The American Stasi and the war on the Supreme Court

The American Stasi is not giving up. They are now trying to topple the Supreme Court.

The last few weeks have seen an eruption of stories about the court, all of them focused on its conservative members. Justice Clarence Thomas has a rich friend who lets him ride on a private jet. Justice Neil Gorsuch sold a house. Liberals claimed that Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s background check wasn’t complete. And so on.

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This is an organized attack.

The Left, frustrated that the bench is no longer advancing its policy priorities via judicial fiat, is trying to either expand the court or set up its own system of justice that trumps the Supreme Court. It’s similar to what the communist government of East Germany attempted during the Cold War.

In their comprehensive book The Stasi: Myth and Reality, scholars Mike Dennis and Norman Laporte examine the two systems of justice in Germany, made up of the “normative” and “prerogative” states.

The normative state was the outwardly appearing system of constitutional law. The prerogative state was the reality — a vast and corrupt bureaucracy filled with spies and jackboots and political actors who could toss people into jail for any reason. A woman named Ines Meichsner was sentenced to 10 months for “gross annoyance” because she was involved in the peace movement. Another peace activist, Uwe Kroker, was arrested for “gross rowdiness” for painting a peace sign on his door.

Dennis and Lapoerte observe: “According to state socialist theory, ‘bourgeoisie’ law and the concept of the separation of powers served to protect the hegemony of a sham democracy like that of Western Germany, whereas ‘socialist legality’ was an expression of the will of the working class and its Marxist-Leninist party in alliance with the farmers, the intelligentsia, and other working people.”

The American Left is trying to set up its own prerogative state even as they attempt to dismantle the normative state. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said during a recent interview that the courts have undermined their own legitimacy and that they do not have the power to enforce their own decisions. She then urged President Joe Biden to flat-out ignore the courts.

There is also the attempt by Sen. Dick Durbin (R-IL) to drag Chief Justice John Roberts into a hearing on Supreme Court ethics. Durbin has even argued that Congress ought to force its own system of ethics onto the Supreme Court.

Klaus Marxen, professor of Criminal Law at the Humboldt University of Berlin, wrote that the Stasi “treated law as an instrument of politics.” In 1979, Stasi officer Erich Mielke put it this way: “Power is the most important position from which to fulfill the historical mission of the working class, to establish communist society … Socialist law is an important instrument of exercising, enhancing and consolidating power.”

In the 2000 obituary for Erich Mielke, the New York Times explained that “communist rule in East Germany [was] where assassination, kidnapping, execution, denunciation and intimidation were used to achieve and maintain power under the long, menacing shadow of the Soviet Union.” Furthermore, “Stasi informants, many of them coerced, spread suspicion and betrayal throughout society — between spouses, between schoolmates, between office colleagues — a terror that outlasted the East German state, which effectively collapsed when the Berlin Wall fell, and formally ceased to exist when Germany reunified in October 1990.”

The Times concluded with this: “Mr. Mielke’s creed, expressed to subordinates in 1982 and recorded for Stasi archives, was: ‘’All this twaddle about no executions and no death sentences, it’s all junk, comrades. Execute, if need be without a court sentence.’”

This is what they tried, both metaphorically and literally, against Kavanaugh, who was the target of an attempted character assassination in 2018, and a literal assassination just last year.

I was a part of the 2018 Kavanaugh nomination battle and wrote a book about it,
The Devil’s Triangle Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi
.

Kavanaugh and I are high school friends, and the tactics used against us in 2018 were exactly like those of the Stasi — spreading suspicion and betrayal “between spouses, between schoolmates, between office colleagues.” They went through our high school yearbook and talked about our parties and beach trips, and girlfriends in the 1980s. Like the Stasi, the Left tried to charge us with rowdiness.

I sometimes get some pushback, even from conservatives, for still talking about it. They ask, why are you still writing about this? Why are you still playing this one note?

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My answer is that we are dealing with an American Stasi, and the Stasi does not give up.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of 
The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi
. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.