Biden’s Thug Government

I f Democrats and other Trump obsessives are really wondering why much of the country couldn’t care less about the Capitol riot, they need look no further than the Biden administration’s disgraceful response to the criminal leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion in the Dobbs abortion case, and to the intensifying threats from the radical Left that endanger the justices, their families, and the Court as an institution.

It is worse than a nonresponse. It is worse than a reckless response. The Biden administration and Democratic Party activists are complicit in the extortionate, norm-busting, burn-it-down id of the woke progressivism they extol.

It is thug government.

I thought President Trump should be impeached over January 6. I still do. Because they can’t help themselves, Democrats corrupted the impeachment. Rather than conducting a competent investigation and crafting impeachment articles that met the moment, they put impeachment in the service of their racialist demagoguery. The impeachment was not so much an attack on Trump, who emerged unscathed. It was an attack on Trump supporters and Republicans generally, who were smeared as white-supremacist domestic terrorists. Congressional Democrats also laid the foundation that would enable progressive activists to file legal actions against Republican lawmakers who supported Trump’s fraudulent “Stop the Steal” gambits in Congress and the courts — seeking their disqualification as “insurrectionists” under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

To the contrary, Trump should have been impeached on two grounds. First, the “Stop the Steal” con job — based on scant evidence of election fraud, patently absurd legal theories, and such artifices as the presentation of phony Trump elector slates as if they were legitimate alternatives to the authentic Biden slates certified by the states at issue — was a willful undermining of the states’ constitutional authority over presidential elections. It was thus a profound betrayal of the president’s core duty to defend the Constitution and execute the laws faithfully.

Second, the president was derelict in failing to use his executive powers and his influence over his supporters to oppose and end an uprising at the seat of government. Far from protecting the Capitol, members of Congress, and the vice president, the president swerved between provocative rhetoric that further endangered them and inaction when he could have short-circuited the mayhem by swiftly calling for the rioters to stand down, and backing those words with firm enforcement action.

Democrats declined to focus on these indefensible aspects of executive misconduct. As a result, the House January 6 Committee is now conducting the investigation that should have been conducted 17 months ago.

Next month, the committee plans to hold eight sensational hearings, endeavoring to jar an apathetic public. It will be a futile effort. Not just because the time for this has come and gone. Not even because Democratic leadership so stacked the makeup of the committee that any valid work it may do will be dismissed by much of the country as partisan hyperbole.

No, the Insurrection!™ will continue to elicit a collective American yawn because, this week shows yet again, the Democrats don’t give a rat’s ass about politically motivated violence, American institutions, or the Constitution.

Abortion has been a hyper-divisive issue in the United States for half a century because seven progressives in robes used their raw power to impose their will. It is not enough to say that the barbaric “right” to terminate unborn life, fabricated in Roe v. Wade (1973), had no mooring in American history and tradition. As the liberal legal eminence John Hart Ely famously observed at the time, the most offensive thing was that the justices exhibited “no sense of an obligation to try to” craft something that could plausibly be described as “constitutional law.”

Roe is not law. It is will to power disguised as law. Its survival in the face of challenges rooted in actual constitutional law has thus depended on extortion. Pro-life politicians have been slandered as misogynists who sought to enslave women (though now that “birthing persons” are, I’m assured, not necessarily women, this smear seems to have lost the plot at some point). Judicial nominees of Republican presidents, particularly nominees to the Supreme Court, have been subjected to vicious, relentless campaigns not just to malign but to destroy them. That’s not hyperbole. As Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh could tell you — as Sam Alito could tell you this week, and Bob Bork could tell you if he were still with us — the Left’s objective has been to ruin their lives. Not just for the malicious satisfaction of laying enemies low, but more importantly for the in terrorem effect.

“I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you Kavanaugh,” the Democrats’ Senate leader Chuck Schumer bellowed in June 2020 — on the steps of the Supreme Court, as the justices heard argument in an abortion case. “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.” In response, progressive activists roared. Because that is how the Roe abortion regime has been sustained. By intimidation. And let’s be clear what intimidation means: by the real, omnipresent threat of politically motivated violence.

Democrats know what their “whirlwind” is. There is a reason why domestic terrorists of the radical Left were rewarded with coveted academic posts and public platforms. There is a reason Barack Obama, as an ambitious young progressive Democrat, saw advantage in debuting in the living room of former Weatherman terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. There is a reason “mostly peaceful protest” is the media’s cynical code for progressive “demonstrations” — i.e., threats, looting, rioting, mayhem, torching, etc. There is a reason why the Biden Justice Department depicts doofuses who merely paraded at the Capitol as if they were terrorist insurrectionists, but then gives sweetheart plea deals to radical leftist lawyers who firebomb an NYPD squad car, and a radical leftist who actually killed a man in burning down a Minneapolis pawnshop, during BLM’s “mostly peaceful protests.” There is a reason Democratic district attorneys drop charges against radical looters.

