There are certain dates that have become a regular feature in American life. In February, the Sandhill Cranes return to the Platte River in Tennessee. In March, the swallows return to San Juan Capistrano…and in October, the protesters have returned to Hupper Island, the summer vacation home of Chief Justice Roberts.
The last migratory pattern is more recent and certainly less welcomed. In past years, liberal protesters have descended on the homes of conservative justices to disrupt their lives, shout abuses, and, in one case involving Justice Brett Kavanaugh, seek to kill a member of the Court. Protesters outside the home of Justice Amy Coney Barrett left bloody dolls on the lawn, knowing that she had young children inside.
This week, the protesters appeared at the vacation home of Chief Justice John Roberts in Maine. Calling themselves “kayak-tivists,” they formed flotillas facing his home to hold up signs and voice their displeasure at the jurist.
It is an ironic moment for a Chief Justice who has been regularly attacked by President Donald Trump for voting against his position in major cases ranging from tariffs to birthright citizenship. However, this is about rage not reason. Back in 2022, Becca Shaw Glaser wrote about how Mainers needed to harass Roberts whenever he ventured out of his home.
She wrote:
“Roberts is one of the most powerful people in the entire world. He comes to Maine to unwind and feel good about himself and his decisions, despite if he has just gutted our rights, forcing rape victims to give birth after an arbitrary time period determined by the government, gutted environmental protections, overruled basic gun regulations, decreed against the separation of church and state, and made politics much more unequal and infested with money.
Exactly why should we continue to let Roberts use Maine as his easygoing backdrop for fun and relaxation? Why should Roberts get to breathe in the beautiful Maine air when he is fine with destroying methods of keeping our air clean?…
Maine is not here as your happy place, your wind-down from all of your hard work destroying my civil liberties and democracy. No. May you never feel welcome here again…”
Glaser, who was later dropped as a columnist, has pushed Mainers to hound Roberts wherever he goes in Maine:
“Should you see Chief Justice John Roberts duck into Squid Ink coffee or the Port Clyde General Store this summer, consider letting him know exactly what you think of him and his illegitimate, ultra-conservative court. Yell, boo, whisper, weep audibly, give him the thumbs down or the finger, hand him a note, refuse to serve him.”
In its recent discussion of these protesters, the New York Times features Glaser and reveals how last year Glaser was approached by Roberts’ daughter, Josephine, who sought to defend her Dad during one of Glaser’s harassing protests. The Times recounts how liberals have been pushed to the breaking point by Roberts despite the fact that he has had to curtail his movement around the island.
One of the featured suffering locals is Wendy Schlotterbeck, who was outraged when Roberts was spotted celebrating the Fourth of July on the island. The Times sympathetically explains the outrage since “[Roberts] and his colleagues had just narrowed protections for transgender athletes and minors and allowed Trump’s immigration crackdown to proceed.” It recounts how Schlotterbeck has transgender relatives and “immigrant friends of hers [have] been arrested.” Outraged, she left the picnic and, the next day, joined the “kayak-tivists” outside Roberts’ home.
Protesting outside the home of a Supreme Court justice is a crime, though some of us have questioned the constitutionality of such laws. Putting that debate aside, the protests should be condemned by all Americans as reckless and wrong.
Justices may hold different views on the left or the right, but they are all people of good faith who are trying to protect what they consider the essential rights of our Republic. (Liberal justices have largely been spared such protests at their homes, though occasional protests have occurred).
What is maddening is that this Court has continued to show its independence in ruling with the law rather than a partisan agenda. Unlike those on the left who want to pack the Court with an instant liberal majority (in the name of fighting partisanship), the Court continues to vote overwhelmingly on a unanimous or nearly unanimous basis. The conservative majority also continues to rule against the Trump Administration when the law requires it.
This term has many potential blockbuster decisions and the protesters are expected to return to the homes of justices around Washington. We have every right to debate, and indeed protest, such decisions. However, we should all unite around all of these justices — on the left and the right — in denouncing these protesters literally bobbing and floating on a sea of rage.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
Isn’t it great to live in a country where you can’t be thrown into a dungeon
for exposing the truth about the President?
In terms of constitutional rights and freedoms, America was already great.
By punishing entertainers and journalists in the manner of a dictator, Trump made it worse.
There’s no shortage of graceless and puerile people on the left, manifest in this country in the attitude that the appellate courts are their property and that it is the business of the appellate courts to give them what they want 24 / 7 if legislative bodies won’t give it to them. (Since 1937, about the only issue in regard to which leftoids have been impeded by judicial opinions when they were not impeded by elected officials would be in implementing the mass gun confiscation they want).
For all the whining and complaining about the lack of civility and mutual respect on this thread, it does not dawn on the commenters here that they are part of problem. Time to accept the fact you are of a different generation; that you too didn’t not always abide by those unwritten rules you lament. And that you are all unwilling to take the blame for this change in our society. You set the example and now you have to live with it until you die.
Former NYTimes executive editor Joseph Lelyveld for many years spent the month of August at his seaside camp farther down the Maine coast, where I was a neighbor. Although predominantly politically conservative, no one in the small lobster-fishing village ever protested his presence. In contrast to the actions of Roberts’ neighbors, and the views of many of the Times commenters, Lelyveld and his family’s privacy was respected without question.
Jonathan does a masterful job unpacking why rage ain’t the way to keep Ben Franklin’s Republic. The worst is when the doers damn well know that. That’s fake rage. That is the bunch that does understand that you don’t take your half of the road out of the middle. And do it anyway. Specifically, they know that the same Chief Justice Roberts held with them on the Affordable Care Act in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius that the coverage mandate penalty was a tax within Article l taxing power. When I read the decision I saw immediately what our Supreme Court of Texas has stated my whole practice career. The Court will uphold the provision of a statute on any valid legal basis, even if not raised by the parties. That is a direct co- equal branch salute. I think there are fellow citizens in the rage camp that can be moved away from it by better speech. In a conversation I would hope to capture the idea you get hearing “do not put valve grinding compound in your gas tank. It will eat your engine.”
Did the 1st Amendment guarantee the right to participate in the unpeaceful events of January 6?
Almost none of the people arrested did anything which merited criminal penalties beyond minor fines.
Can the same be said about the kayakers, or is your criticism of them simply based on a dislike of their politics?
We need to start “Broken Windows” policing of these creeps. Inspect the boats for licensing, throwing dolls is littering. Harassing ICE during arrests is interfering.
You can’t phart in America without breaking some law or ordinance. Use it.
One person’s “Broken Windows” policing is another person’s Enabling Act:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
You’re a fraud.
Why do you say that?