Chuck Schumer’s Embrace of Mobs Is a Menace to Constitutional Democracy

A mong all the dishonest and irresponsible responses to the controversy over the expulsion of two Democrats from the Tennessee state legislature, the worst has to be a letter sent on Wednesday to Attorney General Merrick Garland by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and four other Senate Democrats (Raphael Warnock, Chris Murphy, Brian Schatz, and Alex Padilla). The letter openly endorses the use of mob tactics to interrupt the work of legislatures — the very thing for which Garland is currently prosecuting many of the people who interrupted the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021.

State representatives Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis led a mob of demonstrators onto the floor of the state house. This not only disrupted the elected state legislature’s ability to carry out the people’s business; Jones shouted at his colleagues through a bullhorn. He and Pearson repeatedly ignored demands from the sergeant at arms, the official charged with the order and safety of the legislature, to stand down. “Demonstrators also blocked several entryways and exits, forcing state troopers to step in to assist members in moving throughout the building,” forcing the legislature to go into recess. They also blocked off a bathroom.

By Any Means Necessary

Many defenders of the legislators have simply whitewashed what they did. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed blandly that students “marched to the capitol” to demonstrate “peacefully,” while some legislators merely “joined in the protest” — a statement deliberately calculated to convince the listener that this entire thing was about a demonstration outside the state capitol, rather than the use of a mob to prevent the democratically elected legislature from debating or making laws:

Schumer, however, went a step further and actively endorsed the use of hecklers and mobs to shut down the legislative process:

By courageously participating in nonviolent demonstrations, they challenged procedural rules governing decorum and good behavior.  We believe the repeated and preventable slaughter of our children should frustrate and disrupt decorum because this horrifying pattern must never be accepted as business as usual. Moreover, we do not believe that breaking decorum is alone sufficient cause for employing the most draconian of consequences to duly-elected lawmakers. (Emphasis added).

Schumer is playing with fire here, and not for the first time. In 2020, he stood on the steps of the Supreme Court to deliver a threat: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have unleashed the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” In 2022, he described American elections as a “rigged game.” In March, he demanded that Fox News “stop Tucker Carlson from going on tonight.”

The Tennessee protest was not violent, and many of the demonstrators were teenagers. But make no mistake: This was the use of force. When a crowd is interposed to prevent debate and voting by means of noise and physical mass, that is not civil discourse, but its stifling. That sort of reasoning is how democracies actually die. The rule of street cadres is actually how nations fall to fascism and communism.

The leader of the United States Senate, which once called itself “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” should never be in a position of saying that policy disagreements “should frustrate and disrupt decorum.” He should never be threatening Supreme Court justices with the “whirlwind” or calling our elections “rigged” or demanding that critical voices in the media be pulled from the airwaves.

Say what you will of the man, can you imagine Mitch McConnell doing those things? Never in a million years would McConnell have written or signed this letter. If you doubt me, go back and watch Mitch’s floor speech on the 2020 election before the January 6 votes, or his remarks on the Capitol riot.

Mob Rule Is Bad

Disruptive mass protest has long been a favored tactic on the left, and Democratic politicians customarily just look the other way when they aren’t actively egging it on. The siege that kicked off the protests and sit-ins that shut down the Wisconsin capitol for weeks in 2011 set the modern template, and was memorably described by Scott Walker and Marc Thiessen in Walker’s book:

The small contingent of capitol police was quickly overwhelmed. Protesters ripped the hinges of an antique oak door at the State Street entrance and streamed inside . . . the window to Democratic Representative Cory Mason’s office opened . . . and protesters began crawling into the building. Once inside, they began unlocking doors and bathroom windows until a sea of thousands had flooded the capitol.

The police retreated in the face of the horde, giving up the first floor, then the second. [The protesters] . . . began searching for the Republican senators who had dared to defy the will of the unions. As the crowd scoured the building looking for the offending legislators, police sneaked them out through an underground tunnel to a government building across the street. But a Democratic representative posted on social media that the Republican senators were escaping through the tunnels, so when the senators came up into the lobby, the mob was there waiting for them.

