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When it comes to radicals, it takes one to know one

Senate Republicans tried to block Rachael Rollins from becoming US attorney in Massachusetts because they think she’s too radical. They should look in the mirror.

Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins, recently confirmed to be the US attorney for MassachusettsSuzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff

My sides are still sore from laughing at all the Senate Republicans who tried to stop Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins from becoming the US attorney for Massachusetts because they think she’s too radical.

These are the same people who think it’s OK for guys to walk around in public strapped with military-style rifles. The same people who have actively encouraged millions to believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. The same people who have defended the willful ignorance of those who refuse to listen to science during a pandemic that has killed nearly 800,000 Americans.

As a DA, Rollins didn’t think it’s wise to gum up the criminal justice system with low-level prosecutions like shoplifting, drug possession, and petty larceny. The majority of people who opposed her confirmation as US attorney think it’s perfectly acceptable to subvert the Constitution, push for more guns in a culture plagued by mass shootings, and treat public health as if it’s an existential threat to personal liberty.

So, if they’re using radical as another word for extremist, who’s the radical?

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The Senate opposition to Rollins was led by Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, who might want to look in the mirror before they start dismissing others as extremists.

Cotton once described slavery as a “necessary evil” to build the nation. In the days leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington, Cruz fed conspiracy theories that led thousands of extremists to storm the Capitol in an attempt to prevent the certification of the presidential election.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader — who apparently saw nothing extreme in the gun-nut congressman from his state publishing on social media a Christmas card showing his family armed to the teeth days after a fatal school shooting in Michigan — urged a no vote on Rollins on the grounds that homicide rates are skyrocketing in cities served by soft-on-crime prosecutors. But the homicide rate has actually fallen in Boston, which makes up most of Suffolk County.

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For those who opposed Rollins, facts didn’t matter. Ideology did. Her confirmation was a straight party-line vote, requiring Vice President Kamala Harris to break the tie.

Harvey Silverglate, the civil libertarian lawyer from Cambridge who has the admirable ability to anger both liberals and conservatives because he has the annoying habit of actually adhering to the Constitution, is hoping that Rollins is even more radical than her enemies portray her.

In an opinion piece in Tuesday’s Globe, Silverglate advocated abolishing the FBI.

In an interview, Silverglate went further, insisting that while it’s all well and good that we cart statues of Confederate generals off to the museum, it’s time to strip J. Edgar Hoover’s name from the FBI building in Washington. Not because the building’s architecture is brutalist, but because Hoover was brutal to the Constitution he was supposed to uphold.

Silverglate wrote a book called “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent,” which argues that the average American unwittingly commits three crimes a day because of vague, arcane federal laws.

Silverglate contends that the feds have far too much power and discretion and can charge just about anybody with just about anything, using the threat of long federal prison sentences to force defendants to plead guilty even if they have a plausible defense. He thinks it’s systemic, not partisan, that Democrats who served as US attorney, such as Carmen Ortiz, were no better than Republicans, such as Andrew Lelling.

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If her enemies think Rollins is a loose cannon, Silverglate hopes she fires away.

“The US attorney’s office can use some shaking up,” he said. “There are all kinds of federal crimes that have minimal deleterious impact on society at large, but which are committed by desperate people and, in the federal system in particular, face high sentences.”

Silverglate believes that if Rollins is able to apply the philosophy she used at the state level to federal prosecutions, the feds will go after even bigger fish, and do so more carefully.

Now that would be radical.


Kevin Cullen is a Globe reporter and columnist who roams New England. He can be reached at kevin.cullen@globe.com.