WASHINGTON \u2014 Lawmakers point to outrageous abuses of the federal government\u2019s unchecked law enforcement and intelligence apparatus, vowing to get to the bottom of the dirty business and root out the shadowy figures responsible.
\nAmericans have seen that scenario play out multiple times in history, with the latest example being the\u00a0successful push by House Republicans\u00a0to create the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to investigate purported instances of federal agencies such as the F.B.I. and the military pursuing political foes and agendas.
\nSpeaker Kevin McCarthy and other Republican backers of the new panel portray their effort as akin to the Senate\u2019s famed Church Committee, a highly regarded bipartisan inquiry in the mid-1970s. Informally known by the name of the panel\u2019s chairman, Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, the committee uncovered serious wrongdoing at the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the N.S.A., among other entities, leading to heralded civil liberties protections and much more aggressive congressional oversight of the intelligence community.
\nMr. McCarthy on Thursday described the new committee as \u201cChurch style\u201d as he trumpeted the first week\u2019s work of House Republicans, including the creation of the panel.
\n\u201cGovernment should be here to help you, not go after you,\u201d Mr. McCarthy told reporters.
\nDemocrats and historians see darker historical parallels. They liken the Republican zeal to pursue nebulous allegations of deep-state conspiracies to the \u201cred scare\u201d days of a McCarthy from an earlier era: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin.
\nBoth the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s and investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1930s and 1940s have come to be seen as sordid, painful chapters in the congressional past, a series of communist witch hunts that needlessly destroyed lives. Lawmakers unleashed unfounded allegations in pursuit of sensational headlines and nonexistent infiltrators and traitors, and Democrats warn that the same could happen again.
\n\u201cThe Republicans are the party of law and order, and now they are out to destroy law and order as long as they think the agencies of law and order are conspiring against them and not working for them,\u201d said Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
\nDemocratic skepticism has been fueled by the fact that the new panel \u2014 and granting it authority to look into continuing criminal investigations \u2014 was among a host of demands that far-right Republicans made of Mr. McCarthy in exchange for their eventual votes for him in a\u00a0historically drawn-out election for the speakership. Language in the resolution setting up the committee gave it the open-ended mission of investigating \u201chow executive branch agencies work with, obtain information from and provide information to the private sector, nonprofit entities or other government agencies to facilitate action against American citizens.\u201d
\n\u201cThis seems less Church and more McCarthy,\u201d said Beverly Gage, a history professor at Yale and the author of a 2022\u00a0biography of J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime head of the F.B.I. known for his own misuse of the agency to pursue those he opposed politically.
\nRepublicans reject such criticism and try to justify the panel by pointing to conservative causes c\u00e9l\u00e8bres such as \u201cwoke\u201d school boards, internet censorship, excessive Covid restrictions and other incidents that have been found to be distorted and overblown. They say conservatives have been subjected to a double standard of justice, from former President Donald J. Trump on down, and they intend to prove it.<\/p>\n