It’s not just Donald Trump who is experiencing two standards of justice in America these days.
In a monologue last week, Tucker Carlson highlighted other examples of a judicial double standard.
He referred to the case of Douglass Mackey, who posted a satirical meme about voting by text message and is now facing up to 10 years in prison after being convicted by a New York state jury. Then he noted Kristina Wong, who similarly posted a meme about texting your vote, and yet has faced no legal consequences.
Wong was a Hillary Clinton voter. Mackey was a Trump supporter.
Another double standard? It’s hard to imagine that if protesters were regularly showing up at the homes of Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Jackson Brown, there would be no prosecution. (Especially if, as happened with Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of those justices had someone come to their street planning to assassinate them.)
“Not a single person has been prosecuted for illegally harassing Supreme Court justices outside of their homes,” Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., said last month. “The reason is crystal clear: The Department of Justice has willfully chosen not to enforce federal law.”
At a hearing, “Britt said the DOJ explicitly discouraged U.S. Marshals from enforcing the law against the protesters without coordination with the relevant U.S. attorney’s office, warning that it would be ‘counterproductive’ for the marshals to make arrests on cases that the DOJ ‘will not charge and prosecute,’” reported my colleague Mary Margaret Olohan.
The U.S. Marshals have been stationed outside Supreme Court justices’ homes in the wake of the ongoing protests.
Another key example of this judicial double standard is the enforcement of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a 1994 law intended to protect both abortion clinics and pregnancy resource centers.
As the Justice Department website states, “The FACE Act is not about abortions. The statute protects all patients, providers, and facilities that provide reproductive health services, including pro-life pregnancy counseling services and any other pregnancy support facility providing reproductive health care.”
But based on the numbers, the FACE Act as currently enforced is “about abortions.”
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, who is leading a group of lawmakers calling for defunding the Justice Department’s enforcement of the FACE act, noted there’s a significant disparity in the current enforcement.
“In 2022, the FACE Act was used more than two dozen times against pro-life activists, including Mark Houck, Father Fidelis Moscinski, Lauren Handy, Herb Geraghty, and a Holocaust survivor,” wrote Roy in a letter first reported on by The Daily Signal and signed by 11 other House Republicans. “Prior to this year, the FACE Act had never been used to indict individuals related to an attack on a pro-life pregnancy center or house of worship.”
And that’s not because pregnancy resource centers aren’t facing violence. Since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, was leaked last year, there have been 83 attacks on pregnancy centers and pro-life groups, according to a Catholic Vote tracker.
One center attacked was the Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center in Lynchburg, Virginia.
“They had taken crowbars to almost all of our windows, two of our doors, and just shattered all of the glass,” Susan Campbell, the center’s executive director, told The Daily Signal in an interview last year. “They had spray-painted [the shapes of] coat hangers on the sidewalks, on the brick facing of the buildings, and [wrote] political things like ‘Vote blue.’ In red on the stamped concrete, it read ‘If abortion ain’t safe, you ain’t safe.’”
Yet there have only been four arrests made for the attacks on all pregnancy resource centers, suggesting either that those attacking the pregnancy centers are criminal masterminds, or, more plausibly, it’s a low priority for the Justice Department to track down and charges these individuals.
That’s not OK.
Our justice system is supposed to enforce the law without fear or favor, not promote a particular agenda.
What’s happened to Trump is just the most prominent example of the justice system’s corruption. It’s not an exception to the rule, but an arrest that highlights a very concerning pattern.
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