By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Fifty years ago, in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, a group of radicals founded “Catholics for a Free Choice” in Washington, D.C. It was a fringe group at the time, but the sodomite-lesbian community was already powerful in the nation’s capital, and the two groups shared the fundamental principles of narcissism, rebellion, destruction of the family, and the annihilation of the Catholic Church, all of them propelled by the Sexual Revolution.
The “pro-choice” movement had grown steadily among Catholics by September 1984, when New York Gov. Mario Cuomo showed up at Notre Dame to give it his imprimatur. There, Cuomo concocted a facile slogan for a movement that was already moving at the speed of light through the culture. Millions of Catholics — and not only politicians — had come to embrace an uneasy “personally opposed, but” approach to abortion, but Cuomo gave it the magisterial approval of a seasoned and successful pol.
In February of that same year, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary held hearings on the first judicial nomination of President Reagan to be formally opposed by America’s sexualized, pro-abortion Left. Senate opponents of the nomination included several Democrats who at various times chaired the Senate Committee on the Judiciary — Ted Kennedy, Pat Leahy, and Joe Biden — all Catholics, all pro-abortion, all the time.
The nominee, Daniel Manion, was a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and had the strong support of University President Fr. Ted Hesburgh, CSC. The campaign against Manion was directed by Ralph Neas. At the time, Neas headed People for the American Way, but over the years he led other key pro-abortion organizations as well. Neas was in fact the most effective pro-abortion leader of his generation, so it was no surprise that he was the chief adviser to Joe Biden, who led the opposition to Manion’s confirmation on the Senate floor.
Neas, also a Catholic, was a graduate of Notre Dame, a classmate and friend of this writer in the Class of 1968. His efforts to block Manion’s nomination failed, but the following year, he led the successful campaign to defeat Reagan’s nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.
What had changed?
In the mid-term election of November 1986, Democrats had regained a majority in the Senate.
Elections matter.
The War Against
Constitutional Judges
Bork’s defeat led eventually to the successful nomination of Mr. Justice Anthony Kennedy, also a Catholic. “Look, he’ll be fine,” Kennedy’s clerk on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals told me at the time. But of course Kennedy wasn’t “fine.” His opinions in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Obergefell v. Hodges were, frankly, disastrous.
The forces that Ralph Neas had assembled and trained knew no boundaries. In the nomination of Clarence Thomas (1991) they recruited a liar so barely credible that even Joe Biden didn’t believe her. By the time Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court (2018), all bets were off, and more lies were orchestrated by the Left’s kept media.
The attacks were fitting of Justice Goldberg’s outburst at the United Nations as it debated the Six-Day War in June 1967: “a gross canard, cut out of whole cloth.” The stream of vile concoctions continued nonstop.
We must bear in mind that the feigned outrage directed at these nominations bore a broader and equally malevolent message. They constitute a signal from the Left aimed at any lawyer who might have the inclination to be considered for the federal bench: “We will destroy you when nominated, and we’ll terrorize you and your kids if you’re confirmed. Your life will no longer be your own.”
I’ve staffed over a hundred Senate confirmation hearings for nominees to foreign embassies and posts in the Executive branch. Even among those nominees who were seasoned professionals, angst — at times bordering on mild panic — was not uncommon as their hearing approached.
But to my knowledge, only one of these nominees received death threats (from the Cali Drug Cartels, the predecessors of today’s Coyote drug-illegal alien-and-sex Traffickers). In contrast, Brett Kavanaugh received countless death threats both before and after he was confirmed. His wife Ashley even received threatening emails at her office.
Today, despite those real and present dangers, the Department of Justice refuses to provide adequate protection to sitting Supreme Court Justices who have received similar threats.
Could it have something to do with abortion?
The Real Target:
Every Pro-Lifer In America
In the months since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization came down in June, 39 churches, 62 pro-life and pregnancy centers, and two dozen other violent attacks by pro-aborts have occurred, according to a list updated daily by the Family Research Council.
The Justice Department has failed to make even one arrest.
Meanwhile, the homes and families of several Justices have been the target of threats, demonstrations, and at least one assassination attempt since last June.
Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland has made no effort to protect them.
The message to those lawyers desiring to serve on the Federal bench rings loud and clear: “be pro-life and we’ll cancel you, doxx you, harass you, and arrest you. If you even pretend to be interested in the Federal bench, we will ruin you and your family. We might even kill you.”
The Biden Justice Department has widened that campaign of harassment to include the entire pro-life community. Last September Garland sent some twenty heavily-armored FBI agents to storm the home of pro-life advocate Mark Houck and arrest him on a charge that had already been thrown out in State Court — a violation of the FACE Act, adopted in 1994, with Garland’s new twist: “demonstrate near an abortuary and you’re guilty until proven innocent.”
Last month, Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta upped the ante. Asserting that Dobbs had “dealt a devastating blow to women throughout the country,” the Department had increased the “urgency” of “enforcement of the FACE Act against pro-life demonstrators.
Given the Stasi methods of Garland’s Justice Department, that “urgent enforcement” will target not only demonstrators, but their supporters, their families, their Facebook friends, Wanderer writers, and anyone else who dares to defend the unborn.
In its rage against Dobbs, which returns the abortion issue to the states, the pro-abortion Left intends to use the police powers of the federal government to drive the pro-life movement underground nationwide – and then to bury it.
The Biden administration has used several subterfuges to advance that campaign. While its various components might be declared unconstitutional in eventual adjudication in the Courts, its immediate purpose is clear: to minimize the impact of Dobbs by undermining, eroding, and outright defying the rights of the States and of the People that the Supreme Court restored in Mr. Justice Alito’s decision in Dobbs.
In one such instance, in April 2021, Biden’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) used the “pandemic” as an excuse to allow the delivery of the abortifacient mifepristone to be delivered through the mail, once a licensed abortionist provided a prescription for the pill.
On January 3, the FDA made that regulation permanent, and also made the abortifacient available through pharmacies, including mail-order pharmacies like CVS. The regulation will undoubtedly be challenged in court by states whose pharmacies are forbidden to dispense the drug, once abortion-state pharmacies attempt to supply it over the border.
This is not be the Left’s first effort to nullify the Dobbs decision by Federal diktat, and it won’t be the last.
Eternal vigilance is not only the price of liberty, but of life itself.
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