This seemingly modest change to the role of the Capitol Police will assume greater, more sinister significance in time.
We recently saw the first phase of the January 6 show trial. The congressional hearing, which the House Republican leadership has boycotted, always threatened to be a farce, prolonging and exaggerating a one-time event for partisan political gain. It lived down to expectations.
The assembled U.S. Capitol Police jerked tears and repeated popular lies, including the now-disproven claim that officer Brian Sicknick was killed during the riots. One of the policemen exposed himself as highly ideological after his tweets praising Black Lives Matter violence surfaced soon after his testimony. All of the witnesses used highly charged language, referring to their fellow Americans as “terrorists” and the event as an attempted “coup.”
In other words, the Capitol Police leadership supported the Democrats’ bleak view of the moment: that the country is beset by dangerous, violent, right-wing extremism, which in turn permits extreme measures to defend “Our Democracy.” With the frequent comparisons to 9/11, it is obvious that restoring the War on Terror’s domestic security apparatus is the goal. But this time, the “war” will be aimed at a much larger group of Americans, namely, those who supported President Trump and have doubts about the 2020 election.
The most ominous development is the plan to deploy the Capitol Police in the nation’s interior, with the first field offices located in California and Florida.
Is This Legal?
This is a peculiar development. The United States has always rejected a national police force, preferring instead more accountable state and local police. The FBI and the enforcement arms of other federal agencies are much smaller than state and local police, and their jurisdiction is limited by their specific agency missions and federal law.
The Capitol Police have very limited jurisdiction by statute. Even in Washington D.C., they’re only allowed to arrest for crimes within the “Capitol Building and Grounds.” In other words, they are highly paid security guards.
Title 2, Section 1966 of U.S. Code, further provides that the “Capitol Police is authorized to protect, in any area of the United States, the person of any Member of Congress, officer of the Congress, as defined in section 4101(b) of this title, and any member of the immediate family of any such Member or officer, if the Capitol Police Board determines such protection to be necessary.” This protective power is extended by statute over the entire United States.
Nonetheless, most congressmen have lax security. With 535 members spread across both houses, members of Congress are far closer to the people than the highly insulated president. It is not unusual to see them about town, perhaps with a local sheriff’s deputy in tow at public events.
Some congressmen have, of course, been attacked. The congressional baseball game shooting of 2017 was undertaken by an angry left-winger. Gabby Giffords was shot in 2011 by a mentally deranged man at a public event. There have also been larger-scale attacks. While we were told repeatedly how the January 6 protest had no precedent, left-wing extremists bombed the Capitol building in 1983. More recently, a black nationalist killed a Capitol Police officer in a vehicle attack in April.
While the Capitol Police have no nationwide arrest authority, they do have a right to work outside the Capitol grounds for “intelligence gathering,” according to 2 U.S.C. § 1978. The scope of this authority is entirely undefined by the statute and related regulations.
In other words, these field offices are probably legal, but they’re also a bad idea. When the Left was worried about Trump’s use of Department of Homeland Security officers to protect federal buildings during last summer’s riots, the Atlantic noted, “One common tool for an interior ministry is a national police force. That can be a dangerous tool because an armed national police force at the disposal of the central government has a tendency to be misused. A repressive regime that is in danger, or simply faced with protests it finds troublesome, can use the national police to crack down, turning the force into an agency that...
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