After a man brought a gun to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s front door, the conservative movement produced a cacophony of condemnation. Many called on President Joe Biden to also condemn the assassination attempt, but they were met with silence.
His administration has certainly not helped the environment in which this incident occurred. After Kavanaugh was harassed by protesters at Morton’s The Steakhouse in Washington, D.C. in response to his vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “This is what a democracy is.”
Now our country has seen an attack on someone with whom Biden agrees politically. A man was arrested yesterday for bringing a gun to the home of Representative Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.), who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The man allegedly shouted threats of violence outside of her home.
The attempt bore remarkable similarity to the one on Kavanaugh’s life. And the Biden administration has responded to it much as it did to that on Kavanaugh: with characteristic silence. Americans have heard not a peep of condemnation.
Biden’s silence on the Kavanaugh incident means he can’t make a principled denunciation of Jayapal’s apparent would-be assassin. Were he to do so without saying a word about the attempt on Kavanaugh’s life, he would be engaging in selective outrage.
Americans have a right to ask when Biden will finally condemn these attempted instances of political violence. What will have to happen for him to declare that some terrible situation merits his comment as the leader of our country?
The answer may be that an assassination attempt has to succeed. Although he has not said anything about the Kavanaugh and Jayapal incidents, he did release a statement about the killing of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe.
Even then, the statement was hardly laudable. Although he gave the requisite praise to Abe, he also decided to lament how “gun violence always leaves a deep scar on the communities that are affected by it.”
Condemning only successful violent attacks (and doing so poorly) does not fulfill the duty the president has to be a unifying leader for the country. Nor is it what the American people were expecting when they elected Biden.
He promised unity throughout the 2020 election cycle all the way up to his inauguration. He famously said that we would not need to worry about his tweets. We expected Biden not to have many tweets that would be as toxic as his predecessors’, but we did not expect him to have hardly any meaningful tweets at all.
Amid the recent uproar in our country, he has been derelict as members of his own side and the opposite side of the aisle face assassination attempts. Remaining silent was never advisable, and his continued taciturnity has become more and more inexcusable.