2005—NARAL unleashes a mendacious television ad against confirmation of John Roberts’s nomination to the Supreme Court. The ad features a woman injured in the 1998 bombing of an abortion clinic, attempts to link her injury to an amicus brief that Roberts filed on behalf of the United States in 1991, and says that Americans should oppose a nominee “whose ideology leads him to excuse violence against other Americans.”
Never mind that Roberts’s amicus brief, which argued that an 1871 law did not provide a federal cause of action against persons obstructing access to abortion clinics, did not take issue with the many laws that criminalize violence outside abortion clinics and did not in any way “excuse violence against other Americans.” Never mind that it was ludicrous to suggest that Roberts’s amicus brief was somehow responsible for the 1998 bombing (all the more so as the intervening enactment in 1994 of the so-called FACE Act imposed severe penalties against those obstructing access to abortion clinics yet failed to deter the bombing). And never mind that Roberts in fact had denounced abortion-clinic bombers as “criminals.”
Days later, under harsh criticism from its usual allies, NARAL pulls the ad.
2006—In an act of collective idiocy, the ABA’s House of Delegates approves the ABA task force’s insipid report on presidential signing statements, a report that earned scathing criticism from leading academics across the political spectrum.