A bullet dodged, literally
An assassination attempt that would have torn apart the country falls short; why you have to hold your nose and work with people on the other team; and the Browns keep doing Browns things.
This post is free to everyone on the mailing list, but premium subscribers get it a few hours earlier. Try a 14-day trial to get early access to all posts and the comment section.
In a liberal democracy, political assassinations are a bad thing. Just some of the trenchant political analysis for which you’re paying five bucks a month.
The guy who showed up near Justice Kavanaugh’s house yesterday got cold feet and turned himself in before he could do any damage, which is why the Wokesboro Baptist Church can keep creeping on his family without any fear of getting kicked off Twitter and the New York Times can bury the story to an extent I’m absolutely certain they would had this been some MAGA maniac showing up at Justice Kagan’s place. (It’s not just Fox News that selectively covers the news in support of a partisan narrative, though admittedly few major outlets are so blatant about it.)
If you think murdering a Supreme Court Justice is morally justified, well, there’s nothing I can say that would change your mind about that. Bless your heart. But I shouldn’t have to explain the absolutely unholy shitstorm that would result from a successful assassination attempt, especially when the Republican-appointed target would be replaced by a Democratic President and Senate. It would have the same effect as the Beer Belly Putsch actually succeeding in overturning the 2020 election results, namely “Troubles” level violence at the very least.
But people who fantasize about starting another civil war, no matter what side they’re on, seem really confident that the other side won’t shoot back.
While liberals downplay this story or wink at it, conservatives who’ve spent the last two years making excuses for January 6 (and ignoring last week’s successful murder of a retired judge by a MAGA maniac, whose hit list included included Democratic politicians plus uber-RINO Mitch McConnell) are looking for a high-profile political adversary to blame. It looks like they’ve settled on the senior Senator from New York:
Republicans have been highlighting a past video of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) warning Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh he will “pay the price” in the wake of a would-be assassin being arrested outside the judge’s home.
The video of Schumer is from a 2020 protest outside the court. Schumer spoke to the crowd of activists as the judges heard a case on a Louisiana law restricting abortion access. The armed man who was arrested outside Kavanaugh’s Maryland home this week reportedly told police he was angered by a recent opinion draft leak out of the Supreme Court suggesting Roe v. Wade could potentially be overturned.
In his 2020 comments, Schumer named both Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and said they could release a “whirlwind” when it comes to abortion.
“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,” Schumer said.
Schumer’s “pay the price” line earned a rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts at the time, referring to it as a “threatening statement.”
Clips of the words are being heavily shared by Republican lawmakers and conservative activists in the wake of the arrest, with many arguing Schumer’s language very well could have helped radicalize people now incensed all over again with the draft leak.
“Chuck Schumer called for this violence. The armed lunatic who showed up at Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home was simply following orders,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) tweeted.
After the Buffalo massacre I pushed back against people trying to directly blame Tucker Carlson’s rhetoric, and I think the connection between this failed attack and Sen. Schumer’s angry speechifying is even shakier. The would-be killer himself said he was angry about an impending decision which would overturn Roe v. Wade1 and was pushed over the edge by the recent spate of mass shootings. He didn’t need a two-year old speech to “incite” him into action.
Trying to blame political opponents for the actions of unhinged terrorists is a trick at least eleven years old, when the conventional wisdom had it that Sarah Palin incited the fatal Tuscon mass shooting in which Gabby Giffords was badly injured. (Of the many, many things for which we can criticize Palin, this wasn’t one of them.) In fact, most political killers say they’re incited by events as much as, if not more than, what politicians and commentators said about them.
Ask the purveyor of an anti-Muslim hate crime why he did it, and he’ll likely say it was because of 9/11, the Bastille Day truck rampage, or ISIS atrocity videos, at least as much as a manifesto he read somewhere. But it’s easier to use it as a club with which to attack someone you didn’t like in the first place.
That said, I do think everyone needs to turn the temperature down a few notches - not so much because of the fear some maniac will take our words as a call for violent action, but for our own good.
