Daily Archives: 15 September 2025

“Political Violence Has Become a Terrifying Fact of American Life”

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That’s the headline. What it doesn’t include, and what the underlying article goes on to not include, is that the political violence is almost exclusively from the Left.

  • Then-Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords (D) shot and nearly killed at a rally
  • Progressive-Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer (NY), on the Supreme Court Building front steps, threatening by name two Supreme Court Justices, followed shortly by an assassination attempt against one of the named
  • Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) accusing Republicans and Donald Trump of autocracy and dictatorship, followed shortly by a Leftist’s mass murder attempt against Republican Congressmen practicing baseball
  • Antifa’s attacks on Conservative newsman Andy Ngo
  • Antifa’s attacks on Christian rallies
  • Attack against then-Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016
  • Months later another Leftist tried to steal a police officer’s pistol with which to shoot Trump at a rally
  • A 2017 attempt by a Leftist to ram a forklift into a Trump motorcade
  • A 2018 mailing of a ricin-laced envelope to Trump
  • George Floyd riots during which Minneapolis’ mayor held off sending in National Guard to quell the riots
  • Summer of Love in Seattle
  • Riots and attacks against Federal officers and buildings in Portland while Portland’s mayor objected to the Federal government sending National Guard troops to protect those Federal buildings
  • 2021 attack on the White House by a Black Nationalist, during which a Capitol Police officer was killed and another injured
  • Two murder 2024 attempts against then-Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump
  • Death threats and swatting made against
    • US District Judge Aileen Cannon
    • New York County DA Alvin Bragg
    • US District Judge Tanya Chutkan
  • Assaults against ICE agents as the go about enforcing immigration law, particularly against violent illegal aliens
  • Murder of Charlie Kirk, a Republican podcaster, speaker, fund-raiser, founder of Turning Point USA
  • The ammunition by the Kirk murderer inscribed with “anti-fascist” and transgender slogans
  • Death threats leveled against Kirk’s widow

Then there’s what Jonathon Turley calls “rage rhetoric,” which Leftists insist is provocative of physical violence, and on that, those Leftists are correct. It’s just that the rhetoric is mostly from their fellow Leftists. The following are in addition to Schumer’s and Sanders’ rage rhetoric. These have set the environment that justifies, in the Left’s collective mind, the violence they inflict.

  • 2022, then-President Joe Biden called the MAGA movement “semi-fascism.”
  • Vice President Kamala Harris yokked it up with Ellen DeGeneres about killing Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence, or former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
  • Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) declared “Elon Musk is seizing the power that belongs to the American people.”
  • Congressman Jamie Raskin (D, MD) said that [Elon] Musk and Trump were conducting a “rapidly expanding and accelerating coup.”
  • Senator Ron Wyden (D, OR) said that a “coup” was being carried out.
  • Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) said Musk was “taking away everything we have.”
  • Congresswoman LaMonica McIver (D, NJ) said “God d—it shut down the Senate!…WE ARE AT WAR!”
  • House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) called on his fellow Progressive-Democrats to fight “in the streets.”

That’s just a taste.

Then there’s the Left’s cancel war against the Right, which while not kinetic is often just as destructive of careers and lives.

Judicial Insubordination

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Elizabeth Price Foley and Mark Pinkert are on the right track. They’ve laid out the problem concisely in their Thursday Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Now some lower-court judges have become brazenly defiant, not only of the administration’s agenda but also of high court opinions. In response, the justices have had to remind lower courts of their constitutional role and chastise them for resisting court precedent. But the resistance continues, threatening to erode the judiciary’s ability to function.

And

An anonymous group of 12 lower-court judges took their grievances to NBC News, telling a reporter that the high court’s rulings are “validating the Trump administration’s criticisms” of lower courts. One said “it’s inexcusable” that the justices don’t “have our backs.” Four judges opined that the justices, especially Chief Justice John Roberts, “should do more to defend the courts,” in the reporter’s words. Another judge complained that he and his colleagues have been “thrown under the bus.” But even an Obama appointee admitted that “the whole ‘Trump derangement syndrome’ is a real issue” and that lower-court judges “are sometimes forgetting to stay in their lane.”

They then propose a solution:

They should avoid writing opinions that contain obvious ambiguities like the one in Fair Admissions. They should also clear away the underbrush of nonoriginalist constitutional law, overruling such precedents rather than narrowing, distinguishing or calling them into doubt. … And all the hullabaloo over the president’s authority to fire executive-branch officers would be quieted if the court flatly overruled Humphrey’s Executor v US rather than merely chip away at it.
The court has a duty to provide doctrinal clarity, especially on constitutional law.

Those certainly are good ideas, at least from this textualist’s perspective. Clarity in bold, declarative sentences written in exclusively plain terms, would good, whether textualist or activist. More is needed though.

The Supreme Court needs lay aside its hesitancy and swat down, firmly, recalcitrant judges, especially (but not only) those of the district courts. The Supreme Court, over the course of its admonishment-containing overrulings, need to remove the recalcitrant judge from the case altogether, an action the Court has done, but up to now all too rarely. The Court also needs, rarely but at a non-zero rate, to rule that a particularly insubordinate judge will have all of his rulings automatically stayed until reviewed by appellate courts, including the Supreme Court, if necessary.

These are drastic steps, to be sure, but they’re necessary to emphasize that Supreme Court rulings are binding on the lower courts, especially at the district level; to increase the efficiency and speed of the courts and especially of the appellate process; and to begin to restore the public’s confidence in our court system.