When the news broke on Monday night that Justice Samuel Alito had written
a majority opinion
to overturn Roe v. Wade, security officials hurriedly erected protective fences around the Supreme Court. Why? Because it has become axiomatic that the Left will turn violent if it doesn’t get its way.
“Progressives” and radicals don’t have a monopoly on mob violence, of course, as supporters of former President Donald Trump made plain on
Jan. 6, 2021,
when they stormed Congress under the professed belief that the election had been stolen from their champion. But their assault on democracy was startling not only because of its enormity, but also because it was unexpected from that side of the political divide.
When storekeepers
boarded up
their properties in the run-up to Election Day, they were doing so because they expected left-wingers to riot if Trump won. Their fear was not that right-wingers would turn nasty if President Joe Biden was victorious, even though that’s how events turned out.
That assumption is made because violence is no longer a surprise on the Left. It is, rather, a tendency frequently indulged. Righteous left-wing riots flared up almost every day during the hideous summer of 2020. You also probably remember a mob
pounding
the Supreme Court’s doors after Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination was confirmed in 2018.
Capitol Hill’s security personnel wouldn’t have bothered throwing up a fence this week if the court decision (which was leaked with gross impropriety) had shown that the justices intended to uphold the fiction of a constitutional right to abortion. The idea that people who attend the March for Life would start smashing things is ludicrous.
But we live in a culture that accepts and often excuses “progressives” when they
riot.
Their tumult is seen as almost a normal step in the political process. The eruption of their anger and direct action basks in a glow of approval, for it is often seen as a just and passionate expression of indignation against injustice. Two years ago, Democrats supported people who ripped 50 city centers apart over the murder of
George Floyd.
Left-wing mayors abandoned the interests of the cities they were elected to lead.
The Left’s elected federal officials, whom you’d suppose would prefer the ballot box to the baseball bat, came out publicly on the side of mayhem. “Fact-checkers” at media organizations
say
it’s false to claim that Kamala Harris, who was then a senator and is now vice president, supported violence. But their analysis is tendentious. If Harris was siding only with a protest “movement,” why didn’t she make the distinction plain? And why did she tell everyone to “beware” of those in the streets? Because she approved of them and did not want to criticize the Democratic base.
The Left’s street violence is in keeping with its inclination toward constitutional vandalism. This is, more explicitly, the demand that the rules be changed if Democrats cannot win under the rules currently in place.
Shortly after the Alito draft broke into the open, Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-VT,
called for
the Senate filibuster to be replaced with bare majority rule, and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-MN,
demanded
that the court be packed with extra left-liberals to entrench Roe v. Wade. The message is clear: Whatever gets in the way of us winning must be swept aside, even if it is the Constitution or public opinion expressed by a chamber of Congress.
Biden responded to the Alito draft partly with his usual word salad, and his staff must have performed a collective facepalm when he referred to a woman’s right to “abort a child.” But he also, crucially, responded by saying the huge moral question of whether abortion should be legal was one that the public must now decide.
Pivoting instantly to the possibility that this huge issue might dynamite the Democrats out of their current funk, he said the Alito draft should prompt midterm voters to elect senators and representatives who supported legal abortion. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, did the same when he said the Senate
would move
to codify abortion rights legislatively.
The irony is stark. That’s the way it should have been all along. Biden actually said it shouldn’t be up to judges. That’s exactly what Alito said — and what opponents of Roe have been saying for half a century.
