally pro-life politician,” NRO’s editors note, is everything pro-abortion activists could have hoped…“ And everything God-fearing Americans must stand against.

Originally published here.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.