The Left’s pressure campaign is of a piece with other intimidation tactics that have only escalated in recent years.
The Left’s pressure campaign is of a piece with other intimidation tactics that have only escalated in recent years.
J ustice Stephen Breyer’s retirement announcement came after a year-long campaign by far-left dark-money groups to intimidate the liberal bloc’s senior justice into vacating his Supreme Court seat. The goal was to ensure that President Biden would replace him with an even more liberal justice who would be expected to hold that seat for decades.
It was never a particularly subtle effort. Demand Justice, the far-left group dedicated to judicial nominations in the vast Arabella Advisors dark-money network, even launched a “Breyer Retire” campaign, complete with an online petition telling the justice to step down immediately and a billboard truck driving around the Supreme Court building to convey that message. And the day after the announcement, the same truck took a victory lap, thanking Breyer.
Just imagine if a comparable effort were ever undertaken by conservatives to pressure an elderly conservative justice to step down during a Republican administration. Of course, that has never happened, despite many years of disappointing decisions handed down from Republican-appointed members of the nation’s highest court.
The Left’s pressure campaign is of a piece with other intimidation tactics that have only escalated in recent years. In 2019, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and several of his Democratic colleagues filed an amicus brief in a Second Amendment case that closed with the threat of having the Court “restructured” if it did not “heal itself . . . . particularly on the urgent issue of gun control.”
That was followed by a drive among an increasing number of Democrats to pack the Court, an idea that had been considered beyond the pale since Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to advance it in the 1930s, only to be rebuffed by his own party. But dark-money groups funded by Arabella embraced Court-packing and even formed a coalition called “Unrig the Courts.”
In 2020, then–Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer stood in front of the Supreme Court building on the day oral argument was heard in an abortion case and threatened two justices, “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.”
Perhaps these Democratic senators could not help themselves; after all, liberals have for generations relied upon the high court to impose an agenda that they could not get through democratically elected legislatures — and they are currently hampered in Congress by a 50–50 Senate. But with the appointments of Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, the Court is more likely than it has been in decades to protect religious freedom, political speech, and the right to bear arms. This term might even bring the overturning of Roe v. Wade — the most illegitimate judicial power grab in living memory. Democrats and their liberal dark-money overlords aren’t happy.
Biden has been notably evasive about his Supreme Court short list since his days on the campaign trail. The president has only stated that he will pick an African-American woman, despite the fact that 76 percent of Americans would prefer that he consider “all possible nominees.” Two sitting judges, Ketanji Brown Jackson of the D.C. Circuit and Leondra Kruger of the California supreme court, have been widely reported as likely prospects, although the list grows by the day.
Whomever Biden chooses to succeed Justice Breyer will be handpicked and blessed by the left-wing dark-money groups who helped elect him and the Senate’s Democrats. Such groups spent more than $1.5 billion on the 2020 election, over $1.2 billion of which came from the Arabella network. Both Jackson and Kruger are on Demand Justice’s own short list. Note that Paige Herwig, who runs judicial selection for the Biden White House, previously worked for the group — as did White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
Justice Breyer prides himself on not being partisan. Consider that last year he came out against Court-packing, which won praise from Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. Interestingly, Fox News’s Shannon Bream has reported from multiple sources that Breyer was not planning to announce his retirement last Wednesday — that in fact he was surprised by how this has played out. After the leak, Breyer even reached out to several of his colleagues to “express regret about how the process unfolded.” He cannot be happy about a retirement announcement that appears to have been coordinated between the White House and those same groups in order to guarantee that he followed through on his decision.
Breyer’s retirement was formally announced by the justice and President Biden at the White House, an event obviously cobbled together at the last minute to impart some sense of order to the rollout of the news.
To be clear, the Left has bullied Justice Breyer into retirement, and now it will demand a justice who rubber stamps their liberal political agenda. And that is what the Democrats will provide, because the time has come to pay back the dark-money supporters who helped elect them.