I have been AWOL for the last few days, attending a conference in Georgia that took up both days and evenings. In today’s overheated political climate it is amazing how much you can miss in just a couple of days. While I was gone, Joe Biden’s zombie campaign came back to life, although the candidate himself didn’t. It looks like a fight to the finish between Biden and Bernie Sanders, with the most likely winner being Donald Trump.
The stop-Bernie movement may succeed, with Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropping out and endorsing Biden at the most opportune moment. Elizabeth Warren has yet to endorse anyone, and she might not. If she backs Biden she is selling out the far left, while her personal animosity toward Sanders might prevent her from throwing her weight behind a fellow leftist. Warren doesn’t strike me as a forgiving person. Regardless, if Biden gets the nomination the Democrats will have a problem with the Bernie Bros. Some will stay home and others will vote for Trump. Will they burn down Milwaukee, as they have threatened to do if Bernie is denied the nomination? Probably not, but given how crazed the Democrats have become, you never know.
Speaking of crazed, Chuck Schumer committed the most shocking political act of my lifetime, threatening physical harm, apparently, against two Supreme Court justices if they fail to toe the Democrats’ line on a pending case. (I don’t know how else to understand “You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you.” Particularly in context, i.e., a speech delivered to a mob on the steps of the Supreme Court building, with Schumer waving toward the justices that he threatened.) We have never seen anything like this before.
Earlier today, the American College of Trial Lawyers released a statement condemning Schumer’s threat. The College of Trial Lawyers shouldn’t be confused with the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, now re-named the American Association for Justice. The latter is an organization of plaintiffs’ lawyers that is one of the staunchest supporters of the Democratic Party. The College of Trial Lawyers is a distinguished group, consisting of top trial lawyers from both the plaintiffs’ and the defendants’ bars. Given the manner in which the American Bar Association has been politicized, it is perhaps the best representative of the American bar. The College’s statement reads:
While the First Amendment protects the free speech rights of all American citizens, when a prominent and leading member of the legislative branch personally demeans individual members of the judiciary by name and in doing so appears to threaten them if they do not rule in a certain way on a particular issue, the criticisms threaten the balance among our branches of government and in particular the independence of the judiciary. Accordingly, the American College of Trial Lawyers supports the remarks of Chief Justice Roberts following statements by Senator Schumer about certain members of the Court in connection with a case under consideration by the Justices. Senator Schumer surely enjoys the protections of expression afforded all citizens, but he also has a responsibility to allow the rule of law to flourish in our country and to permit our judges to exercise independent judgment in support of the rule of law without undue outside influence or apparent efforts to intimidate.
The American College of Trial Lawyers believes that attacks on judicial officers when designed to influence their determinations on cases pending before them are an affront to the fundamental principle of judicial independence that cannot be ignored. The College also believes that no public official should interfere in a pending judicial proceeding, take actions or make statements that could reasonably be viewed as intimidating to a judge, or belittle any judge for his/her decision. It is vital that all branches of our government respect the integrity of the judicial process.
The Democrats are trying to move on via a non-apology from Schumer, and a false equivalence with statements made by President Trump, who has on occasion criticized judges, but has never come close to threatening them with violence. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine what the press’s reaction would be, should President Trump denounce, for example, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, saying that they “have released the whirlwind and will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you.”
My only other observation is that whatever concerns people may have about coronavirus aren’t preventing them from traveling. I passed through the Minneapolis-St. Paul and Atlanta airports; both were packed, as were my flights. I saw exactly one person wearing a mask.
