Democratic Senator faces ethics complaint for threatening the Supreme Court over the Second Amendment

Back on August 13th we learned that a group of Democratic Senators threatened–in Wassermanesque style–the Supreme Court with retribution in a court brief if the court did not rule with the Democrats and against the Second Amendment in an upcoming case.

  Here is a little background:

Several high-profile Senate Democrats warned the Supreme Court in pointed terms this week that it could face a fundamental restructuring if justices do not take steps to “heal” the court in the near future.

The ominous and unusual warning was delivered as part of a brief filed Monday in a case related to a New York City gun law. Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., referenced rulings by the court’s conservative majority in claiming it is suffering from some sort of affliction which must be remedied.

“The Supreme Court is not well. And the people know it,” the brief said. “Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.’”

  The hypocrisy of playing partisan politics while accusing the court of partisan politics was not lost on me, but the idea that sitting Senators would file a court brief with the Supreme Court threatening it was astounding to me! And now it turns out at least one Democrat is facing an ethics complaint for trying to intimidate the Supreme Court.

  Here is more:

Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island has attracted an ethics complaint and vigorous criticism from conservatives after raising the prospect of court-packing in a new legal filing before the Supreme Court.

“Senator Whitehouse’s bald-faced threat to ‘heal’ or face the consequences is inappropriate and shows just why an independent judiciary is essential to our system of government,” Elizabeth Slattery, a legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The justices should, and most likely will, ignore attempts to intimidate them, and instead focus on what the Constitution requires.”

“And further, the facts don’t bear out Senator Whitehouse’s claim that the justices are driven by a partisan agenda,” Slattery added. “Just look at the voting records of the newest justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, who ended up on opposite sides in nearly a third of cases last term. That doesn’t look like the outcome-oriented judging to me.”

   I could not agree more, both with the need for an ethics complaint to be filed against this attempt to bully the court and with the fact that this court has hardly been partisan. With Donald Trump’s two nominees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, being busts and with John Roberts as Chief Justice the newly made Supreme Court has been mostly a disaster.

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium