Supreme Court Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett had some visitors at her home in Virginia this weekend, but they weren’t friends and family members stopping by for a pre-summer barbeque. A group of mostly female protesters showed up outside her house wearing a garish collection of costumes that appeared to be soaked in fake blood. Many also carried toy baby dolls or had them tied to their wrists. They claimed to be part of a group named Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights and they were, of course, attempting to intimidate Barrett into not voting with the majority on the court in the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health. (If you’re going to make the name of your group that ridiculously long anyway, wouldn’t you just write out the word “for” instead of using a numeral?) The group carried a variety of signs with various messages and adorned with objects including coathangers. (NY Post)

Pro-choice activists protested outside Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s house over the weekend, donning fake-blood-stained clothes and holding baby dolls.

The protesters marched to the judge’s Falls Church, Va., home Saturday and held signs including one with a coat hanger on it that said, “Not going back.”

The youth activists, part of a group called Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, tied their hands together with tape and held the plastic baby dolls.

What the group was doing was obviously illegal, a fact that even liberal justices on the Supreme Court have upheld in the past. Aggressive demonstrations at the homes of the justices intended to change the outcome of the court’s findings is a felony. Someone obviously must have advised them of this fact because a spokesperson for the group insisted they were “not working to change the minds of women-hating fascists.” Instead, they claimed to be “calling on the pro-choice majority” in America to “stop the Supreme Court” from overturning Roe v Wade.

That’s just one of the many seemingly nonsensical explanations we’ve heard from these groups thus far. How is this supposed “majority” in the country supposed to legally go about stopping the Supreme Court from doing anything? Courts around the country hear cases and pass rulings every day. The losers in many of those cases decide to appeal and some of those appeals eventually make it all the way to the Supreme Court. When they do, the court decides whether or not to hear the case, and if they do, they render decisions. We may not agree with them all of the time, but that’s just how the system works.

It’s also worth pointing out that even if the court hands down a ruling in Dobbs that is identical to the leaked draft we saw earlier, they are not preparing to do anything that would make abortion illegal. They would simply be overturning the court’s previous finding that abortion qualifies as a constitutional right and returning the question to the states to decide for themselves. Anyone supporting the ability of women to have an abortion who lives in one of the primarily blue states where it’s never been banned has nothing to worry about.

If they want to protest someone or work to change the eventual outcome, they could consider fighting to win more elections in states where the practice will likely be restricted or banned and have the laws reflect those positions. That’s how things happen legally in a civil society. Of course, I doubt that’s going to sink in for any of these young women covered in fake blood. (Or at least I assume they were women. I’m not a biologist, after all.) But if nothing else, they’ve managed to obtain their fifteen minutes of fame on cable news.