It’s shameful that a US Senator would say that political activities might lead to violence. How dare a polician try to stifle dissenting activity by coded threats?

In both cases, fear of violence was used to rally support for the politician’s measures to prevent that violence. Both instances were cynical and unwarranted. Both cases involved morally specious arguments and motives. If you think that one was morally OK and the other was not, then Jon is speaking to you.

MK: There’s no moral equivalency? Why, because you say so? I’m not sure why you believe you have any authority on the matter that we should all just take your word for it.

MK: There’s no moral equivalency? Why, because you say so? I’m not sure why you believe you have any authority on the matter that we should all just take your word for it.

Actually, I explained why - you obviously didn’t bother to read my post, so I will shorten it.

1. The Rehnquist Court has ruled that Congress lacks the power to give citizens the right to sue the federal government for unlawful action under environmental statutes. In so doing, the court invalidated, in effect, dozens of Congressional enactments, which purport to give citizens that very right. Constitutional history strongly suggests that Congress has the power that the court denied it. But in invalidating the citizens’ suit, the court ventured not a word about the history or about the framers’ original understanding. Indeed the court made no effort to connect its unprecedented decision to the text, structure, or history of the Constitution. This is particularly disturbing, because some of the key justices (most prominently Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas) usually purport to base their decisions on what history tells us—and in invalidating federal legislation, Justices Scalia and Thomas have said nothing about history.

2. The court has struck down a number of affirmative action programs adopted at both the state and federal levels. Does the Constitution clearly forbid such programs? It does not. Justices Scalia and Thomas have expressed the greatest willingness to strike down affirmative action programs, but the history of the equal protection clause strongly suggests that such programs were not thought to be unconstitutional. To date, no one on the court has discussed the relevant history in an opinion.

3. The court has struck down a number of state and federal efforts to regulate commercial advertising. Justice Thomas has gone so far as to suggest that commercial advertising should receive the same level of constitutional protection as political dissent—and the Rehnquist Court has unquestionably moved in his direction. But the idea that the Constitution provides strong protection to commercial advertising is novel, and the court has made no effort to show that the idea is compelled by the original understanding, or any plausible understanding, of the Constitution.

4. The court has used the idea of state sovereign immunity to strike down a number of congressional enactments, including parts of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act. In doing so, the court acknowledged that its decisions are not based on the text of the Constitution.

5. Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment gives Congress the power to "enforce, by appropriate legislation," the provisions of that amendment. In a remarkable, precedent-busting series of decisions—striking down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (which required employers to justify, in strong terms, any practices that interfered with religious practices), the Violence Against Women Act (which gave victims of gender-motivated violence a right to sue in federal court), and part of the Americans With Disabilities Act—the Rehnquist Court has dramatically reduced Congress’s power under Section 5. It has effectively concluded that Congress is limited to preventing conduct that, in the court’s own view, would violate the Fourteenth Amendment—and has thus forbidden Congress from legislating on the basis of its own views about what that amendment means. The court has reached these conclusions, and insisted on its own supremacy, without seriously grappling with pre–Rehnquist Court precedents or the history of the Fourteenth Amendment.

6. For the first time in 50 years, the Rehnquist Court has struck down federal legislation as beyond congressional power under the Commerce Clause. In the most important case, the court struck down a key provision of the Violence Against Women Act, notwithstanding extensive testimony before Congress, and extensive findings by Congress, that sex-related violence has a significant effect on interstate commerce.

“I believe the increasing politicization of the judicial decision making process at the highest levels of our judiciary has bred a lack of respect for some of the people who wear the robe. That is a national tragedy.

Finally, I don’t know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country—certainly nothing new; we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that has been on the news. I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in violence, certainly without any justification, but that is a concern I have that I wanted to share.”