People are complicated and sometimes completely inscrutable. (Sarah Longwell once ran a focus group of people in Georgia who voted for Marjorie Taylor Greene and Joe Biden in the same election.) Sometimes your local representative might have helped you out in some way - honestly, this is 95% of what politicians actually do - so you reward her with your vote, even if you disagree with her party.
Partisan hatred is as old as the Republic, but it really does seem to have heated up in recent years. Jeff Jacoby surveys the damage:
Far too many of today's political arguments begin from the premise that those on the other side of a controversial issue are motivated by repugnant views or sick motives. That attitude pervades the abortion and gun debates. Supporters of Roe are "evil monsters who don't think twice about slaughtering unborn babies," a conservative radio host tells his many online followers. "There is no number of murdered little children that is too many for Republicans," writes a prominent liberal journalist after the massacre in Uvalde. Such is the quality of rhetoric you encounter if you spend any time scrolling through social media or watching cable news — resentment, mockery, rage, and the conviction that anyone who disagrees does so in bad faith.
This isn't merely abrasive politics or overheated partisanship, which are to be expected in heterogeneous democratic societies. It is toxic polarization — the populist cancer that has metastasized on both the right and the left of American culture. It turns every disagreement into a binary war of good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, enlightened vs. barbaric. It shreds the public sense of moral community — the presumption that, whatever our disagreements, we all operate within a shared tradition and are pursuing the common good.
[…]
"The truth is that the best argument on each side is a damn good one, and until you acknowledge that fact, you aren't speaking or even thinking honestly about the issue," wrote Caitlin Flanagan in a powerful essay in The Atlantic in 2019. "You certainly aren't going to convince anybody."
The same is true when it comes to guns. Yes, the Constitution enshrines "the right of the people to keep and bear arms." But that shouldn't inhibit even the staunchest supporter of Second Amendment rights from admitting that firearms take a ghastly toll on American communities and that reasonable restrictions on acquiring and carrying guns are both sensible and, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, "presumptively lawful." At the same time, even people who would ban all handguns and assault weapons if they could ought to have the intellectual honesty to affirm, with Senator Bernie Sanders, that "99.9 percent" of gun owners are law-abiding.
It is not betraying your convictions or abandoning your allies to show a measure of grace to those with whom you profoundly disagree or to concede that your cause doesn't have a monopoly on integrity. Self-government is not a zero-sum game — inevitably it requires compromise, and compromise is only possible when honest debate is possible. Yet when it comes to our thorniest, most divisive political controversies, such as abortion and gun control, leading politicians, activists, and opinion leaders act as if they are in a war to the death, in which the goal is not just for their side to win but to ensure that the other side is seen to fail.
You don’t have to hold hands with them. God knows where Bob’s have been.
And I can’t say you should never end a friendship because of noxious political views. I’ve done so myself a few times (one guy I knew fell really deep into QAnon garbage and couldn’t talk about anything else) and had it done to me many times, though that might have had more to do with my off-putting personality than my opinions.
But I also know many people I know to be fundamentally good, even if I sometimes strongly disagree with them. Even people who might not be good can still do good, sometimes. Say what you will about Ben Carson, but if I need a brain surgeon I’ll accept his help.2
Unless there’s a new deadly strain of COVID-19 that only kills people who don’t agree with you on every issue, they aren’t going away any time soon. And that leaves the options of compromise, stagnation or sectarian warfare.
If you choose the latter, well, Godspeed. After all, surely the other side won’t shoot back, right?
The Cleveland Browns: making Toronto Maple Leafs fans feel slightly better about themselves since 1999.
Ironically, of the five Justices attached to Justice Alito’s leaked draft opinion, Kavanaugh is the one who’d be most likely to back off and concur with a less radical ruling.
I can’t find it, but Piers Morgan once tweeted that he’d never let Carson anywhere near his brain, and someone responded, “he’s a brain surgeon, not a proctologist.”