Do we really want a nationwide federal police force accountable solely to a small number of legislators, not subject to FOIA and other citizen protections applicable to the executive branch?  The Acting Chief of the U.S. Capitol Police has recently announced the expansion of their federal force into Florida and California.  Two new field offices will be opening in Tampa and San Francisco, due to claims from Acting Chief Yogananda Pittman that the number of threats against sitting Congressmen has doubled in the last year.

A Capitol police officer with an automatic weapon

Photographed July 28, 2011, by Edward Kimmel CC BY-SA 2.0 license

However, this isn’t D.C.’s first effort to implement a new national police force.  Just last June, House Democrats voted to pass H.R. 7120, an attempt to nationalize state and local police departments across the entire country, disguised as legislation for defunding the police.

Is it hypocritical that the same lawmakers who have been calling for a total overhaul of law enforcement since the death of George Floyd in police custody last May, now want their personal police force expanded nationwide? Absolutely, but that’s never stopped a politician before.

However, the USCP is a completely different beast.  Unlike any other law enforcement agencies, including federal ones like the FBI, the Capitol Police fall under the legislative branch and therefore remain exempt from being subjected to oversight like the Freedom of Information Act.

Which explains why there has been so little effort and information surrounding Ashli Babbitt's untimely end.  Shrouded in secrecy, the USCP does not answer to the people of America.  Only an oversight committee run by a few select members of Congress; the same ones that reap the benefits from this total lack of transparency.

While some leftists may celebrate the killing of one of our veterans and the absence of accountability for her murderer, that is truly self-defeating.  One day it will be the same leftists that want to air their grievances against Congress and they too will be met with gunfire.  Jesse Kelly recently tweeted, “Despite all of human history telling them otherwise, these people still think the monster they’re feeding won’t ever turn on them.”

I asked Tayler Hansen, who was present when Capitol Police opened fire and struck Ashli Babbitt, his thoughts on nationalizing the perpetrators.  His response was chilling:

“The Capitol Police Force opening field offices in California and Florida is a tragedy. They have already done so much to ruin ordinary Americans’ lives, but it seems they’ve only gotten started. I pray for the residents of these states, hopefully they don’t meet the same ends as Ashli Babbitt and others did on January 6th.”

 Currently, the USCP is able to arrest individuals on Capitol grounds and areas around D.C. like Union Square courtesy of an agreement with the city.  This means granting them jurisdiction nationwide would simultaneously install the first nationalized police force with no input from the citizens of this country.

While that is terrifying, it also raises questions on whether it is legal under the U.S. Constitution.  The 10th Amendment limits the power of the federal government while granting all other responsibilities to the individual states.  A nationalized police force could overstep the federal government’s authority and infringe on the rights that are granted to the states.  Frankly, expanding the USCP is just too much power for the legislative branch of our government.  And we can look at historical examples to know that such actions have been tried before and always lead to autocratic leadership.  States’ rights have been our bastion of democracy and they shouldn’t be tossed to the dogs because Congressmen were frightened to be confronted by their own constituents.

The new field offices also highlight other federal forces' inadequacy.  The FBI, US Marshals, and Secret Service all currently respond to threats against politicians, so this new overlap with the USCP means that lawmakers are not confident in these establishments’ abilities to handle this responsibility.

And that may be a legitimate concern. To date, over 500 individuals have been arrested for their appearance at the Capitol building on January 6th and the FBI is still looking for 300 more.  Missing from the lineup of grandmothers and vegans in fur hats is the individual who placed pipe bombs at the DNC and RNC the night prior.  That brand of incompetence is emblematic of federal bureaucrats.  But the answer definitely isn’t to spawn a new police force nationwide under the full control of a handful of politicians thousands of miles away.

While lawmakers may be using January 6th as a public reason to expand this private police force, expanding the USCP has been on the agenda for a while. Just last year, Congress increased the Capitol Police’s annual budget to just over half a billion dollars.

Then, in May, the House increased USCP funding by over 350% when they passed a $1.9 billion Capitol Police budget (by only one vote) - that breaks down to $3.5 million per Congress member.  If that doesn’t sound ridiculous enough, consider that several million are being spent on “two new support dogs, named Lila and Filip, [who] will join the force to ‘spread the message of wellness.’”

With the media and tech companies under pressure to continue the fear-mongering regarding January 6th, it's no wonder that the average Democratic voter sees the arrests of their own countrymen as a justification to continue irrationally hating their political opposition and encouraging the further expansion of D.C.’s authoritarian powers.  Democrats get to point to the “seditionists” and say, "Republicans are so corrupt that they are arrested by the trainload!"

I almost pity them and their inability to recognize the redefined role of the federal forces, like legislators granting themselves the broad powers to be their own judicial review via a nationalized Capitol Police force.  Democrats celebrate the death of Ashli Babbitt as well as the rifle-drawn arrests of political adversaries while happily regurgitating propaganda that those challenging the seats of power are “insurrectionists” and that should terrify us all.

Tayler Hansen went on to say, “With a Nancy Pelosi commission, I can only imagine what a politically weaponized police force will do.”  Unfortunately, we don’t have to use our imaginations.  The Nazi Party came into power in Germany in January of 1933.  By the following summer, it was illegal to belong to any other political party.  Without the newly nationalized German police force, it wouldn’t have been possible.

You can reach Taylor Day on Twitter @TheTaylorDay

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