RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/attacks-supreme-court-justices-are-real-assaults-bruce-thornton/

The recent leak of the draft of a Supreme Court decision overturning Roe and Casey has ignited a national tantrum on the Left. Pro-choice organizations, Senators, and Congressmen are making veiled threats of violence against the five Justices voting for the pending decision; the usual suspects are promising “days of rage” redolent of the summer of 2020; and Justices have been doxed and their home addresses publicized––all are violations of federal law (18 U.S. Code § 1503), and all bespeak the Democrats’ modus operandi of resorting to force and intimidation to achieve their aims, rather than following the Constitutional lawmaking protocols and “democratic norms” they continually charge Republicans of subverting.

As usual with any assault on Constitutional guardrails, lies and the corruption of language are playing a big part in the (for now) rhetorical violence. Samuel Alito’s decision if it stands would not threaten any other Supreme Court decisions like those legalizing same-sex marriage or striking down segregation. It does not violate the Constitution, nor the principle of stare decisis, which is not absolute but contingent on the specific circumstances of particular cases. And, the big lie, it does not make abortion illegal or weaken democracy, but honors it by returning the issue of abortion to the Congress and the states, whose lawmakers are accountable to the voters.

Nonetheless, the intensity and irrationality of the tantrums and lies will likely move beyond words when the decision is formally announced, unless the earlier threats work and at least two justices submit to the intimidations of the mob. That outcome will be a sad day for our already weakened Democratic Republic, when one of its most critical protections against tyranny––the independence of the judiciary, upon which the integrity of democratic justice relies, and its crucial principle of equality before the law rests––is cancelled by intimidation and violence

This resort to force, as we saw on graphic display during the BLM and Antifa violence in the summer of 2020, is a repudiation of the founding principles of democracy going back 2500 years. The foundational principle of Athenian democracy, or any constitutional order run by citizens, is the substitution of language for violence. We see this epochal innovation memorialized in Aeschylus’ trilogy the Oresteia, which starts with the dark, blood-soaked Furies who demand bloodshed to expiate bloodshed; and ends on the sunlit slopes of the Areopagus, where twelve citizens listen to arguments, deliberate, and vote to convict or exonerate.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/whos-paying-protesters-harass-justices-and-daniel-greenfield/

Supreme Court justices have faced harassment and intimidation after a pro-abortion group calling itself Ruth Sent Us posted a map to their homes.

Justice Alito and his family, who wrote the draft opinion on abortion that had been leaked by leftists, have had to go into hiding at an undisclosed location.

Had conservative protests outside the homes of Sotomayor and Kagan led one of them to go into hiding, the FBI would already be on the case and the media would be calling it an insurrection and a threat to democracy, but it’s not political terrorism when leftists do it.

So you can be confident that none of the leftists threatening Supreme Court justices will themselves face justice. And if a single one of them is arrested, they will immediately have the best lawyers and a media press campaign claiming that free speech is being silenced.

Just to add bigoted intimidation of houses of worship, Ruth Sent Us also called for protests at Catholic churches. “Stand at or in a local Catholic Church,” it urged on its Twitter account.

While over the past two years, Big Tech companies have suspended or deplatformed conservative groups over the encouragement of political protests, including against lockdowns, Twitter has no problem with leftists encouraging the harassment of houses of worship.

“Do you dare to chant in your local churches?”

Abortion activists dressed like characters from the faltering Hulu TV show The Handmaid’s Tale disrupted prayer services while chanting their support for the murder of babies.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dojs-silence-on-the-lefts-lawless-intimidation-of-supreme-court-justices/

“Biden’s thug government continues.”

Fox News has a report on the Biden Justice Department’s refusal to take enforcement action against radical leftists who have been conducting demonstrations at the homes of Supreme Court justices, blatantly seeking to intimidate and influence the Court while it has the Dobbs abortion case under consideration.

As Rich noted last week (citing Allahpundit), a federal penal statute, Section 1507, unambiguously criminalizes this behavior. I’ve heard some suggestion in the commentary in recent days that Section 1507 may violate free-speech principles. It doesn’t.

The First Amendment has always permitted reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions. The degree of permissible restrictiveness is heightened as the government’s interest becomes stronger.

The Constitution insulates the judiciary from politics, so it is obvious that the government has a high interest in protecting the integrity of the judicial process, on which the rule of law depends, by safeguarding judges, jurors, and litigation participants from intimidation and corrupt influence (e.g., pressure to decide a case based on fear rather than on faithful application of the law).

Moreover, Section 1507 does not criminalize all expression; only expression undertaken “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.” The government must prove this intent requirement beyond a reasonable doubt. The First Amendment is not a defense against menacing. Furthermore, free expression forbids only the criminalization of protected speech, not proof of speech as evidence of a standard crime. (The First Amendment, for example, does not bar a prosecutor from proving that the mafia boss said “Whack him” to the button man shortly before the murder.)

https://www.newsweek.com/bidens-disinformation-board-gift-republicans-opinion-1704256

If you worked really hard, you might be able to come up with an idea as unappealing as a government disinformation board. Voters already distrust the government and are especially concerned about its excessive intrusion and unchecked regulatory power.

If you worked even harder, you might find as bad a person to lead it as Nina Jankowicz, a self-styled “disinformation expert” whose real specialty seems to be spreading disinformation to support her left-wing views.

If you tried hard to justify this mess, you might come up with a defender as ineffective as Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security. The secretary, already in deep trouble because of the porous southern border, faced a hostile Senate hearing and admitted he knew nothing about Ms. Jankowicz’s dismal history of ideological fulminations and partisan statements. He refused to say whose bright idea it was to hire her—only that he was clueless about her background. Still, Mayorkas refused to apologize, refused to replace her and refused to back down from creating this ill-conceived (and ill-defined) board.

If you did all these things, as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has, you would be committing political malpractice. You would be mocking the Constitution’s fundamental protection of free speech, encoded in the First Amendment. Although a few ideologues might applaud you, you would hear only groans from moderate Democrats running for reelection. This ill-conceived board would lash them, at their peril, to a high-profile effort to monitor private speech, conducted by a very unpopular administration. That’s dangerous constitutionally and incompetent politically.