Police for thee, but not for me.
Following concerns about being unfairly targeted by unchecked members of law enforcement, a new movement has emerged calling for agencies to be stripped of power and funding. Rampant distrust and fears about abuse of power are fueling calls to push back, to limit authority and constrain personnel counts.
This isn’t the left’s “defund the police.” It’s the right’s “stop the FBI.” It’s the GOP’s explicit opposition to boosting staff at the IRS.
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So we got Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) intoning about “BIDEN’S SHADOW ARMY,” a crew that would “target regular, everyday Americans,” and GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel warning that those taking part-time jobs to pay bills are “exactly the people the 87,000 new IRS agents will likely go after.” And so on.
It’s very useful to consider this rhetoric in the broader context of the recent debate over law enforcement. People like Cruz and McDaniel are presumably not worried about overreach by their local police departments. Importantly, they understand that this is not something their voters are terribly worried about. Complaints that municipal police might be treating some segments of the population differently than others — pulling them over disproportionately, searching them more — are not things Cruz’s and McDaniel’s bases lose sleep over.
But an audit? Sure. So the idea that the IRS is gaining clout is cause for concern, particularly because there had been an effective defund-the-tax-police movement for years that’s now being reversed. In 1999, there were 60 examination and collection agents for every 1,000 filers reporting incomes of $500,000 or more. Two decades later there were only 17.
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This was the state of play until about 7 p.m. on Monday. I made those graphs expecting to write about the response to IRS funding in this context. Then, suddenly, I got a new example: FBI agents had searched former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla.
In short order, the bureau became a target of even more virulent opposition. Take this, from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).
This is not irony. It is Greene extending her belief that the FBI’s targeting of Mar-a-Lago was an unacceptable overreach to a specific conclusion: the bureau is too powerful and should be constrained. She’s co-opting the verbiage of those who view local police departments with similar skepticism, but she is not being insincere in her demand.
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We should at no point grant law enforcement a reflexive benefit of the doubt that it is operating with complete directness and objectivity, certainly. Any use of governmental force — from arrests to searches to financial reviews — should be conducted with transparency and evenhandedness, something that demands our collective oversight and scrutiny.
But it is impossible not to notice how the response to the Mar-a-Lago search and the IRS expansion reveal the gulf in what sorts of oversight Americans fear. Black Americans in particular have drawn focus in recent years on how police departments apply force, including deadly force, prompting the political right to largely circle the wagons in defense of cops. When, however, the cops work for the IRS or target a popular Republican political figure — even one with a lengthy track record of blurring legal lines — that reflexive support evaporates. Instead, there’s default skepticism and concern about systemic problems. Which, for the original supporters of “defund the police” will seem familiar.
One refrain that emerged following the Mar-a-Lago search was that it demonstrated how far federal law enforcement was willing to go. “If they can target a president, they can target you,” the common line went. Setting aside the unique circumstances here — if the search was, as reported, targeting classified documents Trump kept at his home, that’s an uncommon situation — a fair response is: sure. Yes, if the feds or the police think that a law was broken, they might search my house, too. And sometimes those searches will be specious. Sometimes the police will engage in coverups to protect themselves. That can happen to you, indeed — but, at certain levels, it seems to happen to some people more than others.
If you demand accountability for members of law enforcement you fear but not for ones you don’t, you aren’t demanding accountability for law enforcement.
