Unhinged Democrat threatens the Supreme Court with assassination in MSNBC interview
The Left has officially gone off the deep end. Now they’re calling for violence.
And an unhinged Democrat threatened the Supreme Court with assassination in an MSNBC interview.
Given Monday’s presidential immunity decision, a California lawmaker questioned whether President Biden might send in the military to “take out” conservative Supreme Court justices while remaining immune to prosecution.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., proposed the argument as a hypothetical scenario on MSNBC in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States.
The decision that a president has substantial protection from prosecution for official activities committed while in office has enraged Democrats.
The ruling has enormous consequences for former President Donald Trump, whose prosecution on Jan. 6 and potential 2020 election involvement prompted the Supreme Court to hear the case.
Lofgren used Trump’s previous contentious comments to argue that the verdict might allow him “wide range” to amend the Constitution, encourage mob violence, and refuse to acknowledge the election results.
“So we’ve got a problem here. If he cannot be accountable – if any president cannot be held accountable under the laws that exist, that’s a complete departure from our history,” she argued.
“I guess, you know, theoretically, President Biden, acting within the scope of his official duties, could dispatch the military to take out the conservative justices on the court, and he’d be immune,” she continued, posing the question to MSNBC legal analyst, former top prosecutor in the Mueller investigation, Andrew Weissmann.
This came after other shocking arguments in the dissenting opinion from the liberal members of the court in Monday’s verdict.
“The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote.
“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”
Another disturbing prospect was proposed by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a footnote to a second dissent.
Noting that the president’s removal of a cabinet member would be an official act, Jackson stated that “while the President may have the authority to decide to remove the Attorney General, for example, the question here is whether the President has the option to remove the Attorney General by, say, poisoning him to death.”
She went on: “Put another way, the issue here is not whether the President has exclusive removal power, but whether a generally applicable criminal law prohibiting m*rder can restrict how the President exercises that authority.”
However, constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley criticized individuals on the Left for “misleading the public” about the verdict.
“[W]hat these people ignore is that there are checks and balances on a president. He can be impeached. He can be removed. There are federal courts that can enjoin him. There are all of these protections. Just because the president can’t be criminally charged doesn’t mean that a president can’t be stopped,” he said on The Brian Kilmeade Show Tuesday.
When contacted by Fox News Digital, Lofgren denied asking for violence and stated that social media users had taken her statements out of context.
“Yesterday, when reacting to the Supreme Court’s radical decision that goes against what our country’s founders envisioned after overthrowing a king, I posited a hypothetical scenario mirroring Justice Sotomayor’s dissent for the sake of discussion with a panel that included fellow lawyers on MSNBC. Unfortunately, some people, on social media and elsewhere, have omitted the word ‘theoretically’ that I clearly used to start my sentence to make it seem or read like I was calling for the military to assassinate conservative justices,” Lofgren said in a statement.
“I did not call for political violence against the justices or anyone else. I merely offered a legal hypothetical, partially posed as a question, in the context of a conversation about the Supreme Court’s broad immunity ruling. I do not condone nor call for political violence, nor do I condone any president abusing power in any way (the latter of which the Supreme Court, sadly, made allowable under law),” she continued.
Stay tuned to the DC Daily Journal.
