Sunday, March 8, 2020

Chuck Schumer and the Temptation of Total Political Warfare


By Noah Rothman
Thursday, March 05, 2020

Basking in the adoration of an enthusiastic crowd of progressive activists, Chuck Schumer let himself get carried away.

Addressing a crowd of pro-choice protesters on the steps of the Supreme Court on Wednesday, the Senate minority leader tried to intimidate the Justices as they hear arguments on an abortion-related case. “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh,” Schumer bellowed. “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.”

It was a callous comment bordering on reckless. If Schumer truly believed, as Democrats regularly profess, that the kind of militant rhetorical excesses to which Donald Trump is prone are genuinely dangerous, he might have been more cautious. Indeed, in a rare statement protesting Schumer’s comments, Supreme Court Justice John Roberts echoed the admonitions Democrats often deploy against the president. “Statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous,” Roberts’s statement read. “All members of the Court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.”

Given the Democratic Party’s oft-stated commitment to civility, this measured rebuke should have imposed some discipline on the minority leader. But it did not. In response to Roberts, Schumer’s office issued a gratingly dishonest statement insisting that the minority leader was only referring to “the political price Senate Republicans will pay” for confirming Trump’s Supreme Court picks. Indeed, the real villain here is Justice Roberts, who backed “the right wing’s deliberate misinterpretation of what Sen. Schumer said.” And all “while remaining silent when President Trump attacked Justices Sotomayor and Ginsberg last week.” This episode shows, in Schumer’s estimation, that Roberts “does not just call balls and strikes.”

Given the galling duplicity of this statement, honest observers can only conclude that Schumer’s office is counting on the ignorance of his audience and the complicity of the press to avoid the scrutiny it deserves. What exactly was it that Trump had said about Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sonia Sotomayor that merits a slap on the wrist? The president had called on both justices to “recuse themselves on all Trump or Trump-related matters” because they had made political comments about the president in public forums. Trump expanded on these comments during an official visit to India: “I always thought, frankly, that Justice Ginsburg should do it,” he said, “because she went wild during the campaign when I was running.” These comments surely infringe upon the bounds of political propriety that should govern how a president talks about representatives of competing branches of the federal government, but they do not even approach the kind of incitement Schumer encouraged.

Rather than rush to fact-check Schumer’s comments, some in the press dedicated themselves to supporting it on whatever grounds they could. “Sounded familiar,” remarked Washington Post Supreme Court reporter Robert Barnes. He noted that Schumer’s comments sounded eerily familiar to those Justice Bret Kavanaugh made during his confirmation hearings. “You sowed the wind for decades to come,” the Justice told the members of Congress. “I fear that the whole country will reap the whirlwind.” The only similarity between this and Schumer’s statement here seems to be the word “whirlwind.” The sentiments these two figures express bear no other commonalities. Nevertheless, Slate columnist and court-watcher Dahlia Lithwick agreed with Barnes’s attempt to exculpate Schumer, adding that “it beggars belief” that Roberts is doing anything other than backing up Donald Trump at the expense of his institution.

The notion that Roberts is not an institutionalist but a pro-Trump sleeper agent in robes is nothing short of deranged. This isn’t the first time Roberts has gotten off the bench, so to speak, in defense of the judicial branch’s independence. The last public figure who merited one of his infrequent reprimands was, in fact, Donald Trump. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts wrote in 2018 in response to Trump, who had criticized a judge’s ruling against the administration’s asylum policy by implying that the decision was entirely political. The “independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for,” the Chief Justice concluded.

Schumer’s remarks are so thoroughly indefensible that the more forthright members of the liberal commentariat could not hold their tongues. “Having watched the Schumer clip a few times, it really was out of line!” MSNBC host Chris Hayes averred. “Not just for norms reasons (though I think those matter) but also because idle threats are dumb and expose impotence.” The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus was similarly reproachful. “Bashing judges,” she wrote, “is dangerous, disrespectful, and corrosive to the independence of the judiciary.”

These are noble efforts to police Schumer’s rhetoric. And though they were few and far between, they seem to have had the desired effect. On Thursday, the minority leader offered a qualified apology for his remarks. “I should not have used the words I used yesterday,” he said, adding: “I’m from Brooklyn. We speak in strong language.” If that’s an excuse, it’s one Democrats don’t believe should apply to people from Queens.

Schumer’s apology is welcome, but it doesn’t detract from the revealing aspects of this episode. What was Schumer’s endgame here? How did his office define the conditions for victory in this feud with the Supreme Court Chief Justice? To even pose the question is to illustrate the absurdity of the fight to which the senator committed himself. Schumer did not have a grand plan when he criticized the Court’s two most recent conservative appointees. He read the room and gave the crowd what it wanted: the uncompromising, vaguely menacing rhetoric of total political warfare. Schumer dug himself deeper into a hole he excavated on the steps of the Supreme Court because American political culture punishes contrition. These are all traits evinced by Donald Trump, of course, but the president did not create the incentives to which he often responds so recklessly.

Trump-skeptical commentators and activists on the right have long warned that the coarsening of American culture is a reciprocal phenomenon. It doesn’t begin and end in one political camp. The left has long mocked that meager faction of the American right for its paucity, but it seems the ranks of the Democratic Party’s civility police are just as thin.

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