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Brett Kavanaugh has two young daughters. Imagine their terror looking out their bedroom windows to see a mob of 100 people symbolically warning their father, “We know where you live.”

They began at John Roberts’s house.

That’s a strange place for a pro-choice protest given the strong likelihood that Roberts is on their side. “A person close to the court’s most conservative members said Roberts told his fellow jurists in a private conference in early December that he planned to uphold the state law and write an opinion that left Roe and Casey in place for now,” WaPo reported today. “But the other conservatives were more interested in an opinion that overturned the precedents, the person said.”

The marchers then proceeded to Kavanaugh’s home. Remember the neighbor that John wrote about yesterday who’s been protesting outside his home? She was at last night’s protest too and shared this thought with Bloomberg News: “The time for civility is over, man. Being polite doesn’t get you anywhere.”

There’s a lot of that going around this week:

As a Twitter pal recently said, it looks like things are about to get “mostly peaceful” in America.

That’s illegal, by the way. 18 U.S. Code § 1507:

Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty, pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer, or with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

We can argue about how close a protest needs to be to a judge’s home to qualify as “near” it for purposes of the statute but standing in the street feet away from their front yard pretty clearly qualifies. Evidently the cops think so too:

Recall that when the White House was asked a few days ago about pro-choicers descending on the justices’ residences, Jen Psaki couldn’t muster even a gentle condemnation:

She doesn’t have an official U.S. government position on something that’s prohibited by federal law?

Contra Psaki, there’s no such thing as a “peaceful protest” outside a public official’s home. The only reason to protest there instead of at their office is to menace them and their families physically, at a location where security is expected to be lax. The traditional legal definition of “assault” is “intentionally putting another person in reasonable apprehension of an imminent harmful or offensive contact.” That’s precisely what you aim to do when you harass someone at their home.

It should go without saying that a mob of pro-lifers chanting outside Sonia Sotomayor’s house would be regarded — correctly — by national media as an outrageous breach of norms, essentially insurrection 2.0. It should also go without saying that the justices and their families deserve 24/7 security at whatever taxpayer expense that entails. After all, in the current political context, a fanatic has more motive to kill one of the Court’s conservatives than just satiating his or her rage. Doing so would provide a strategic benefit to the pro-choice side. Congress should give them all the bodyguards they need, and then some.

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