A Supreme Court ruling overturning race-based college admissions has reignited smoldering Democrat attacks on the nation's conservative justices. The incendiary offensive, mobilized by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, aims to delegitimize the court and undermine its decisions.
Democrats are threatening impeachment against Justice Clarence Thomas while calling for ethics rules stricter than the ones that apply to Congress. A Schumer disciple, Sen. Ed Markey, is championing expanding the size of the Supreme Court to allow President Biden to pack the court with leftist judges.
Although President Biden has been lukewarm to increasing the number of justices, nonetheless he blasted the court's decisions as "not normal" and criticized the judges "values system as different." The outrage is calculated to make the Supreme Court a voter issue in the upcoming presidential election.
The simmering hostility was sparked last year when a leak of a preliminary draft court decision on a case to overturn Roe v. Wade. Even before the court's official ruling, Schumer stood outside the Supreme Court building and railed against Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett 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," Schumer hectored.
Abortion activists, clearly motivated by Schumer's bombast, released the home addresses online of conservative justices. Protestors showed up at residences, shouting obscenities and brandishing menacing signs.
The marshal of the Supreme Court pleaded with officials in Maryland and Virginia to enforce state and local laws that "prohibit picketing outside the homes" of justices and their families. The two governors punted the decision to federal law enforcement, which never acted to end the unruly protests.
It was shameful to allow such intimidation of justices. It nearly boiled over when police arrested an armed man near the home of Justice Kavanaugh who had traveled to Maryland with the intent of harming the jurist. Democrats never made any apologies for their role in fueling the threatening tactics.
Imagine if the court was considering a challenge to gun ownership and protestors showed up at the private residences of the three liberal justices. Does anyone believe that the FBI would have failed to disburse the crowd? Agents would have removed the protestors post haste.
It is even more preposterous that the marshal for the court was never able to identify who leaked Justice Samuel Alito's draft opinion. This was a major breach of court decorum. The leak had to be initiated by a sitting justice or a court clerk. Yet no one could identify the leaker? That's not credible.
Once the abortion decision was handed down overturning Roe v. Wade, Democrat surrogates initiated a smear campaign against against Justices Thomas and Alito. The hatchet job has been carried out by ProPublica, an obscure leftwing publication.
The muckraking online news site is the brainchild of Herb and Marion Sandler, billion former mortgage bankers of Golden West Financial Corp., which collapsed during the subprime mortgage meltdown. The two Democrat donors pledged $10 million a year to fund ProPublica in initial funding.
Billionaires George Soros and Paul Steiger are also financial backers of the slandering website, headquartered in New York City. On its IRS disclosure form in 2021, the nonprofit listed $35 million in donations. Financials for 2022 show more than $9.9 million came from two undisclosed donors.
With that background, it is hardly a surprise ProPublica placed a bullseye on Thomas and Alito, revealing the justices accepted private trips with wealthy patrons and had alleged financial entanglements. Their investigation claimed these same patrons had cases before the Supreme Court.
Neither justice recused themselves, the website reported. ProPublica's allegations were amplified across the mainstream media echo chambers. Democrat Senator Dick Durbin said the revelations were cause for possible impeachment of the justices.
(Parenthetically, members of Congress indulge in the same sort of behavior that ProPublica accused the justices. They regularly take trips on donors private planes, vote on legislation that donors advocate and own stock in companies with a vested interest in legislation.)
ProPublica's vilification strategy worked until The New York Post broke a story pointing out that Justice Sonia Sotomayor didn't recuse herself from multiple cases involving book publisher Random House and its subsidiaries, which paid her more than $3.6 million for her 2013 memoir.
Justice Sotomayor's liberal colleague at the time, Justice Stephen Breyer, recused himself from the case. He also had received money from Penguin Random House. Whoops. And just like that--BOOM--the mainstream media's interest in justices' ethics momentarily fizzled.
But the media campaign against the justices is picking up steam again as senate Democrats are plotting an impeachment strategy with an eye toward invigorating their base prior to the presidential election. Courts are certainly fair game for legitimate criticism of their decisions.
But the constant drumbeat of belligerent verbal aggression undermines the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and ignites an open hostility to individual justices, threatening their safety. This behavior regularly happens under authoritarian governments. It has no place in America's democracy.
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