The decision of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to seek 15 felony convictions against David Daleiden and Sandra Meritt at the Center for Medical Progress, who exposed the horrific cynicism and mendacity Planned Parenthood was shown to have engaged in as a matter of routine, represents a clearly unconstitutional abuse of state power against conservatives who get "uppity" or assert the same rights to expression leftists exercise with no constraint.

Becerra's predecessor, Kamala Harris, engaged in the same sort of behavior when she actually ordered a police raid of Daleiden's  home last year in a shotgun attempt to find something incriminating – and, of course, to make sure conservatives in California have the same civil rights as blacks in 1934 Mississippi.

The Constitution, however, demands that all persons within a state be granted equal protection of the laws.  The most important meaning of "equal protection" is equal enforcement of the laws, equal treatment by prosecutors, police and judges, and equal protection by all of the administrative agencies of state and local government.

When there is clear abuse by different parts of state and local government in the practical implementation of laws, then it is the responsibility of the United States Department of Justice to take appropriate actions.  The utter indifference of Harris and Becerra to fair and equal enforcement of the law and the use of each as a tool of oppression of minorities like conservatives are obvious.

Becerra is not looking all over California to find individuals who have recorded someone's conversation without the consent of the other, and neither was Harris.  The selective enforcement of laws against despised minorities put Becerra into the same disgusting sludge as Bull Connor, the Birmingham commissioner of public safety fifty years ago who selectively enforced the law against blacks who challenged the status quo in Alabama.

Not only is this vile behavior unconstitutional, but, when there is a pattern of collaboration among state and local officials, and when these also act in concert with private groups like the Ku Klux Klan or Planned Parenthood, then the offenses are much more serious.  Attorney General Jeff Sessions ought to open a broad investigation against California criminal justice and public safety officials, starting at the top with Xavier Becerra, and it ought to extend beyond just the travesty of the planned lynching of Daleiden.

The Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, with the full support of the federal criminal justice agencies, ought to probe how often violations of this California statute are made and how often criminal prosecutions are sought under the statute.  Patterns of investigation and prosecution that  show an effort not to protect Californians but to intimidate and bully conservatives, if that is found, ought to be brought in a DOJ lawsuit to enjoin California officials from pursuing actions against these conservatives.

Sessions's Department of Justice also ought to seek a change of venue and a removal of those federal judges in California and also in the Ninth Circuit, arguing that these federal judges are too biased to rule fairly.  This would require approval by the Supreme Court and by the time that the investigation is concluded, there ought to be a five-to-four conservative majority on that court.  Federal judges from Iowa holding hearings and trials in Des Moines would remove the prospect of a fixed deck. 

If the investigation shows an active and secret collaboration among those parts of California government that are supposed to be separate and objective, then a conspiracy would be in evidence.  That would carry both civil and criminal consequences.  Depending upon how deep and broad the conspiracy, the State of California could be placed under the Department of Justice oversight for decades, just like what the states of the South have endured.

What that would mean is that before California officials could take actions that affect the rights of conservatives in California as journalists or college students or any of the myriad other ways in which the rights of conservatives were protected at the whim of creeps like Becerra, the Department of Justice would have to grant its approval.  Conservatives would become a "suspect class," presumed to need protection from California state and local officials.

The most important benefit over the long term is that California could be exposed before the nation as precisely the type of bigoted and hateful civil rights violator leftists revel in condemning.  Conservatives, who have civil rights too, would have a valuable model in protecting those rights – at last – in practice and not just in theory.