Setting the Table for Another Assassination Attempt

The first one flopped, but persistence is the name of the game

As we take a look at the latest NYT/ Left wing “news” story designed to whip up hatred of conservative Supreme Court justices (Justice Sam Alito in this instance), it’s instructive to review what was probably the most prominent one. The Wall Street Journal helpfully recounts it in a March 5, 2020 piece:

Democrats like to accuse President Trump of violating institutional democratic norms, and often he does with his rhetorical broadsides. But at least he’s never directly threatened the U.S. Supreme Court the way Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer did on Wednesday.

Speaking to a crowd on the Supreme Court steps, the leading Senate Democrat declared: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.” He meant Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, the newest Justices who were appointed by President Trump.

Mr. Schumer was speaking before abortion-rights activists as the Supreme Court considers whether to curtail the ability of abortion providers to sue on behalf of women seeking abortions—a doctrine known as third-party standing. Mr. Schumer, still addressing Messrs. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, added: “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Actually, we didn’t have to wait all that long before we got to “know what [was designed to] hit them.” Pro-abortion zealot Nicholas Roske traveled to the aforementioned Justice Kavanaugh’s home in the middle of the night on June 8 — a little less than six months ago — wearing black clothing and carrying a suitcase, a backpack, and several items and weapons: a Glock-17 pistol with ammunition, zip ties, a tactical knife, pepper spray, a hammer, a screwdriver, a crowbar, duct tape, a pistol light, and boots padded to be stealthy. Fortunately, Roske was apprehended by the authorities before he entered Justice Kavanaugh’s house. It is undisputed that his intent was to assassinate Kavanaugh for his “complicity” in the Dobbs opinion, a copy of which had been leaked a month earlier by a person or persons still unidentified, and whose origin is still being investigated.

One might think that an assassination attempt along the lines Sen. Schumer must have known he was fanning with his rhetoric might be enough to persuade the Left to cool it, but one would be wrong, largely because the Left is more seriously violent than we having been telling ourselves, even after the numerous and bloody (even if “mostly peaceful”) George Floyd riots. Hence the recent and vicious press attacks on Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni, attacks centered on the fact that Mrs. Thomas persists in taking seriously the Left’s (often bellowed but only intermittently whispered where conservatives are concerned) line about how a woman should not live in her husband’s shadow and should speak out in her own right. See, e.g., the snarling articles here, here and here.

The attacks on Justice Thomas and his wife appear to have petered out for the moment in favor of the New York Times “news” story I linked in my first line. The story is a long and breathless account of how Justice Alito supposedly leaked the Hobby Lobby opinion to a friend and dinner companion, Gayle Wright, in June 2014, three weeks before the decision was handed down. The Times then recounts how Ms. Wright shared this knowledge with one Rev. Rob Schenck, at the time an anti-abortion activist who has more recently become a “progressive” minister.

The burden of the story is, I think, indirectly to suggest that Justice Alito is guilty of the more recent Dobbs leak (I guess so he could get himself assassinated along with Justice Kavanaugh). More of the possible motives in a moment. For now, I want to note that, eleven paragraphs down into this single-sourced story (in other words, farther down that the casual reader will ever get), the Times says this (emphasis added):

Justice Alito, in a statement issued through the court’s spokeswoman, denied disclosing the decision. He said that he and his wife shared a “casual and purely social relationship” with the Wrights, and did not dispute that the two couples ate together on June 3, 2014. But the justice said that the “allegation that the Wrights were told the outcome of the decision in the Hobby Lobby case, or the authorship of the opinion of the Court, by me or my wife, is completely false.”

Mrs. Wright, in a phone interview, denied obtaining or passing along any such information…

In other words, the two people who would know best about what if anything Justice Alito told Ms. Wright, point-blank deny the late-blooming allegations of the newly progressive Rev. Schenck. But their statements get buried down the page.

And, as noted, this is a single-sourced story. It does not claim, much less establish, that anyone other than Rev. Schenck asserts that Justice Alito leaked the Hobby Lobby outcome.

