Senator Marsha Blackburn says Justice Department should arrest pro-choice protesters

‘They should haul all of these people down to the police headquarters’

Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn said the Department of Justice should use a little-used law enacted during the Red Scare of the 1950s to punish Americans who protest outside the homes of Supreme Court justices.

Speaking on the right-wing television network Newsmax on Sunday, Ms Blackburn said the DOJ should tell protesters they are in violation of section 1507 of the US criminal code, which makes it a crime for anyone to “picket or parade in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by” judges or justices.

“They should haul all of these people down to the police headquarters. They should book them for violating a federal statute,” she said, accusing the protesters of trying to “change the outcome of a Supreme Court decision” by “force or intimidation”.

Numerous protests have taken place outside homes of several justices in the days since the disclosure of a draft opinion overruling a landmark 1973 case which legalised abortion across the US.

Prominent Republicans have compared the protests to the 6 January 2021 riot carried out by a mob of former president Donald Trump’s supporters at the US Capitol, but the protests outside justices homes have been peaceful.

The law Ms Blackburn cited was enacted as part of the McCarthyism-era Internal Security Act, most of which was ruled unconstitutional or repealed decades ago.