Senator Alex Padilla vs. the American Gestapo

The above is the complete extant video of what happened to US Senator Alex Padilla the other day in California, the state he represents. We don't see what happened before this, but the video begins with Sen. Padilla being pushed by some kind of Federal agent. Padilla tells his assaulter who he is -- "Senator Padilla" -- and his assaulter's response, joined by other assasulters, is to forcibly escort the Senator out of the room and then wrestle him to the ground.

I use the word "assaulter" because assault is defined as any offensive or unwanted touching of the body. Assault is a crime, and it doesn't matter whether the assault is done by whatever kind of Federal agent. The job of any kind of police is to apprehend criminals, and stop crimes from happening if the crime has not already occurred. Their job is manifestly not to assault a United States Senator, or any other person exercising their Constitutional rights -- in Senator Padilla's case, the right to free speech and peaceable assembly guaranteed in the First Amendment.

And assault, unfortunately, is not the worst crime that can be committed. In May 1970, two unarmed student protestors and two unarmed students who were observing the protest at Kent State University were shot dead by National Guardsmen sent there by the governor of Ohio. Some of the protestors were throwing rocks. That's not peaceable assembly. It's unclear if either of the two who were shot dead were throwing rocks (they were far away from the National Guard, who were not in any danger of being hit by the rocks), but even if any of the protestors were throwing rocks, the death penalty certainly would not have been on the table had they been arrested. What is clear is that the four were cut down, murdered by the National Guard, and none of those murderers were ever brought to justice.

I call them, and their current incarnations, Gestapo, because that's what this flagrant disregard of rights and appliance of violence to crush those rights in 1970 and again this past week with Senator Padilla in California ultimately lead to. Whether it's a US Senator pushed to the floor and handcuffed, or Marines facing down peaceful protestors in Los Angeles yesterday in the No King protests, these assaults on our democracy and our way of life, need to stop. Every assault on a person exercising their Constitutional rights is an assault on our democracy, and a nail in the coffin that those who dislike democracy are attempting to build. Those who do the assault, the perpetrators, and the people who put them in that place, need to be brought before a court of law.

We need law-abiding police in our society. Calls to defund the police are crazy. Defunded police empower criminals and would-be criminals. But law enforcement at all levels -- municipal, state, and Federal -- needs to stay focused on the apprehension of real criminals, and the prevention and solving of real crimes, like the assassination of Democratic State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, and the serious wounding of Democratic State Senator John A. Hoffman and his wife Yvette yesterday in Minnesota. The arrest of that heinous assassin within 48 hours is an example of law enforcement at its best. The FBI and state and local police who worked so efficiently to make that arrest are heroes. The FBI and Secret Service agents who pushed a U.S. Senator to the ground and handcuffed him for the crime of asking a question at an inopportune time are quite the opposite. They are grave dangers to our democracy.

The above video that just came to my attention (thanks Frank Tomasulo for sending it to me) starts a little earlier than the video at the top of this post and shows that Senator Padilla was a little rude, for asking a question of Christi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, while she was talking. But note that the question is posed in a conversational tone of voice -- Padilla is certainly not shouting. And this is certainly not grounds for being forcibly removed from the event. Had I been in Secretary Noem's place, I would have answered the question and invited the Senator up to join me on the stage. That's democracy.