Judicial Intimidation: The Left’s Effort to Subjugate the Court

Even before the left manipulated the election and inflicted this country with a Biden presidency, they were working to change our government so that they could obtain permanent political power.

As the New York Times wrote in September of 2020:

“Some Democrats, and not just on the left wing, are increasingly embracing structural changes to the political system — including eliminating the Senate filibuster, ending the Electoral College and granting statehood to Washington, D.C.”

So eager are the Democrats to avoid the cyclical nature of our two-party system -- one that may see them lose their majorities in the House and the Senate by year’s end -- that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even held up the Coronavirus Relief Act, then called the HEROES Act, in an effort to force a national end to state voter ID laws. Voter ID, requiring voters to show that they are who they say they are, is clearly integral to voting integrity.

Furthermore, the Democrat establishment is intent on eliminating Donald Trump, inarguably today’s most popular Republican, as a viable political candidate. As of this writing, Trump is being smeared as an insurrectionist and riot-inciter by a January 6th Commission comprised of six Democrats and two #NeverTrump Republicans, all of whom previously voted to impeach him.

The Hill is one of many outlets that confirm this speculation, writing:

“In the year since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, a handful of Democrats, constitutional scholars and pro-democracy advocates have been quietly exploring how a post-Civil War amendment to the Constitution might be used to disqualify former President Trump from holding office again.” 

But while they have thus far fallen short of achieving these goals, they have become reinvigorated in their pursuit to cross one particular item off their to-do list: corrupting the Supreme Court.

The left is using intimidation tactics to undermine the independence of the judiciary. In 2020, for example, then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stood in front of a rally outside the Supreme Court and yelled, “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions!"

This threat was a precursor of threats against the Court to come, especially since May of 2022, when a draft of a decision that indicated that the Supreme Court was moving toward sending Roe v. Wade to the states, ignited a wildfire.

One of the most heinous initial responses by the left was to dox offending members of the Supreme Court. In a previous blog, I pointed out that doxxing “involves exposing the private information of someone who wishes to make a contribution to, or speak on behalf of, a cause anonymously, with the intention to make that individual vulnerable to harassment.”

Therefore when a pro-abortion group called Ruth Sent Us published a map containing the home addresses of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito on its website, its intent to subject these Justices to, at minimum, harassment and intimidation, is clear.

It should be noted that protesting at the homes of these justices is illegal:

Federal law is quite clear. Under 18 U.S.C. § 1507 it is a criminal violation of federal law to picket or parade ‘near a building or residence occupied or used by [a federal] judge, juror, witness, or court officer’ with the ‘Intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty.’

However, the protests are not just illegal, they are extremely dangerous, especially in light of the recent wave of domestic terrorism by abortion activists. Recently Life News reported:

“Radical abortion activists who firebombed the office of a pro-life groups in Wisconsin and Oregon, firebombed a pregnancy center in Buffalo, New York, and who have vandalized over a dozen churches and pregnancy centers have struck again.

“Now, not even a week after abortion supporters firebombed the Buffalo pregnancy center, another pregnancy center in Gresham, Oregon has been set ablaze.”

While it may be unsurprisingly that these acts of domestic terrorism have received little media attention, as they were not committed by Trump-supporters wearing horned fur hats, one would think that an assassination attempt on a sitting U.S. Supreme Court would attract a bit of attention.

However, on June 6, 2022, when an armed man was arrested outside the family home of Justice Kavanaugh, where he lives with his wife and two daughters, it hardly made the paper:

The New York Times put the story on page 20 the following day, and the threat to Kavanaugh didn’t make the front page of USA Today or Chicago Tribune. MSNBC's primetime shows between 8 and 11 p.m. ignored it that evening, and the Sunday talk shows on ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN ignored it completely.

The day after the arrest of the would-be Kavanaugh assassin, protesters demonstrated outside the home of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, where she lives with her husband and her seven children.

Worse, the protesters then decided to target the Barrett children directly. The group, Ruth Sent Us, “tweeted an infographic with the name of Barrett’s church. It also identified the school that Barrett’s children attend, and encouraged protesters to “voice your anger” by demonstrating there.”

Perhaps one of the reasons why the media gave the attempt to kill the Kavanaugh family less attention than they gave some of the questions asked of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during her confirmation hearing is that these demonstrations, much like the ANTIFA and BLM protests, have the full backing and are doing the bidding of the Democratic Party.

Even after it became clear that the lives of the Justices were endangered, 27 House Democrats voted against a bill -- the Supreme Court Police Parity Act -- that called for “expanding security protections to family members of Supreme Court justices.”

Although several of these Democrats later made excuses for voting against the bill, claiming they supported additional security measures for the Justices but, alas, simply had no choice but to vote against a bill that would have provided that additional security because of this or that, one can be forgiven for not believing them, given how useful these protestors are to the goal of the Democrats to intimidate the judicial branch into compliance.

In April of 2021, only a few weeks after the Democrats took a thin majority in the Senate, longtime Democratic senator Ed Markey, along with several House liberals, introduced the Judiciary Act of 2021, intended to add four seats to the Supreme Court. The transparent hope was to either add four Ruth Bader Ginsburgs fresh out of law school, guaranteeing a liberal judicial majority for decades, or to send a message to the Supreme Court that they should not dare to oppose a liberal legislative agenda.

The latter is not a new tactic. Political science professor Charles Lipson wrote about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1937 threat to expand the Supreme Court:

"…The president won because he got what he really cared about: acceptance of his major policy initiatives as constitutionally proper. The sitting justices listened to FDR’s threats, recognized his enormous political power after a sweeping election victory, and caved in. Then, one by one, the most conservative justices retired, allowing Roosevelt to reshape the court without adding to the existing nine members."

Another political scientist, Alexander Hamilton, wrote in the Federalist Papers: No. 78 that “The complete independence of the courts of justice is peculiarly essential in a limited Constitution.”

This essential independence is rapidly being undermined by efforts to intimidate Supreme Court justices, either by protesting outside their homes, threatening to protest their children at their place of worship, and failing to fund additional security even after a protestor was arrested after clearly intending to kill a sitting justice, and perhaps his family as well. It is also being undermined by constant plans to expand the court so that Progressives can be guaranteed at least one branch of government for the foreseeable future.

It would be ruinous for the American experiment if the Democrats succeed in subjugating the Court for its purposes. As Andrew Jackson put it, “All the rights secured to the citizens under the Constitution are worth nothing, and a mere bubble, except guaranteed to them by an independent and virtuous Judiciary.”

--DK