This is the Cater Daily podcast for Friday, February 28, 2025. I'm Caleb Brown. It may be just a big distraction from the more pressing matters of federal overspending and rapidly growing debt.

Several members of the U.S. House are asking the U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to target a handful of small civil society groups for special scrutiny.

Why? We're telling people what their legal rights are when dealing with immigration law enforcement.

Patrick Eddington says it's far too reminiscent of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Pat, for the purposes of this discussion, I will keep most of my opinions about what qualifies as un-American to myself.

But if you don't mind, give us a sense of the activities and certainly the political benefits

that accrued to the people who undertook the House un-American activities committee.

I guess the best way to put it, Caleb, is that for those, you know, who engaged in that,

it gave them a platform to demagogue, to say they were doing something, and so on and so forth.

And, of course, the Select Committee on American Activities is what its original name was in the House. And it was created in the late 1930s. And by January of 1945, it was basically on life support

because of the outrageous

behavior of its

then former chairman, Martin

Dies, Democrat of Texas,

who used that

House platform to go after

everybody that you could possibly

think of, and probably a lot of people

that you've never even heard of for their alleged communist ties and so on and so forth.

And, you know, there, at least initially there was a thought, I think, in early January,

in 1945, that the votes were not there to keep this thing around.

But they underestimated a particular racist Mississippi House member by the name of John Rankin,

...