The new panel will fall under the House Judiciary Committee and, presumably, will have subpoena power to compel testimony from officials.
"Recent revelations about the FBI’s involvement in censorship on social media platforms, which have become public knowledge thanks to the publishing of Twitter’s internal documents, is not the only instance of those abuses, nor is the FBI the only entity that what is currently referred to as the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government will look into," Reclaim the Net reported.
"The subcommittee is very likely to be formed because several Republican members of the House have made it one of the conditions to support the election of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker," the site continued, citing The Wall Street Journal.
The paper said that the new panel is tentatively being called the “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government," and its creation is part of a demand by a group of conservative Republicans in exchange for backing House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as Speaker when Nancy Pelosi is forced to hand over her gavel this week after the GOP won a majority in the November midterms.
The WSJ's Kimberly Strassel noted further:
The committee’s title is a recognition that the recent revelations about government meddling in speech and politics go beyond the FBI. There’s plenty yet to discover about the bureau’s sordid Russia-collusion hoax, its duping of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and its efforts to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story. And a recent batch of Twitter files from journalist Matt Taibbi includes documents showing a shocking intimacy between the FBI and Twitter as they policed online speech. But files have also shown the FBI was facilitating censorship requests from other parts of government.
"Add to this other disturbing government moves to use its power to silence or track citizens, whether it be Attorney General Merrick Garland’s directive to the FBI and U.S. attorneys to probe parents (after the National School Board Association suggested they might be domestic terrorists) or the Department of Homeland Security’s plans to create a Disinformation Governance Board," Strassel noted further.
While government agencies have been abusing their power and surpassing their authority to suppress Americans for years, it appears -- at least to Republicans -- that FBI's efforts to bypass the Constitution's free speech protections by getting social media companies to suppress speech is a bridge too far.
"I’m told the panel—in addition to shining a light on past and continuing misbehavior—will take a look at how agencies work with each other and with the private sector to collect information on Americans," Strassel wrote. "It’ll evaluate what powers Congress has given the executive branch; whether that was a good idea; and whether agency actions conform with the Constitution, laws enacted by Congress, and ethical standards."
In other words, it appears as though this panel will be used at some point to develop recommendations for Congress to scale back authorities that are currently used and abused by various federal agencies that have been weaponized against the taxpayers who fund them.
But here's the kicker: For this plan to work, there has to be some enforcement mechanism put into place. It's clear that Biden's Justice Dept. will not enforce congressional subpoenas issued by a GOP-controlled House, so that means Republicans have got to be prepared to withhold funding from the offending agencies, because that is the only way they will ever get compliance.
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