Republicans held a hearing on Wednesday about Europe’s free speech laws, featuring trans-bashing failed Irish TV writer Graham Linehan whining about how he can’t get work in the U.K. anymore.

It was a massive waste of time and a distraction, their Democratic colleagues said, from the real work of the House Judiciary Committee: oversight of the Department of Homeland Security as they lay siege in Minnesota.

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“The Republican Majority wants to change the subject and to distract from its utter failure to perform oversight over the [administration’s] lawless and deadly policies,” said committee member Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY).

Linehan appeared with an operative for the far-right anti-trans legal group Alliance Defending Freedom International, along with a conservative member of the Finnish parliament, for the hearing titled “Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation: Part II.”

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Linehan blurted in his testimony about how “gender ideology and free speech cannot coexist,” with complaints that his own anti-trans ideology has lost him fans and work. He blamed it on the U.K. government.

“The government’s hands stay clean. The censorship happens. The state didn’t do it,” he rattled on.

All of it was beside the point, Democrats on the committee said.

“Why isn’t Republican leadership of this Committee and Congress hauling the Department of Homeland Security and Kristi Noem before this Committee? Why aren’t they conducting an investigation into the killing of American citizens and the use of excessive force by ICE and CPB? Why aren’t they doing their jobs to demand accountability? Americans are outraged. I don’t understand why my Republican colleagues are not,” said Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA),

She added: “The most serious threat to American civil rights and civil liberties is coming from our own government.” 

Out committee member Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) also spent time redirecting the hearing’s focus to ICE and threats to Americans’ constitutional rights.

“I’ve spent time both in Minneapolis, Saint Paul, and I’ve spent time in Chicago, and what we are seeing on the ground is absolutely terrifying,” Balint said. “You have members of the clergy being pepper balled in the head while they are peacefully praying and protesting in front of immigration facilities. You have members of the press being arrested, other members of the press being roughed up even after they are identifying themselves as members of the press. You have election offices being raided. You have Americans’ First Amendment, Second Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights being eroded. You have citizens being arrested.

“And even before the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, we had documented over 170 American citizens who had been arrested and detained by ICE and Border Patrol, and it’s gotten worse since then.” 

Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA) agreed.

“I know for a fact that these situations are what we should be talking about, not Europe, our own,” she said. “Due process rights right here in America are being violated.” 

Democrats managed to call one witness to address what they called our own government’s “lawless onslaught on our First Amendment rights”: Deepinder Mayell, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota.

“Mr. Mayell, can you talk about what you take away from the things that have mobilized people in Minneapolis, like we haven’t seen anywhere else in the country? What’s at the heart of it?” asked Rep. Chuy Garcia (D-IL).

Mayell explained: “What I can say is that the people of Minnesota have been disrupted, are shocked, are in a state of grief. They are opposing what they’re seeing as unlawful, unconstitutional, un-American activity on their streets.”

“This is not normal law enforcement,” he said. “This is not normal, what is happening in Minnesota. And it should alarm everybody.”

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