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The following essay is an excerpt from Ted Cruz's new book, Justice Corrupted: How the Left Weaponized Our Legal System, published by Regnery.
If the goal of the leak of the Dobbs v. Jackson opinion was to put political pressure on the Justices, it worked. In the days that followed, there were protests all over the country. Abortion rights activists published the home addresses of Supreme Court Justices. When White House press secretary Jen Psaki—serving her final days in that position before moving over to MSNBC to do effectively do the same job—was asked about doxing the Justices and protestors screaming outside their homes, she refused to condemn these actions. Instead, she said that the Biden administration encouraged "peaceful protest."
Importantly, this leak and the attempted intimidation of the Court didn't come out of nowhere. For years, Senate Democrats have been attempting to politicize and undermine the Court. Indeed, the Democrats have attempted to turn the Court into a mini-legislature, where five unelected judges decree the rules for the entire country regardless of what the voters decide.
In 2020, Senator Chuck Schumer went so far as to threaten, by name, two Justices for the decisions they might make. Standing in front of the Supreme Court, he said, "I want to tell you Gorsuch, I want to tell you Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price... if you go forward with these awful decisions."
And criminal leftists heard the Democrats' call to violence. At 1:50 a.m. on June 8, 2022, police arrested Nicholas John Roske, a 26-year-old man who had traveled from Simi Valley, California, to the home of Justice Kavanaugh. He came to murder the Justice, and he was arrested carrying "a 'black tactical chest rig and tactical knife,' a pistol with two magazines and ammunition, pepper spray, zip ties, a hammer, a screwdriver, a nail punch, a crowbar, a pistol light and duct tape." The would-be murderer "told the police that he was upset about the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and about a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion suggesting that the Justices were poised to overturn Roe v. Wade."
In 2021, a year before the leak, leftist groups announced plans to protest in front of Justice Kavanaugh's home in a clear effort to intimidate him and threaten the safety of his family. Groups like Demand Justice have likewise launched shameful bullying tactics, trying (successfully, it would turn out) to force Justice Stephen Breyer to retire and pave the way for a younger, more activist justice. They took out ads and even hired a mobile billboard truck to try to make this happen.
We are also seeing an ongoing, false, character assassination directed at Justice Clarence Thomas. In my view, Justice Thomas is one of the finest Justices ever to serve on the Court, which is precisely why this deliberate effort to slander his character and to politicize the Court is so dangerous.
These efforts, of course, are massively funded by dark-money groups—the same dark-money groups that Democrats love to inveigh against—dedicated to putting leftists on courts and undermining our justice system. These groups, including Arabella Advisors, in turn fund Demand Justice, an organization led by Brian Fallon, a former press secretary to Chuck Schumer. On the night the opinion was leaked, Fallon tweeted that the SCOTUS leak was "good." Another leftist named Ian Millhiser tweeted, "Seriously, shout out to whoever the hero was within the Supreme Court who said 'f**k it! Let's burn this place down.'"
Sadly, the Left no longer makes any attempt to hide its outright contempt for our justice system. The corruption that began with Richard Nixon and continued through Barack Obama is reaching a kind of culmination with the administration of Joe Biden and his band of angry left-wing activists. Today, they are leaking opinions on abortion and attacking parents who come to school board meetings to complain about transgender policy. They are waging war on states that pass laws that are offensive to their far-left base, and bringing good old-fashioned racism—which they cleverly call "antiracism"—back into American government.
I shudder to think of what they might do tomorrow. But as of this writing, the corruption shows no signs of slowing down. Having just seen the attempted murder of a Supreme Court Justice, I fear the consequences of the politicization of our legal system will continue to get worse.
But, filled with hope, I know that only We the People can stop it.
Senator Ted Cruz is the author of the new book: Justice Corrupted: How the Left Weaponized Our Legal System.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
