One of the loudest Republican complaints in the last few years was about the calls by liberal activists to defund the police in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder. Prior to Floyd’s death, there had been several other high-profile cases of police brutality against Blacks. All of those incidents triggered mass demonstrations across the country, at times leading to some protesters’ demands for the police to be abolished altogether.

Republicans charged all along that mainstream Democrats and the party’s leaders failed to rein in the radical left as they were making those calls. I agreed with Republicans that some authority figures on the Democratic side should have stepped in sooner. The police play such a crucial role in society that it is difficult to see how anyone could justify something as drastic as abolishing that arm of law enforcement—or defunding it. An even more important argument is that the actions of one individual or a small minority should never be used to condemn an entire group of people.

Most Americans agree that while there are some bad apples within police forces, the overwhelming majority of police officers perform their duties in a professional manner. Removal of rogue cops from the streets was an urgent necessity, but it was ill-advised to call for dissolution of entire police departments. Moreover, the activists never provided any credible alternatives for the safeguarding of public safety.

In some ways, Republicans are now having their own defund-the-police moment. There have been several news reports in the last week about President Trump and his advisers either firing senior Justice Department officials or pressuring them to resign. The purge, apparently, is meant to root out those who targeted the Jan. 6 rioters for prosecution. Additionally, there are published accounts of concerted efforts within the administration to identify other career professionals in the department who should be terminated.

It is quite bizarre that anyone would cite prosecution of the Jan. 6 rioters as a reason to fire those career civil servants. I recall, at least on a couple of occasions, hearing some people refer to those who stormed the Capitol that day as tourists. But I thought then that it was a completely ridiculous characterization that wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. Do the president and his allies and Republican leaders in Washington want us to believe that the career civil servants in the Justice Department are rather the guilty parties? Many of those “holidaymakers” were assaulters of police officers at the Capitol, breakers of windows, and destroyers of other property inside that shrine of democracy. Does the GOP leadership want to tell us that they shouldn’t be punished in any way for those obviously criminal acts? That, apparently, is what the president is saying with his blanket pardon of those individuals.

The left’s vilification of the police had enormously harmful effects on communities across the country. Many officers left the force, and the vast majority of those who remained were either too demoralized or afraid to do their jobs for fear of being charged with abuse of civilians. The result was sharp increases in crime levels in some of the worst affected areas.

The Justice Department officials now being targeted for retribution are human, just like the police are. Apart from those who have either been fired or are going to be, many more will resign or retire due to loss of morale. There is no way to look at that scenario as a positive outcome for the country.

Republican leaders and many of their constituents didn’t like it when left-wing Democrats branded the entire police force as corrupt and abusive. They argued that whatever problems existed within that branch of law enforcement were due to the actions of a few bad cops. But these same Republicans are now the ones referring to career civil servants as members of a deep state. They speak constantly about dismantling that “shady” administrative state entirely. Why aren’t these people making the distinction that they demanded of Democrats?

It was wrong for radical Democrats to call for the police to be defunded or abolished completely. It is equally unacceptable for Republicans to allow the president and his allies to so openly vilify the entire civil service because some officials within it have incurred their displeasure. When are Republican leaders going to speak up?