So let me get this straight. If you are a private citizen the police are free to search your car without your consent and use whatever they find against you in court; give you a few seconds to open your door before kicking it down if they SUSPECT you might destroy evidence, like a joint, before they enter; take your possessions to fund their police department whether you are guilty of a crime or not; and essentially pull you out of your house and arrest you with little to no evidence at all if they are arresting you on drug charges. And now Congress gets all testy when one of their members gets his office raided by the Feds after he is caught on tape accepting $100,000 in cold, hard cash. Speaker Dennis Hastert is demanding that the FBI return the files that they took:

“We think those materials ought to be returned,” Hastert said, adding that the FBI agents involved “ought to be frozen out of that (case) just for the sake of the constitutional aspects of it.”

And Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is calling the raid an abuse of executive power:

“Not anyone here is above the law,” Pelosi told reporters Tuesday, as she prepared to meet with the House speaker. But, she added, “I think you’ve seen abuse of power of the executive branch over this weekend.”

Maybe the Congress needs to read up on how the modern police force acts and how they use forceful measures to instill fear and reactivate power. These kind of raids — and in some communities they are done in a paramilitary fashion — are common in parts of this country. Perhaps instead of complaining about how they are being treated Congress should recognize that they are being treated in the manner that they decided that the rest of the populace ought to be treated.