The most stunning revelation from Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito this week isn’t that he “has a pretty good idea of” who leaked the draft Dobbs abortion decision, but that the conservative justices have been forced into a virtual prison of the Left’s making as a result.
We know this will make the Jacobins running the Democrat Party quite happy, but the rest of civilized society considers all of this appalling and want someone — many someones — punished.
You can start with these chaos agents who have never stopped protesting in front of the conservative justices’ homes. They even sent out an interactive map identifying the locations — which got them in trouble with old Twitter. Now, they send out maps of places close to the justices’ homes, usually stores or pharmacies to meet up and walk over to protest.
They’ve protested golf clubs where justices belong. They’ve rushed restaurants where the justices eat, and Justice Kavanaugh was forced to sneak out the back way to avoid the mob. They have constantly dehumanized the conservative justices. They’ve called out and subtly threatened the school where Justice Kavanaugh’s kids attend. They’ve name-checked his wife and their church. The message is clear: we know where you live, where you spend your time, where you worship, and there will be “no peace” for you.
Justice Alito was forced to participate by Zoom in a presentation at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University because he wouldn’t be safe from the student screamers. He could have gone in person but would have gotten the Stanford “Law” School treatment.
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In a story about the speech, the Washington Post never mentioned why it was that Justice Alito might have to do a speech virtually and not in person except to note that “these were not normal times.” No kidding.
Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland, who but for Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, would have been a U.S. Supreme Court justice, has not arrested one “protester” who has illegally sought to intimidate and tamper with the court’s decisions.
In March, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took a virtual law book and (metaphorically) beat Garland about the head and shoulders for not enforcing the law against “these threats of violence” and intimidation.
Merrick Garland vs. Ted Cruz pic.twitter.com/CYWvOG9FI5
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 1, 2023
The one person Garland did arrest was an assassin outside of Justice Kavanaugh’s home. It was the least he could do.
In a Wall Street Journal piece about Alito based on an interview with him in mid-April, legal scholar David Rivkin and reporter James Taranto reported that this constant intimidation is illegal. And considering that the leak made justices “targets of assassination,” you’d think Garland might have considered it in these emergent circumstances, but naw.
A federal law called Section 1507 makes it a crime to picket or parade “in or near” a federal judge’s residence “with the intent of influencing” him “in the discharge of his duty.” During a hearing last month, Attorney General Merrick Garland told Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah) that the marshals have “full authority to arrest” violators of Section 1507. But according to training slides obtained by Sen. Katie Britt (R., Ala.), deputies on the justices’ residential details are told to enforce the law only as “a last resort to prevent physical harm to the Justices and/or their families.”
PJ Media colleague J. Christian Adams noted at the time that the state laws of Virginia also outlawed this intimidation. They’ve never enforced the law, either. But, as PJ Media colleague Rick Moran reported, Garland has an official hands-off policy on these protesters.
The WSJ reports that Alito said, “I personally have a pretty good idea who is responsible, but that’s different from the level of proof that is needed to name somebody.” So that contemptible person who launched a thousand threats and an assassination attempt goes on blithely with his/her law career. We wonder if Perkins Coie hired them.
Alito knows precisely why the person leaked the document. “It was rational for people to believe that they might be able to stop the decision by killing one of us,” he told the WSJ. In other words, he or she could have been complicit in a murder.
That campaign included unlawful assemblies outside justices’ homes, and that wasn’t the worst of it. “Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination,” Justice Alito says. “It was rational for people to believe that they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.” On June 8, an armed man was arrested outside the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh; the suspect was later charged with attempted assassination and has pleaded not guilty.
This contemptible behavior led to the virtual imprisonment of the conservative justices.
He feels safer but is forced to live in a cage.
He adds that “I don’t feel physically unsafe, because we now have a lot of protection.” He is “driven around in basically a tank, and I’m not really supposed to go anyplace by myself without the tank and my members of the police force.” Deputy U.S. marshals guard the justices’ homes 24/7. (The U.S. Marshals Service, a bureau of the Justice Department, is distinct from the marshal of the court, who reports to the justices and oversees the Supreme Court Police.)
Yet Merrick Garland refused to arrest his pet protesters who break federal law by intimidating justices outside their homes. Why is the Biden Justice Department doing that?
Since the court granted certiorari in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Left’s chaos agents have amped up the political pressure on the court without ramifications.
We at PJ Media believe in the First Amendment and peaceful protest. These activities have never been about peace. They’ve encouraged the opposite. Couching their meaning in words that won’t get them banned on social media, the organized Left has called for “aborting Alito” endlessly, labeled two of the justices as “sexual deviants,” and promised them “no peace.” They’ve urged drastic action with motorcycles, using as an example a stunt from a Will Ferrell movie. Declared that being “polite” is “capitulation”. They urged people to be “downright impolite!” and offered the usual implied threat of violence, “no justice, no peace.” They showed images of “interrupting mass,” “strike,” and “boycott.”
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As you’ve no doubt divined, some of these intimidation agents aren’t very smart. One held a sign saying, “Don’t like me at your house? Get out of my uterus,” not understanding — or choosing not to — understand that with the Dobbs decision, the court was doing exactly that. Idiots.
But they don’t have to be smart. They just need to be a mob. Alito explicitly acknowledges this for what it is, an effort to destabilize the Supreme Court. Worse, the organized bar, indeed, “nobody, practically nobody, is defending us.”
Justice Alito says “this type of concerted attack on the court and on individual justices” is “new during my lifetime. . . . We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us. The idea has always been that judges are not supposed to respond to criticisms, but if the courts are being unfairly attacked, the organized bar will come to their defense.” Instead, “if anything, they’ve participated to some degree in these attacks.”
Those who throw the mud then disparage the justices for being dirty. “We’re being bombarded with this,” Justice Alito says, “and then those who are attacking us say, ‘Look how unpopular they are. Look how low their approval rating has sunk.’ Well, yeah, what do you expect when you’re—day in and day out, ‘They’re illegitimate. They’re engaging in all sorts of unethical conduct. They’re doing this, they’re doing that’?”
The Left doesn’t care about ethics, naturally. But somebody should.
Alito told the WSJ that suggestions someone conservative would have leaked the draft Dobbs opinion to “lock in” the five-justice majority is “infuriating to me.”
He explains that “Look, this made us targets of assassination. Would I do that to myself? Would the five of us have done that to ourselves? It’s quite implausible.”
Exactly.
It sure would be nice to know that someone is paying for all this.
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