Carrie Campbell Severino
Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement announcement came after a year-long campaign by far-left dark-money groups to intimidate the liberal bloc’s senior justice into vacating his Supreme Court seat. The goal was to ensure that President Biden would replace him with an even more liberal justice who would be expected to hold that seat for decades.
It was never a particularly subtle effort. Demand Justice, the far-left group dedicated to judicial nominations in the vast Arabella Advisors dark-money network, even launched a “Breyer Retire” campaign, complete with an online petition telling the justice to step down immediately and a billboard truck driving around the Supreme Court building to convey that message. And the day after the announcement, the same truck took a victory lap, thanking Breyer.
That was followed by a drive among an increasing number of Democrats to pack the Court, an idea that had been considered beyond the pale since Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to advance it in the 1930s, only to be rebuffed by his own party. But dark-money groups funded by Arabella embraced Court-packing and even formed a coalition called “Unrig the Courts.”The Left’s pressure campaign is of a piece with other intimidation tactics that have only escalated in recent years. In 2019, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and several of his Democratic colleagues filed an amicus brief in a Second Amendment case that closed with the threat of having the Court “restructured” if it did not “heal itself . . . . particularly on the urgent issue of gun control.”
In 2020, then–Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer stood in front of the Supreme Court building on the day oral argument was heard in an abortion case and threatened two justices, “I want to tell you, Gorsuch! I want to tell you, Kavanaugh! You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price! You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
Perhaps these Democratic senators could not help themselves; after all, liberals have for generations relied upon the high court to impose an agenda that they could not get through democratically elected legislatures — and they are currently hampered in Congress by a 50–50 Senate...
Whomever Biden chooses to succeed Justice Breyer will be handpicked and blessed by the left-wing dark-money groups who helped elect him and the Senate’s Democrats. Such groups spent more than $1.5 billion on the 2020 election, over $1.2 billion of which came from the Arabella network. Both Jackson and Kruger are on Demand Justice’s own short list. Note that Paige Herwig, who runs judicial selection for the Biden White House, previously worked for the group — as did White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
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