Wednesday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) expressed his concern that there could be more threats aimed at Supreme Court justices on the heels of a threat aimed at Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Rubio told FNC’s “Hannity” that he had a “terrible feeling” and called the situation “an incredibly serious thing.”
“I have a terrible feeling about this, Sean,” he said. “I think this is headed in a very dangerous direction. I think the last time I was on the show from this very studio, I said that at the time, and here’s why: this is a country, 331 million people, OK? You have people out there basically saying that these members of the Supreme Court are equivalent to the Ku Klux Klan to Nazis. You’ve had some sort of saying burn the place down. Three hundred thirty-one million people, it only takes a couple of them to look at that and say, well, if these people are that evil, the next step is to just take them out. And that’s just the Supreme Court justices, not to mention we’ve got hundreds of members of Congress that don’t have U.S. marshals outside their home, and you know we want to thank the U.S. marshals for the role they played we will be having a very different day here today in Washington.”
“But this is an incredibly serious thing,” Rubio continued. “This is not the only guy in America with these thoughts in their head, and I have a very bad feeling about the direction this goes on either side. I’m not in favor of this happening to anybody. I don’t think — I don’t want protesters showing them outside the house of Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer anybody else. I think there’s a time, place and manner for free speech to be regulated. You can say whatever you want, but there’s got to be some limits to it. And in this particular case, it’s illegal because these are judges that these people are trying to intimidate to make a decision that they want in a court case.”
The Florida Republican lawmaker also suggested the goal of the protests was to intimidate the justices.
“[T]here’s only one reason for protesters to show outside the home of a public figure, and that is to send them a clear message: we know where you live,” he explained. “Now, maybe there’s a hundred people there, and not a single one of those hundred people are going to hurt anybody. But I’m going to tell you. Someone’s watching. Someone’s taking down notes on the internet where this person lives and that one deranged person is going to show up at the house of someone and eventually harm them.”
“This is an unfortunate trend that we’re now seeing,” Rubio added. “It’s a very, very dangerous one. We should not be playing with this. We are playing with fire. I’m not saying this guy wouldn’t have done this anyway if he’s truly as deranged as he appears to be. My point is that when you’re encouraging this when you’re calling your political opponents people that have blood on their hands, people that are the same as the Ku Klux Klan, that are coming to rip your rights from you, you’re going to have some people take some pretty violent dramatic and dangerous actions and that’s what was averted last night thank God. But I don’t think we’ve seen the last of this, unfortunately.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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