I was never a journalist or a journalism student, but my understanding is that newspapers generally refrain from publishing single-sourced stories, for the obvious reason that their reliability is too open to question. Thus I think the fair inference is that the Times piece is less a news story than a smear weakly impersonating a news story. This is not exactly new for the NYT, but the question is: Why this story, and why now?

I don’t know; let me just say that up front. But I do know something about how Leftist “journalism” works, and how the Swamp works, since I live here. I think there are four possible reasons.

The first is that the Supreme Court’s investigation of the Dobbs leak is about to come out, and will show that the most likely leaker was a liberal or someone aligned with the Left. I think the NYT story may be preparing the battlefield for when that happens — in particular, to be able to use that reliable if shopworn excuse, “Look, both sides do it.”

The second possible reason is simply to punish Justice Alito for Dobbs. The Dobbs opinion is not only hated but feared by the Left, since, not only does it debunk the notion that there’s a right to abortion in the Constitution; it does so with a textualist and originalist analysis that could threaten other rights the Left has manufactured through the years (my personal favorite, after a fashion, being the Fifth Amendmenty “right” to Miranda warnings, a “right” the Constitution does not even hint at).

The third possible reason is that old Leftist standby, intimidation. If you can’t beat them, you don’t join them — not that! — you smear them to teach them they’d better wise up. This has been tried lots of times, probably most memorably by Ted Kennedy against Robert Bork (when Sen. Kennedy felt he could take time off from drowning his weekend dates) and most recently by “Doctor” Christine Blasey Ford in her fabulist attempted rape allegation against Justice Kavanaugh (once all the other attacks on him at his confirmation hearing had flopped and he was on the brink of getting a favorable Committee vote).

The last possible reason for the NYT story, as the title of this entry suggests (but the one I think is the least likely), is for the Left to whip up one of its crazies to attempt to murder Justice Alito. None of the justices has any known serious health problems, and hence none is likely to be unable to continue on the Court over the next two years for President Biden to replace. Hence a, shall we say, more emphatic means must be found to try to create a vacancy.

Is that far-fetched? I sure hope so. Is it beyond the realm? Ask Steve Scalise.

UPDATE: Without a trace of irony (or memory), the Washington Post this evening says this:

We may never find out whether Schenck’s story about the Hobby Lobby decision is true — or, for that matter, who leaked the abortion opinion. But the issue of Supreme Court leaks raises important questions about the nine justices and their interactions with the outside world. The Supreme Court, as an institution, is supposed to be shielded from outside influence in a way that Congress and the executive branch aren’t. The justices, who don’t have to run for reelection, are supposedly free to interpret the law without worry about gaining popularity or winning over supporters.

That lament of course omits all mention of Sen. Schumer’s remarkably overt threats. It omits all mention of the attempted assassination of Justice Kavanaugh. And it omits all mention of the Post’s own story about several Democratic senators bluntly attempting to bully the Court in a Second Amendment case not long ago. Specifically, this is what gets dumped down the Post’s memory hole:

It is rare that an amicus brief filed in a Supreme Court case is characterized as both a brassy reality check and unprecedented political bullying.

But such is the controversy that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and four other Democratic senators have ignited with a filing that instructs the Supreme Court to either drop a New York gun case it has accepted for the coming term or face a public reckoning.

“The Supreme Court is not well. And the people know it,” writes Whitehouse, who is listed as the attorney of record on the friend-of-the-court brief. “Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.’ ” The phrase is from a poll question with which a majority of Americans agreed.

Hey, wait, didn’t the Post just scold us tonight that the Court must be free of majoritarian influence?

“Out in the real world, Americans are murdered each day with firearms in classrooms or movie theaters or churches or city streets, and a generation of preschoolers is being trained in active-shooter survival drills,” Whitehouse writes. “In the cloistered confines of this Court, and notwithstanding the public imperatives of these massacres, the NRA and its allies brashly presume, in word and deed, that they have a friendly audience for their ‘project.’ ”

Well sure. The “cloistered confines of the Court” get either (a) upbraided (as in the Whitehouse letter taking the Court to task for its supposed obliviousness) or (b) warmly embraced (as “supposed to be shielded from outside influence” in the Post’s column tonight), depending solely on what result the Left wants and which justices it believes would benefit from a little intimidation.