By CHRISTOPHER MANION
A year ago this month, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case was leaked by a person not yet publicly identified.
That illegal leak, a betrayal of trust as well as a federal felony, was a signal from the pro-abortion Left that all bets were off. The curtain was pulled back: crime works, and the criminals won’t get punished, so long as they commit the right kind of crime.
After Alito’s opinion was leaked, illegal demonstrations erupted immediately outside the homes of Supreme Court justices who had joined the opinion.
A month later Nicholas John Roske was apprehended in the middle of the night near the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. He possessed all the weapons required to massacre the entire Kavanaugh family, but (dare I say “miraculously”?) instead, he called 911, asked for psychiatric help, and waited for local law enforcement to pick him up.
They found him sitting on the curb down the street from the Kavanaugh family residence. He was arrested by local police and charged in federal court with attempted murder.
In spite of this narrow escape from a crime of unimaginable magnitude, federal marshals have not made a single arrest, although thousands of demonstrators continue to harass and threaten members of the Supreme Court outside their private family homes.
Justice Alito recently told the Wall Street Journal that the leak of his opinion had “made us targets of assassination.” And the Left’s intimidation tactic has been successful. Justices have severely curtailed their travel and public appearances, but that isn’t all.
Justice Clarence Thomas used to walk without a bodyguard from his Supreme Court office to Mass at St. Joseph’s on the Hill a couple of blocks away. Try that today and he’d be met by screaming termagants of all “genders.”
Federal Marshals — absolutely mandatory now — could do nothing to protect him unless he was physically assaulted.
Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland recently admitted that such hostile manifestations violate federal law if they are intended to influence decisions of a government official. But Garland has announced no change in policy.
“It’s up to the Federal Marshals,” he told Congress.
Was Garland telling the truth? Or are the Federal Marshals rendered helpless by orders from above?
The Washington Times reports that on May 3, “Republican senators revealed new evidence on that the Justice Department ordered Federal Marshals to ignore a law that should have protected conservative Supreme Court justices after last year’s leak of a High Court opinion.”
Federal law prohibits protesting to influence a justice’s rulings, the Justice Department admitted, but Garland ordered the Marshals not to enforce it. Instead, Marshals “were ordered not to make any arrests unless someone physically threatened justices or their families.” Should that come to pass, they were ordered first “to coordinate ‘in advance’ with the local U.S. Attorney before enforcing laws.”
Disingenuous Or Defiant?
Mr. Garland’s comments are as disingenuous as they are ridiculous. Imagine a federal marshal observing a felony in process, but prohibited from arresting the malefactor before he goes up his own chain of command. His boss has to get the green light from the relevant U.S. Attorney before any arrest can be made.
Meanwhile, if the malefactor disappears during that laborious process, the case is a non-starter.
But Garland had another option.
He could have told Maryland U.S. Attorney Erek Barron and Eastern Virginia U.S. Attorney Jessica Aber that these intimidation cases are as important as those dealing with the peaceful trespassers in the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
That’s another story entirely.
If that were the case, there would be plainclothes detectives filming every demonstrator, handing the videos to the FBI for facial recognition and determination of residence. The demonstrators’ presence on social media, their emails and telephone conversations and texts, would be monitored, their domiciles raided, and their computers seized.
None of that is happening, of course, but let us suppose that an honest federal marshal with a dedication to duty and honor actually succeeded in arresting a demonstrator who is threatening the Justice or the Justice’s family outside their home.
In that case, the marshal has a different mountain to climb.
The case would be placed in the hands of a supervisor at the U.S. Attorney’s office, which would coordinate an investigation, usually conducted by the FBI.
Right here we pause: Do you mean the FBI of Christopher Wray? Who defies Congress and turned on the president who signed his appointment him before the ink was dry?
That’s a real challenge. But let’s assume that the investigators are professional — in my experience over many years, I’ve found that most of them are. They still need to know that they have the support of their colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s office, where the concept of “prosecutorial discretion” rules. It boils down to the power of the prosecutor to decide which of many possible crimes he will investigate, whom he will charge, and for what crime(s).
Two examples will illustrate that power in action.
First, obscenity. The U.S. Criminal Code (18 U.S.C. 71) defines obscenity, including adult obscenity, as a felony. That’s right, that article is still in the code, but the last successful prosecution of an adult obscenity case by a federal prosecutor occurred almost twenty years ago in the Western District of Pennsylvania.
While subsequent years have seen a strong focus on investigation of child pornography, prosecution of adult obscenity has virtually disappeared. To bring such a case, the prosecutor and his staff have to endure the mockery of pro-pornography media like The Washington Post, who taunt prosecutors who are “chasing dirty pictures instead of terrorists.”
And that’s not all. At trial, the jury is required to view the offending material. That means that juries in such cases are very hard to seat. As one former federal prosecutor told me, that’s a very tough task indeed.
For a second example, we need look no further than America’s Democrat-ruled cities, where prosecutors have steadfastly refused to prosecute many crimes because their political base wants to sow chaos and criminality for political and social reasons.
The people, like the Justices, have no recourse.
Bottom line, Merrick Garland is much more interested in harassing Catholics, concerned parents of public school pupils, and other “potential terrorists” than he is in protecting pregnancy centers, churches, shrines, and offices of pro-life groups throughout the country.
Satan’s Revenge
“The more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
The Dobbs decision sparked a parallel crime wave that included over a hundred attacks on churches and crisis pregnancy centers. Many attackers spray-painted “Jane’s Revenge” at the scene of their crimes to account for their destruction.
Nobody’s sure just who “Jane” is, but there is certainly a lot of revenge going around. And clearly, abortion is taking center stage at the heart of the struggle sessions that the Left trots out in every venue and outlet it can find.
The unborn child represents the promise of unborn future generations. That promise is made by parents who join together to bear and to raise children destined for Heaven. And in the raging war on the family, that unborn child is in the bull’s eye.
No babies, no future.
The Godless Left constantly manufactures new weapons to target life, the family, and the Faith. Truly human qualities are discarded for “humanity,” where, as Rubashov puts it in Darkness at Noon, “the individual is one-millionth of a million men.”
A constant barrage of the “new” corrodes all it can in the good, the true, and the beautiful. Why, we can transcend reality itself — with transgenders, then transsexuals, even trans-humanity — all designed to leave God’s creative purpose in the dustbin of history!
Satan can create nothing. He can only destroy.
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