Rand Paul Blocks Consideration of Bill Protecting Federal Judges and Their Families as FOX News Tries to Get a Federal Judge Murdered

     There was a bit of blowback from progressives and centrists regarding the Supreme Court Police Parity Act. For clarification: all the law did was give Supreme Court justices the same protection as the president and members of Congress get-- no more, no less. There was also controversy on the Right with a claim that Democrats were trying to derail the bill when, in fact, the opposite is true: Democrats wanted to expand who was covered under the bill while Republicans led by Mitch McConnell threatened to filibuster such a version.

     Let's make another thing clear: political violence is what happens in countries like Nicaragua, Cuba, Guatemala, and Venezuela, not the United States. That's what we said after January 6th not because of politics, but because it is true that political violence has no place in the United States. Brett Kavanaugh has no place on the Supreme Court, but even succeeding in the demented goal one man had of killing him would have had anything but a positive impact on the makeup of the Supreme Court: without question, the unprecedented act would have cost Democrats the House and the Senate in November as well as made it impossible to appoint a liberal judge in the meantime.

     Something else to consider: it's not just the judges or one side of the political aisle harmed by actions like these. In July 2020, an ultra-MAGA extremist named Roy Den Hollander who was involved in the men's rights movement placed a bomb in a package at the door of New Jersey judge Esther Salas, an Obama appointee who was the first Latina to serve as a magistrate and a district judge in her home state. Salas was not home at the time, but her son, Daniel Anderl, was killed by the explosion just one day after his 20th birthday, while her husband was seriously injured. Hollander later died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound across the country in California. Hollander had also planned to kill Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

     In the name of Daniel, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved Daniel's Law, a bill to ban publishing the addresses of federal judges and their families online. (Hollander got Salas' address from public records.) Seems like a pretty good law. Enter Rand Paul, a senator with no significant achievements whose sole role in the Senate has been to delay consequential legislation like the Emmett Till Antilynching Act and the Ukraine Supplemental Appropriations Act. No surprise here, Paul is the sole senator with an objection, one that has prevented this bill from passing the Senate after it was voted out of the committee unanimously in December 2021.

     In spite of all of their bellyaching over the attempted violent attack on Brett Kavanaugh, it is a Republican senator, specifically the junior senator from Kentucky, preventing the passage of the most consequential legislation Congress could pass to protect federal judges. This is especially despicable considering the fallout that has occurred since the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago on August 8th and the attack on a Cincinnati FBI field office that occurred days afterward because of the violent and false rhetoric by Republican leaders. This rhetoric has included targeting Bruce E. Reinhart, the magistrate judge who signed off on the warrant in the Southern District of Florida. In what has been the most despicable attack to date, FOX News shared a doctored image of Judge Reinhart with Oreos and whiskey getting his feet rubbed by convicted sex trafficker and Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. The image was the worst photoshop I have ever seen and featured a notorious image of the two rapists on Epstein's private jet. Even Sean Hannity pointed out that the image looked doctored to Brian Kilmeade, who presented it as fact and later tried to backpedal by claiming he had displayed it in jest.

     The damage was already done. Reinhart had already been receiving death threats that forced the Southern District of Florida to remove his personal information from their website and led the FBI to put Kevlar fabric around his windows. This image made it so much worse: any person without critical thinking or technology skills, i.e. the FOX News audience, would believe the image displaying Judge Reinhart to be real. Most people who believed anyone, let alone a judge, to be involved in human trafficking would (not entirely incorrectly) feel justified to inflict great bodily injury or even death upon such a person. The impact of sharing this image could land Judge Reinhart the same fate as Ricky Schiffer, the Trump supporter who was fatally shot by police after assaulting FBI agents in Cincinnati. Judge Reinhart has a clear case for defamation here.

    If you thought the fallout from January 6th was despicable, what is happening right now is even worse. Republicans blocking consideration of legislation to protect judges and law enforcement while inciting violence against them in defense of a man under investigation for violating the Espionage Act is a new low for this sham of a political party.