Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Washington DC-area home was surrounded by protesters on Monday as the backlash over the decision to allow Texas’s restrictive abortion ban to take effect continues nationwide.
Video tweeted by a number of news outlets showed dozens of demonstrators gathered at a park near the Chevy Chase, Maryland home of the court’s second-newest addition and participating in a demonstration moments later in a residential area where they chanted slogans through a loudspeaker.
“Our message was loud and clear at Brett Kavanaugh’s house yesterday: We will not allow *anyone* to deny our rights and our humanity. Respect our existence or expect resistance,” Shutdown DC, which organised the protest, said in a statement.
Mr Kavanaugh was one of five conservative justices on the Court who voted earlier this month to allow a law passed by Republicans in Texas banning abortion after six weeks and deputising state residents to file lawsuits against offenders to go into effect. The decision elicited scathing reactions from liberals as well as some of the court’s dissenting justices.
The Texas law bans all abortions after six weeks into the pregnancy, before most women even know they are pregnant, and is enforced via a bounty system that rewards citizens for filing successful lawsuits against anyone accused of participating or aiding in an abortion after the six-week threshold.
“The Court’s order is stunning. Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent.
Mr Kavanaugh’s nomination to the court was one of the most controversial and politically-charged nomination fights in the modern history of the court; after his initial hearings were held, several women came forward with claims of sexual assault allegedly committed by Mr Kavanaugh during his time at school, which the now-confirmed justice furiously denied.
Despite the furious liberal resistance to his nomination, Mr Kavanaugh became the second of three Supreme Court justices to be confirmed to the court under former President Donald Trump.
The third, Amy Coney Barrett, was confirmed in the height of the second wave of Covid-19 cases in the US and became involved in a superspreader event when the White House event celebrating her confirmation resulted in numerous Covid-19 infections among guests and attending press.
