About two years before this week’s leak of a draft of the Supreme Court’s most important abortion ruling since Roe v. Wade was leaked to the media in an unprecedented manner, the top Senate Democrat threatened a pair of conservative justices, telling them “you won’t know what hit you” if they ruled in a way on the issue that he and fellow Dems did not like.
“Inside the walls of this court, the Supreme Court is hearing arguments, as you know, for the first major abortion rights cases since Justice Kavanaugh and Justice Gorsuch came to the bench,” Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York said at a pro-abortion rights rally in March 2020, referring to justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
“I want to tell you Gorsuch, I want to tell you Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions,” the now-Senate Majority Leader shouted.
🚨 UNHINGED → Schumer threatened conservative justices Kavanaugh & Gorsuch on the steps of the Supreme Court:
"You have released the whirlwind & you will pay the price. You won't know what hit you."
Enough. This rhetoric has dangerous consequences. Where's the media outrage?
— Steve Scalise
Now, a GOP lawmaker on the House Judiciary Committee has linked the two incidents.
“It’s speculation to a degree, but almost certainly this [leak] comes from the minority on the court to disrupt or somehow produce public pressure to alter the course of deliberations,” Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) told The Daily Wire.
It also carries an intimidating potential for violence, he added.
“It is unquestionably true that there is an attempt to intimidate [justices], and whoever the actor or group that caused it, since they’re willing to intimidate I don’t think they’d [draw a line at] threats of violence,” he said.
“It’s very grave, when you have something like this that’s never occurred before in the history of the court. Since they’ll do things that are unprecedented, you don’t want to just sit back and see how far it will go,” Bishop added.
“I’ve never heard of something like this [leak] in the Supreme Court in my life,” Bishop, who is an attorney, continued. “The deliberation process has a lot of tradition around it. In order to maintain public trust and respect, it needs to remain sacrosanct that people don’t betray the process. I can’t imagine a more harmful act to the integrity of the court.”
The North Carolina Republican said that “the Left constantly goes around talking about threats to our democracy, but they are willing to do anything to our democracy: They’re willing to pack the court, take over all power to run elections, the ‘ministry of truth’ being created in DHS… eliminate the filibuster, add states to the U.S. without going through a constitutional process, make D.C. a state.
“There is nothing they will not do to get the result that they want,” he declared to The Daily Wire.
“The Supreme Court ought to investigate it internally and reveal who’s responsible, and there’s a certain set of circumstances under which it might be appropriate for Congress to hold such a person responsible,” he added.
However, there’s “not a chance that Nancy Pelosi would do such a thing. She and Schumer issued a statement that attacked the court, just as Schumer said ‘you won’t know what hit you.’ I think it’s likelier that [Pelosi is] in league with whatever’s been done.”
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Conservatives Blast Leak of SCOTUS Abortion Ruling, Call For Protection of Justices Now In Jeopardy