Merrick Garland’s Federal Offense Threats against school boards are an issue for local law enforcement.
Is there a culture-war issue that Merrick Garland won’t jump into? We can’t think of one, and now the Attorney General is nosing the Justice Department into debates at local school boards.
His intervention came this week after the National School Boards Association (NSBA) wrote to President Biden asking the feds to consider if threats and acts directed at school boards “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
We hadn’t heard that an angry parent is the equivalent of ISIS. But Mr. Garland this week directed the FBI and U.S. Attorneys to meet with local law enforcement to find ways to address the “disturbing spike” in “threats against school administrators, board members, teachers and staff.”
The NSBA letter cited various disruptions and incidents. In Illinois a man was arrested after striking a school official escorting him from a meeting. In Michigan a man gave a Nazi salute and shouted “Heil Hitler” in protest of masking requirements. In Virginia a man was arrested and another ticketed for trespassing after a raucous meeting whose subjects included the treatment of transgender students.
Some meetings were suspended amid the arguments. Disrupting a public meeting is inexcusable and, as Mr. Garland rightly notes, some of these acts may be criminal.
The problem is that none of this constitutes a federal offense. The AG is also getting close to chilling political speech that is protected by the First Amendment. Invoking Hitler may be dumb and over the top, but it’s protected speech.
Today school boards are ground zero for some of America’s most divisive cultural debates: critical race theory, mask and vaccination policy for teachers and students, the use of racial quotas to deny Asian-American students entry to elite public schools, and the Covid-19 response that kept many public schools closed for a year. Citizens have an enormous stake in how these decisions are made.
If these debates are more contentious than they ought to be, one problem may be that those running public schools don’t think they’re accountable to parents. Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for Virginia Governor, recently made this explicit when he said in a debate, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Many school boards view parents as a nuisance, and that can lead to frustration when people finally get a chance to be heard.
Local and state authorities are well equipped to make arrests and prosecute threats or acts of violence. Parents don’t want or need the FBI and federal prosecutors intervening to stifle their legitimate concerns for the education of their children.
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