Senate Judiciary Committee watchers are by now familiar with its Democratic members’ attacks on the Supreme Court. Time and again, they engage in nasty power plays meant to intimidate and damage a branch of government that no longer does the Left’s bidding.
On the Judiciary Committee’s markup agenda yesterday: Authorization of subpoenas to private individuals in order to expand their years-long intimidation campaign against the Supreme Court. But Republicans came fully prepared to call the Democrats out on their own sordid tactics to delegitimize the Supreme Court and their rank hypocrisy. “You’ve opened up Pandora’s box,” said Ranking Member Lindsey Graham, “and you’ll get a look into it. It’s not very pretty.” Senator Marsha Blackburn spoke, previewing several subpoenas she was going to introduce, including one for Justice Sotomayor’s book publisher.
This was just the tip of the iceberg, but markup viewers would not have known about the rest of the iceberg because Chairman Richard Durbin abruptly adjourned the committee meeting before most Republican senators had addressed the subpoena issue. Committee Republicans came armed with 88 amendments, and Durbin said afterwards that he recognized “we just didn’t have time.” True as that might be, the Democrats additionally faced the prospect of embarrassment by the Republican proposals. Here are just a few of them:
- From Senator Lindsey Graham: Subpoenas to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas regarding aliens in the Terrorist Screening Database encountered by U.S. Border Patrol, to Arabella Advisors and the Alliance for Global Justice among other dark-money groups regarding their funding of entities with ties to Hamas or other terrorist organizations, to David M. Rubenstein and affiliates regarding their gifts or hospitality to past or present Supreme Court justices, and to ProPublica and its donors regarding donations to the New Venture Fund, which in turn funded Demand Justice;
- From Senator Chuck Grassley: Subpoenas directed to Hunter Biden and his bank accounts and to the Department of Justice regarding its targeting of Catholics;
- From Senator John Cornyn: Subpoena to George Soros entities regarding their efforts to influence the composition of or matters before the Supreme Court;
- From Senator Mike Lee: Subpoenas to Attorney General Merrick Garland regarding Justice Department failure to enforce Section 1507 violations at the personal residences of Supreme Court justices, along with several instances of overreach from correspondence treating parents protesting school board actions like domestic terrorists to the prosecution of pro-life activist Mark Houck;
- From Senator Ted Cruz: Subpoena to Michael Chertoff and the marshal of the Supreme Court relating to their investigation of the leak of the Dobbs draft opinion last year;
- From Senator Josh Hawley: Subpoena to Arabella Advisors and Demand Justice and their founders regarding their work on judicial nominations and legislation to pack the Supreme Court;
- From Senator Tom Cotton: Subpoenas to ProPublica relating to its 2021 expose based on IRS documents it obtained and to Attorney General Garland for communications between the Department of Justice and Council on American-Islamic Relations;
- From Senator John Kennedy: Subpoenas to the Pritzker Organization and Foundation relating to travel and other hospitality provided to Justice Stephen Breyer, to Morris Kahn and the Genesis Prize Foundation regarding prizes and hospitality to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and to George Soros entities regarding their funding of state and local prosecutorial candidates—as well as mandating an ethics code addressing members of the House and Senate who legislate on topics that financially enrich themselves or immediate family members;
- From Senator Thom Tillis: Subpoena to the president of Act Blue relating to the organization’s financial support of violence against law enforcement officers; and
- From Senator Marsha Blackburn: Subpoena to Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s staff and book publisher to gather information on her aggressive promotion of her books, to Secretary Xavier Becerra to explain how the Department of Health and Human Services lost track of 85,000 unaccompanied migrant children, and to Jeffrey Epstein’s estate to provide the flight logs for his private plane.
Durbin has stated that the committee will return to the subpoenas in the near future. We shall see whether that statement amounts more to a face-saving effort for Democrats than a serious commitment to continue this tactic. Either way, Republican members have shown they are ready if and when that day comes, and their Democratic colleagues can’t say they haven’t been warned.