Republicans spent decades building the right-wing judicial machinery that enabled this week’s devastating Supreme Court draft decision that when made official would overturn nearly 50 years of abortion rights in America. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a single Republican lawmaker eager to celebrate what by any measure is a generational victory for anti-abortion rights conservatives.
Instead, Washington’s political media is abuzz with the race to uncover who leaked the court’s draft plan. And no one is more outraged than Senate Republicans, who lined up on Tuesday to condemn the leak as a dangerous attack on democracy itself.
“By every indication, this was yet another escalation in the radical left’s ongoing campaign to bully and intimidate federal judges and substitute mob rule for the rule of law,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement—without offering even a hint of evidence to support his incendiary claims.
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“It is a sad day for the Supreme Court and a dangerous day for the Rule of Law,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham in a statement, adding, “the radical Left is hell-bent on reshaping institutions that have stood in the way of the outcomes they desire.”
During a Fox Business appearance on Tuesday, Sen. Ted Cruz mused about a “left-wing law clerk” responsible for the leak—a character Cruz made up out of thin air because we have no idea who leaked the draft—that will be “prosecuted and [serve] real jail time.”
This is the same Cruz who publicly apologized for calling the Jan. 6 insurrection a “terrorist attack” after Trumpist standard-bearers Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz accused him of disloyalty to the MAGA movement. And that’s the point.
A mob of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 after the Republican president perpetuating the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen told them to “fight like hell.” And then 147 congressional Republicans still voted to oppose certifying the election’s results that very night. A few weeks later, 43 Republican senators voted to acquit Trump at his second impeachment—including McConnell, who said Trump was “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of [Jan. 6],” which he also called “terrorism.”
Republican efforts to muddy the waters around the violent Jan. 6 attack began even as the insurrection was unfolding, with text message evidence outlining how prominent Fox News personalities—including Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham—sent increasingly panicked text messages to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, while publicly downplaying an active attempt by the far right to overthrow the peaceful transfer of power. But unlike the chaos of Jan. 6, the Republican messaging machine was well-prepared to use this week’s Supreme Court leak to whitewash their own well-documented history of cheerleading the collapse of American institutions.
But all that’s ancient history, even if the Jan. 6 Committee is nowhere near done with its work. Republicans don’t want to talk about it anymore. They need a distraction.
And so, voilà, GOP Outrage Theater has a new uber-villain: “the Leaker.”
But the GOP’s moral outrage over the Supreme Court leak isn’t just cynical, it’s factually inaccurate—because there are no known facts to work with!
As it stands, Republicans are effectively rewriting history, while pinning blame for the Supreme Court leak on an unnamed and possibly nonexistent agent of the shadowy “radical left.” Unfortunately for the news-consuming public, Beltway media outlets like Axios and Politico largely allowed McConnell to skirt tough questions about what the Supreme Court’s decision actually means. In place of a serious grilling, Republicans were left free to weave their narrative without interruption from facts and reality.
McConnell’s attempt to equate the draft leak with an attack on democracy didn’t originate from the Minority Leader’s office. McConnell and other GOP lawmakers are pulling their language directly from the far-right goons who have made a career out of minimizing the damage of Republican extremism.
A day before McConnell spoke, the conservative Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh tweeted that the Supreme Court leak was “an attack on our system 100,000,000 times more serious than the Capitol riot,” urging his audience to “never listen” to Democrats concerned about “saving democracy.” The Daily Wire’s resident celebrity pundit Ben Shapiro went further, speculating that the leak was “designed to create threat to the life and limb of any justice who signs onto the majority opinion.”
By comparison, Shapiro wasn’t nearly as worried about the actual violence that took place on Jan. 6, describing Democrats’ outrage over the attack as a “game,” while hand-waving away the severity of that day with the glib remark, “Politics is always politics. Always.”
In the “law-and-order” GOP, a leak of a SCOTUS draft decision is an assault on the fabric of America, but an actual attack on the federal government is recast by the Republican National Committee as the “legitimate political discourse” of justifiably angry conservative voters.
It’s no mistake that Republicans are demanding jail for a leaker they imagine is a Democrat. With the House Jan. 6 Committee gearing up for blockbuster public hearings this June, the GOP desperately needs to convince Americans that what happened on Jan. 6 wasn’t that bad—and if it was, meh, because Democrats attack democracy, too. Since there’s no actual evidence to support their delusions, McConnell and Republicans are more than happy to make up a liberal villain in hopes of confusing Americans, and masking their own terrible legacy of antidemocratic misconduct.
Republicans will flex their considerable media machinery to keep the story of “the Leaker” in the headlines—both as a dodge to avoid discussing the Supreme Court’s apparent intent to overturn a ruling that 54 percent of Americans support, and as a way to weaken any efforts to hold the GOP accountable for its actions (and inactions) on Jan. 6.
For the sake of our democracy, both the media and Democrats must proactively push back against these cynical lies before they become another super-effective weapon in Republicans’ misinformation arsenal. They can start by breaking the leadership taboo on using the word abortion, which President Joe Biden studiously avoided saying during a press gaggle on Tuesday morning.
Unless Democrats can find their voice and break the Republican-promoted myth that talking about abortion is political suicide, the GOP will once again enjoy unchallenged messaging control during a critical time for women’s rights.