The tall windows that framed the lobby were plastered with people yelling and banging on the glass. . . . They were trapped. The senators hid under a stairwell, out of view, while the police ordered a city bus to pull up in front of the building. Officers then formed a human wall on the sidewalk, parting the sea of protesters and creating a pathway for the senators to reach the bus. . . . Once the senators were on board, the mob on the street began punching the windows and shaking the vehicle. . . . The police told the senators and staff inside to keep their heads down in case a window shattered.

In 2013, at the Texas state capitol, when Wendy Davis’s filibuster failed on the floor of the Texas senate, thousands of protesters shouted down the elected legislators, making it impossible to pass the abortion bill being debated; the legislature had to call a separate special session to resume lawmaking. As local news recalled, “The rowdy crowd proved integral in preventing the Senate from taking down a vote in time.” At the time, the Texas Tribune wrote about “How Activists Yelled an Abortion Bill to Death” and “protesters made enough noise to grind the Senate chamber to a halt”:

“Our job as we saw it was to gauge the crowd and see what the potential was for taking things in the most radical direction possible,” said Katie Feyh of the Austin ISO chapter. Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, had staked out a spot in the center of the rotunda, not far from where a portrait of her mother, former Gov. Ann Richards, hung on the wall. [Until late in the evening,] she and others, including some Democratic lawmakers, could be seen occasionally gesturing to the crowd to quiet down. . . . After word spread from the Senate floor that the noise was effectively grinding the Senate to a halt, Richards began furiously pumping her arms in the air, signaling to all around her to get as loud as possible. The noise in the Capitol grew to a deafening roar.

In retrospect, it was dangerous that nobody was held responsible for any of this. Things, predictably, got worse. In 2016, as Byron York recounts, pro-gun-control Democrats led a sit-in on the House floor to obstruct the majority from being able to do business. I’ve detailed at some length the protests that invaded the Capitol around the 2018 confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, as well as other, similar disruptive left-wing protests in that period around state legislatures and city councils. Chuck Schumer’s niece Amy was one of the hundreds of people arrested for invading the Senate office buildings following Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation in 2018, but most protesters had charges dropped. In 2020, protesters breaching the security barricades around the White House led the Secret Service to rush President Trump and his family into a secure bunker. In 2022, a protest against the Dobbs decision at the Arizona state house drove state troopers to deploy tear gas “after a crowd of protesters repeatedly pounded on the glass doors of the State Senate Building.”

This is a perilous path — as Democrats recognized only when the tables were turned on January 6. The riot at the Capitol that day was terrible, but just considered as a riot, it was by no means the worst civil disorder of the year that preceded it. Moreover, many of the January 6 protesters committed no acts of violence, yet they have been criminally prosecuted for trespassing their way into the Capitol and disrupting the business of Congress. Garland is charging scores of them under 18 U.S.C. § 1512, which threatens up to 20 years in jail for anyone who “obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding.”

For my part, I have no problem with those prosecutions, having argued that harsh punishments such as the 41-month sentence for “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley are needed to make examples of their conduct and deter its repetition in the future. But if you’re going to create an exception in which your own favored causes “should frustrate and disrupt decorum,” you lose all moral standing to argue for throwing the book at people who apply the same reasoning to their causes. That sort of thinking by pro- and anti-slavery people in the 1850s led to the near-fatal beating of Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, and to John Brown murdering slave traders. From there, civil war followed.

The whole point of elected legislatures is to create a mechanism for society to settle, by deliberation and voting, issues that are serious enough that people might otherwise resolve them with violence, or at least by mass action of the loudest and the most physically vigorous members of society. Wars, crime, abortion, guns, the death penalty, police brutality, life-and-death health issues, race discrimination, religious liberty — you name it, there’s an issue of the gravest importance we ask democracy to resolve by rules, and the executive branch and the courts to handle in applying those rules to particular cases. The moment you start justifying and excusing the mob, you have summoned the whirlwind, and you can no longer control where it will take us.