Noah Feldman, Columnist

Chuck Schumer's Bizarre Supreme Court Threat

The Senate minority leader was completely out of line in telling two conservative justices they had "released the whirlwind."

March 5, 2020 at 3:30 PM UTC

By Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

It’s never a good idea to threaten judges.
Photographer: Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images

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Ordinarily, Chuck Schumer is the very model of a rational, calculating politician who does things for deliberate strategic reasons. So what in the world was he thinking when he stood in front of the Supreme Court building during oral arguments on an important abortion case and threatened two conservative justices by name?

Schumer’s language was so extreme as to be almost bizarre: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.”