Thursday night’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell featured an odd hit piece on Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. O’Donnell, still reeling from SCOTUS’s historic Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, criticized the Chief Justice for a speech where he recounted the unfortunate danger the Court was faced with from pro-abortion activists in the wake of the decision leaking last year.
O’Donnell whined that Roberts found that the “hardest decision” he’s had to make was to put security fencing around the Supreme Court facility. According to O’Donnell, Roberts should have had a tougher decision regarding death penalty or healthcare cases.
The mode in which the Supreme Court comes to a decision should be determined solely by the law, not on personal feelings. O’Donnell also threw Roberts’ Catholic faith in his face, implying he should have based his decisions on death penalty cases on the Catholic Church’s opposition to the death penalty. Supreme Court justices do not base their decisions on Catholic social thought, but on United States law. Has O’Donnell completely forgotten about the separation of church and state which liberals have held as absolute truth for years?
And since O’Donnell completely omitted Roberts’ explanation from the speech, he attributed a wholly false motive to Roberts’ order for the fencing to be placed around the Court:
But, he did not want the protesters against his easy decisions to revoke the constitutional rights from women to get close to the Supreme Court so he ordered a temporary fence erected around the Supreme Court, which he just might have to keep there or decide to keep there for the rest of his life.
Roberts, who is widely seen to be a stabilizing, centrist figure on the Supreme Court, was not ordering fencing placed there as some sort of political optics move. He did so to protect the Court from legitimate potential threats from leftist activists that very well could have threatened the safety of the justices, such as the foiled assassination attempt on Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s life or the alleged unlawful protests at the homes of SCOTUS justices.
And as for the assertion that Roberts would keep the temporary fencing there “for the rest of his life,” well, SCOTUSblog reported that “An eight-foot-tall fence erected around the Supreme Court in the spring has come down, replaced by a network of much smaller barriers … A series of shorter metal barriers, each about three feet tall, continued to line the perimeter on Monday.” How horrifying it is that the highest Court in the country is protected by three-foot-tall barriers after January 6, which was considered by Democrats to be the worst attack America faced since the Civil War.
Lawrence O’Donnell’s attack on John Roberts was sponsored by Infiniti and Subaru. Their contact information is linked.
The transcript is below, click "expand" to read:
MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell
05/25/2023
10:36 PM ETLAWRENCE O’DONNELL: The chief justice of the United States thought long and hard about it, and he wrote a passage of a speech that he gave earlier this week in which he described the hardest decision he ever had to make.
JOHN ROBERTS: In 18 years, I was asked what was the hardest thing, what was the hardest decision I had to make an 18 years. Was it this First Amendment case, was it the death penalty case, was it some major separation of powers case? None of those. The hardest decision I had to make was whether to erect fences and barricades around the Supreme Court.
O’DONNELL: It would be hard to imagine a more shallow-minded chief justice serving over the last 18 years than John Roberts. From his seat on the Supreme Court, he has ordered people to their deaths in capital punishment cases. And, apparently, those were not hard decisions for him. Even though his Catholic religion and the Pope opposed every one of those executions, John Roberts had no problem supporting them.
John Roberts has made important decisions on countless cases that have affected the health and safety of millions and millions of people, and that apparently wasn’t hard for him. He decided to repeal portions of Obamacare and take health insurance away from people, that was not hard. And of course, he decided to revoke a constitutional right that allowed women - the control of their own bodies and that was not hard for John Roberts.
But, he did not want the protesters against his easy decisions to revoke the constitutional rights from women to get close to the Supreme Court. So he ordered a temporary fence erected around the Supreme Court, which he just might have to keep there or decide to keep there for the rest of his life. So that the voices of those protesters can be pushed farther away from his window.
It was not hard for John Roberts to make a decision that forced a ten-year-old girl, who was raped in Ohio, to give birth. That’s what John Roberts’ decision did. And that was not hard for him. But, that ten-year-old girl found the help she needed to leave the state of Ohio, to get the legal abortion she needed in Indiana. And, thanks to John Roberts, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, who helped that ten-year-old girl is now the target of a disciplinary hearing by the medical board in Indiana on charges of failing to report child abuse to authorities and violating patient privacy.