The reason is simple: When the political Left wants something badly enough, extortionate threats — which are effective because they are frequently coupled with actual violence — are always on the table. Democrats cannot condemn progressive political violence because it is deemed righteous, seen as devotion to the cause. Leftists who engage in violence are lionized, not condemned.

The leak of Justice Alito’s draft opinion overruling Roe is a uniquely execrable act. As whoever leaked it had to know, it puts the safety of the justices associated with it at risk. It also puts at risk the safety of their families. If that was not obvious enough already just from the leak, it is made manifest by the doxing of the Court’s six most conservative justices and the circulation of maps identifying their addresses to enable radical leftists to “peacefully protest” at their homes.

Moreover, the leak threatens the existence of the Supreme Court as a judicial tribunal. An appellate court cannot function in the absence of confidential deliberations, including the capacity to exchange, debate, and refine draft opinions. The Court has maintained public esteem, notwithstanding such politicized exercises in judicial imperialism as Roe, because of the integrity of its process. If leaks and overt political pressure are now part of its process — as they will be if this leaker is not identified and commensurately punished — then the Court is no longer a court. It is just another legislature whose outcomes are expected to be determined by political suasion, not detached application of the law.

The stakes, then, could not be higher. So what does the Biden administration do? It refuses to condemn the leak. It gives no hint of interest in prosecuting the leak. And it is encouraging the “protests,” including the “protests” at the justices’ homes.

Asked if the president condemned the leak — which is a blatant obstruction of justice and an embezzlement of government property, both criminal offenses — White House flack Jen Psaki responded that the Biden administration did not “have a particular view on that.” Psaki said it would be up to the Justice Department to decide whether to investigate the leak, as if it weren’t Biden’s Justice Department, as if the executive branch had no interest in or responsibility for the protection of the Supreme Court and its members. That’s quite the departure from Biden’s Capitol riot rhetoric, which not only touts the enforcement of the laws but aggressively calls for prosecution of people who dare defy the January 6 Committee’s subpoenas.

When pressed again on the leak and the Left’s plans to demonstrate at the homes of the conservative justices — i.e., to endeavor to influence and intimidate them even as the Dobbs case is being reviewed by the Court — Psaki would say only that the president understands the “passion” that is motivating pro-abortion activists. She lamely said the White House sure hopes they keep it “peaceful,” but we all just need to understand that there is “a lot of passion, a lot of fear, and a lot of sadness from many, many people across this country about what they saw in that leaked document.”

The offense, you see, is not the criminal leak or the intimidation of Supreme Court justices. No, no, no: We’re to see the offense as the content of a leaked draft opinion — one that is not and may never be a binding decision.

And what is so offensive about Justice Alito’s draft opinion? It indicates that five justices are poised to rule that the issue of abortion should be returned to the states, from which the Court usurped it a half-century ago, in a ruling that cannot be defended as constitutional law because it never even purported to be constitutional law. Indeed, even in upholding Roe’s bottom line, Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) had to gut its reasoning and, as Justice Alito compellingly demonstrates, sidestep its failure to connect the ruling to any specific provision under all the Constitution’s wily penumbras and emanations.

What the Left is doing is the Big Lie.

It is a lie at least as offensive as Trump’s “Stop the Steal” mendacity. Biden and woke progressives suggest that the Supreme Court is banning abortion. If — and this is a big if — the eventual ruling is consistent with Alito’s draft, what the Supreme Court would be doing is consigning abortion to the democratic process — you remember, the “ground up” process that progressives never cease telling us how much they revere.

Would that abortion could be banned by a court!

But it can’t. See, constitutional conservatives are not progressives. They don’t use raw judicial power to impose conservative policy preferences. If Alito’s draft, or something like it, became the law, the Court would be saying: “You can have as much or as little abortion as you want, America. It’s not in the Constitution, so we have no authority to say what you may or may not do.”

Finally, why is Biden lying? Because he believes it is in his and his party’s electoral interests to do so. Biden knows his administration is a disaster. If Democrats have to run on his record in the 2022 midterms, and then, two years later, he or some presumably sentient substitute has to run on it, Democrats are going to be wiped out. Fearing this, they are desperately trying to fool the electorate, to cling to power based on an enormous lie.

In so doing, they are willing to risk the safety of the justices and the viability of an institution, the judicial department, without which the Constitution that Biden is sworn to defend cannot be preserved and protected.

That’s why no one cares what the Left has to say about January 6. We already know the Capitol riot was an abomination. The only thing to be said in mitigation is that at least that display of “passion” was aberrational. With the leak and the intimidation campaign that has inexorably followed, Democrats are firmly within their long tradition.