They were accused of messing with Portland police officers. Should the feds intervene? Analysis

 Early on July 13, 2020, another protest against police brutality in Portland, Oregon, turned into a clash with armed police in riot gear. Multnomah County law enforcement officials claim that during the melee a Seattle man named Jesse Herman Bates fired a small metal ball from a slingshot on his wrist, hitting a nearby firefighter in the chest. (Police say the firefighter was bruised but otherwise OK.)

Local police arrested Bates that night, but the county prosecutor ultimately decided not to pursue charges. District Attorney Mike Schmidt declined most of the thousand-plus cases referred to his office from local protests, saying he was reserving resources for the most serious crimes.

Normally, that would be the end of any legal entanglement for someone entanglement for someone like Bates. He wasn’t on federal property and the firefight like Bates. He wasn’t on federal property and the firefighter wasn’t a federal employee, so usually local authorities would have the final word. But Bates is now facing up to five years in federal prison, under a rarely-used “civil disorder” law that his defense attorneys argue is unconstitutional.

Since the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol in January, policymakers and pundits have debated how best to pursue and prosecute domestic terrorism. There was a surge in such cases last year, but it was driven by a crackdown on racial justice protests rather than right-wing militias. And while the insurrection in Washington, D.C., took place on federal property, in the case of Black Lives Matter marches, the federal nature of many offenses is murky.

Last year, Justice Department prosecutors filed the most “domestic terrorism” charges of any year on record, many against those accused of crimes during demonstrations that followed the police killing of George Floyd. The biggest group of these cases—78—came from the Oregon U.S. Attorney’s office for offenses ranging from assault on a federal officer to creating a hazard on public property.

Bates and at least 14 other Portland protesters have been charged with “civil disorder,” defined as interfering with any firefighter or law enforcement officer during a civil disturbance that interrupts commerce. (He pleaded not guilty.) Others charged with civil disorder in Portland were accused of acts like throwing a helmet at a local cop while they arrested someone, shining a laser in police’s eyes, smashing windows and stoking fires.

Bates’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss his charges in late January, saying the obscure statute “is hopelessly overbroad and invalid... [Its] legislative history shows that it was enacted to suppress messages in support of civil rights and racial justice for Black Americans.” Multiple nearly identical motions have been filed in other civil disorder cases across the country...

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What is the real concern here? Is it everyone's civil liberty? Is it defending what may be an unconstitutional law? Or possibly the following:

According to the Associated Press, federal authorities have arrested over 300 people across the country involved in recent racial justice protests. Justice officials told the New York Times that this intense focus on people they considered antifa or anarchists sapped resources and attention from pursuing a growing white supremacist movement.