What made the hearing especially notable, however, wasn’t the GOP talking points, but rather, the protesters in attendance. Roll Call reported:

A man whose son was killed in the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting was arrested Thursday after disrupting a joint subcommittee hearing called by Republicans in defense of Second Amendment rights. A Capitol Police spokesman confirmed Thursday that Manuel Oliver, 55, was arrested in the Rayburn House Office Building after he “disrupted and refused to stop shouting, and then attempted to go back inside the hearing room.”

His wife, Patricia Oliver, also disrupted the hearing, and was also arrested.....

The Texas Republican, who chairs the Oversight panel’s Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs Subcommittee, not only wanted the protesters removed from the hearing room, he also thought it’d be a good idea to compare them to a very different kind of group.
https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1638984488452763649

....GOP officials have invested an enormous amount of energy into the ridiculous idea that Democrats and law enforcement treated parents like terrorists if they raised concerns at school board meetings. It was against this backdrop that one House Republican yesterday compared grieving parents to insurrectionists because they raised concerns at a congressional hearing.

While running for president again and awaiting possible indictment in multiple cases, Donald Trump also faces a civil trial next month in a rape and defamation lawsuit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll. But in one important respect, it’s being treated more like a terrorism or organized crime case — that is, when it comes to the jury, which the judge is taking the rare step of making anonymous.

What does this have to do with terrorism or organized crime, you ask?

Well, as Southern District of New York Judge Lewis Kaplan noted in an opinion Thursday, anonymous juries have been used when “the risk of tampering with or violent retaliation against jurors by criminal defendants or their confederates was palpable, most often in terrorism and organized crime cases.”

Kaplan saw fit to give Trump’s civil trial the same treatment. In explaining the move, in one of two similar suits brought against Trump by Carroll, the judge recapped what amounts to a greatest hits of the former president’s lashing out against various actors in the legal system — from judges to grand jurors. Kaplan recounted, among other things, Trump’s whipping up of Jan. 6 rioters, his criticism of the Georgia special grand jury foreperson and his urging of supporters to “take our country back” in the face of potential indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s grand jury/div]