A group of liberal Democrats from New York has sent a threatening letter to the Supreme Court over their upcoming decision on New York gun laws that run afoul of the 2nd Amendment.
They say that an unfavorable decision would set off a movement to pack the Supreme Court with liberal judges and make the court the premier law writing body in the United States.
The letter was written by RI Sen Sheldon Whitehouse and signed off on by Sens.
Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Dick Durbin of Illinois and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.
Most telling is that they don’t cite US law in their arguments but rather they use liberal hosts from CNN and MSNBC as well as selective polls.
A “friend of the court” brief filed with the Supreme Court by Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and four Democratic colleagues contains a not-so-veiled threat that if the justices don’t vote the Democrats’ way on a pending Second Amendment case, Democrats just might decide to remake the court itself.
It’s not litigation; it’s intimidation.
But the senators’ language goes far beyond the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York. In language ranging from pedantic to hectoring to outright threatening, the Democrats argue that the high court has been virtually hijacked by conservatives.
“With bare partisan majorities, the court has influence sensitive areas like voting rights, partisan gerrymandering, dark money, union power, regulation of pollution, corporate liability and access to federal court, particularly regarding civil rights and discrimination in the workplace. Every single time, the corporate and Republican political interests prevailed,” the brief states.
In an odd appeal to authority for United States senators addressing the Supreme Court, they write that as “scholars, journalists and commentators have observed, the court has employed a number of methods to circumvent justicability in decisions that moved the law.”
Now, obviously citing legal scholars is one thing, but when senators are relying on “journalists and commentators” to make their case, literally, in the Supreme Court, it’s a pretty good bet they have an argument that depends more on public relations than legal strength.
(If The New York Times editorial page or CNN’s Chris Cuomo think something is true, who do five members justices of the Supreme Court think they are to rule differently?)
“Restructured to reduce the influence of politics” is how the Democrats are describing their half-baked proposal to expand the court and pack it with justices who will vote liberal ways – actually increasing the influence of politics over an institution that was expressly designed to be as independent of politics as a government agency can be in a democratic republic.
It’s also thuggery. Whitehouse and the Gang of Five are basically threatening the United States Court to vote the way it demands on a gun control case, or face the prospects of a Democratically controlled government in the future vastly overhauling the court itself and how it does business.