Many see Democrat double standard on political violence when it comes to Jan. 6, Kavanaugh threat

During a tumultuous week, Democrats pressed hard during a prime time televised hearing to condemn the violence 18 months ago during the Jan. 6 riots while staying mostly muted on the arrest of an alleged assassin targeting conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh over abortion rights. 

The performance has many critics seeing a hypocritical double standard.

Liberal Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz said Democrats' Jan. 6 hearings have been staged to be so unfair and one-sided that it reminded him of the work of the late Sen. Joe McCarthy decades ago or a production of the Soviet-era Pravda network.

"This reminds me of my youth, when, at eight o'clock at night, we would watch the  House Un-American Activities Committee, or the McCarthy committee, holding spectacle hearings in order to tell one side of the story, never having anybody to present the counter narrative," Dershowitz told the Just the News, Not Noise television show.

"But at least in those days, you had an almost equal number of people on the Democrat side," he added. "Here we have Nancy Pelosi fixing, rigging the committee, making sure that the only two nominal Republicans on the committee are anti-Trump Republicans so that nobody will present a counter narrative. It's just so Pravda."

Dershowitz said while Democrats have roundly criticized former President Donald Trump's speech on Jan. 6 as incitement -- comments the law professor said were actually protected by the First Amendment -- they have not condemned Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer's threats to Kavanaugh and Justice Neil Gorsuch that they "will pay the price" for their stances on abortion.

"I would expect Chuck Schumer who I've known for years and years, who I remember was a former student at the Harvard Law School, to retract and apologize for the statements he made in front of the Supreme Court threatening Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and having a dog whistle," Dershowitz said.

"I mean, unbalanced people, like people like the person who went to Kavanugh's house could easily have misinterpretedwhat Schumer said and saying that was a license for violence."

From columnists to TV pundits, there have been lots of efforts to compare and contrast Democrat rhetoric on the two cases of political violence.

During the televised Jan. 6 committee hearing on Thursday, Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) began with saying he was reminded of the "dark history" of the U.S. with regard to slavery and the Ku Klux Klan as he heard "voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists on January 6th, 2021."

Thompson said that on the day of the riot, "it was domestic enemies of the Constitution who stormed the Capitol and occupied the Capitol, who sought to thwart the will of the people, to stop the transfer of power. And so, they did so at the encouragement of the president of the United States, the president of the United States trying to stop the transfer of power, a precedent that had stood for 220 years, even as our democracy had faced its most difficult test."

The Mississippi Democrat said that after losing at both the ballot box in 2020 and in the courts afterwards, Trump continued his conspiracy to overthrow the election.

"Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy, and ultimately Donald Trump, the president of the United States, spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the Constitution to march down the Capitol and subvert American democracy," he continued.

Thompson added that legal jargon mentioned during the hearings, such as "seditious conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States boils down to this: January 6th was the culmination of an attempted coup, a brazen attempt, as one rioter to put it shortly after January 6th, to overthrow the government. The violence was no accident. It represents seeing Trump's last stand, most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power."

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) also said during the hearing, "President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. You will also hear about plots to commit seditious conspiracy on January 6th, a crime defined in our laws as conspiring to overthrow, put down, or destroy by force the government of the United States or to oppose by force the authority thereof."

No one made at the hearing, however, made any mention of the plot to assassinate Kavanaugh just one day earlier.

Early Wednesday morning, Nicholas John Roske from California was carrying weapons near Kavanaugh's Maryland home before being arrested. He admitted to intending to break into the home and kill the justice before committing suicide.

According to an affidavit, Roske also told law enforcement that "he was upset about the leak of a recent Supreme Court draft decision regarding the right to an abortion as well as the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas."

On the John Solomon Reports podcast Friday, Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) also criticized Democrats for being reluctant to support the Supreme Court justices amidst violent threats.

"They don't support the judiciary unless the judiciary is doing the work of their ideology," Perry said. "That's very clear, there's a long history of it at this point. They have used the judiciary to get what they could not get legislatively and now they're being challenged on it with this court. And so they are, I hate to say it, but it sure appears that they are willing to at least accept violence if it will meet the ends that they wish."

He added that not only was Schumer "fomenting violence when he says Judge Kavanaugh, by name, 'you will reap the whirlwind,'" but that President Joe Biden also added fuel to the fire this week.

"You got Joe Biden … this is after the would-be assassin is arrested — goes on national TV, on late night TV, and says that if the Supreme Court finds in a way that they disagree with, it will start 'a mini revolution,'" Perry said.

Biden made the comment on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" Wednesday night with regard to the Supreme Court's expected overturning of Roe v. Wade, following the leak of Justice Samuel Alito's draft opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health.

Perry also criticized Attorney General Merrick Garland for not enforcing the law with regard to protestors outside the justices' homes.

"You got Merrick Garland, the attorney general of the United States, refusing, refusing to enforce the law where you have protesters right out in front — it's on display for the whole world to see, it's on primetime TV, we see it in our living rooms — these protesters right in front of their, the justices', homes protesting, and that's against the law, it's intimidation. This is something from a third world," he said.

Perry mentioned that Speaker Pelosi postponed the vote on the Senate bill protecting Supreme Court justices' families, saying, "no one is in danger" just a day after Roske was arrested outside of Kavanaugh's home.

"I don't know how much danger she needs to witness before she considers someone to be in danger," Perry said.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy also responded to Pelosi's comment, saying in a press briefing, "I don't know how she can say that, knowing that you just captured a person who wanted to kill Kavanaugh and his family."