It is quaint now to remember that the Congress once was supposed to be a coequal branch of government and, as such, it was tasked with keeping its own house—and Senate—in order. By and large, it did a pretty good job of it. The process was slow, and it was vulnerable to Good Old Boy back-scratching, but, generally, the system worked the way it was supposed to work. It dealt with child sexual abuse. It took God's own good time censuring Joe McCarthy, but it finally got around to it. It expelled a whole group of traitors who allied themselves with the Confederacy. It rid itself of the ABSCAM crooks, and also of George Santos. Och, thim was the days.
A video posted by Fox showed what appeared to be law enforcement in HSI jackets at what Fox News said was [representative Ilhan] Omar’s Washington, D.C. residence.
Gee, what a coincidence that a FNC crew just happened by.
“Today in the Washington, D.C., area, Homeland Security Investigations executed a judicially authorized search warrant secured by the Department of Justice. This enforcement action is part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation,” a DOJ spokesperson told The Guardian. It was unclear what the nature of the warrant was.
Omar’s office did not respond to a request for comment, and the White House and Department of Homeland Security referred comment to DOJ. Citing two unnamed sources “close to the investigation,” Fox News reported that the search was related to a criminal fraud investigation concerning Omar’s immigration paperwork, which her late father filled out when she was a child.
Rep. Omar came to this country as a refugee from Somalia when she was 12. Whatever her father may have done—and I'm going to need a truckload of evidence that he did anything at all—I don't know what it has to do with her. Except that, she has been the target of abject racial xenophobia ever since she came to Washington.
It was just the latest in months of talk about investigating Omar. Trump in December accused her of having “married her brother” and said she “should be thrown the hell out of our country,” a reference to a years-old but unsubstantiated claim that Omar sought to help her ex-husband—who they allege is really her brother—obtain immigration papers via a sham marriage. Days later, his “border czar” Tom Homan said: “We’re pulling the records now,” referring to Omar, and said a fraud investigator in Homeland Security Investigations, the ICE division that historically has been tasked with investigative work, would look into the matter.
First, this is another example of the president weaponizing law enforcement to play out the demonology in his increasingly superfluous brainpan. Second, it also is a shocking violation of separation of powers. And, yes, the cowardly sycophantic behavior of the Republican majorities made Congress vulnerable to institutional sabotage. But many of the Republicans in Congress are just as rabid about rep. Omar as the president is. Their bigotry cannot replace the constitutional order, even under this president, who wouldn't know the constitutional order if it fell on his head, which, one day, I hope will happen.