Suppression of Rights

For John, BLUF:  The only good news out of this is that DA Chisholm was not able to sabotage Scott Walker's run for governor.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Writing in USA Today Law Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds gives us "Wisconsin's dirty prosecutors pull a Putin".

Corrupt prosecutors.  Corrupt.  unAmerican.  Ugly and scary.

And here is his 20 April Blog post.

“HANDS UP, DON’T SHOOT!”:  But it’s not your stereotypical white-officer-in-minority-neighborhood situation, where we are admonished by the political left that “Black Lives Matter.“  Instead, it’s in America’s Heartland, Wisconsin.  And the targets are–gasp!–conservatives who supported modification of Wisconsin’s collective bargaining rules for public employees.  In this terrific new piece at National Review Online, David French breaks down the shocking excessive force used against conservative targets of the so-called “John Doe” investigation.  In the words of one target, “Anne”:

“It’s a matter of life or death.”

That was the first thought of “Anne” (not her real name).  Someone was pounding at her front door.  It was early in the morning — very early — and it was the kind of heavy pounding that meant someone was either fleeing from — or bringing — trouble.

“It was so hard.  I’d never heard anything like it.  I thought someone was dying outside.”

She ran to the door, opened it, and then chaos.  “People came pouring in.  For a second I thought it was a home invasion.  It was terrifying.  They were yelling and running, into every room in the house.  One of the men was in my face, yelling at me over and over and over.”

It was indeed a home invasion, but the people who were pouring in were Wisconsin law-enforcement officers.  Armed, uniformed police swarmed into the house. Plainclothes investigators cornered her and her newly awakened family.  Soon, state officials were seizing the family’s personal property, including each person’s computer and smartphone, filled with the most intimate family information.

Why were the police at Anne’s home? She had no answers.  The police were treating them the way they’d seen police treat drug dealers on television.

In fact, TV or movies were their only points of reference, because they weren’t criminals.  They were law-abiding.  They didn’t buy or sell drugs.  They weren’t violent.  They weren’t a danger to anyone.  Yet there were cops — surrounding their house on the outside, swarming the house on the inside.  They even taunted the family as if they were mere “perps.”

As if the home invasion, the appropriation of private property, and the verbal abuse weren’t enough, next came ominous warnings.

Don’t call your lawyer.

Don’t tell anyone about this raid.  Not even your mother, your father, or your closest friends.

The entire neighborhood could see the police around their house, but they had to remain silent.  This was not the “right to remain silent” as uttered by every cop on every legal drama on television — the right against self-incrimination.  They couldn’t mount a public defense if they wanted — or even offer an explanation to family and friends.

Don't call your lawyer?

OK, to restate, this is from an article in the National Interest, to be found here.

Let us name names.  We are talking about Milwaukee District Attorney, John Theodore Chisholm.  His actions, as reported by the National Interest make him sound worse than Ms Louis Lerner, formerly of the IRS (You do know it is Day 712 of the IRS Scandal).  No, this is more like Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s, when the Prosecutors and Judges thought they were doing the right thing, but in fact they were doing the most awful things.

There is nothing more dangerous in politics than certitude.  Certitude has given us not just the Holocaust, whose machinery killed more than Jews, but also the Armenian Genocide, the deaths of hundreds of thousand of Greeks and Turks in a population exchange, the Ukraine Holodamor, other Soviet purges for millions of people, the German/Soviet effort to destroy the intelligentsia of Poland, the Great Leap forward in China, Pol Pot and the Killing Fields, Rwanda and now what Deash is doing in the Middle East.  I am sure I missed some.

Here is Blogger, and Wisconsin Law Professor Ann Althouse back in September of last year.  Yes, the Deep State.

Did I mention that Milwaukee District Attorney John Theodore Chisholm presents as scum, an anti-democracy putz?

Hat tip to Ann Althouse.

Hat tip to the Instapundit.

Regards  —  Cliff