Part 4 of 5
In 1986, the National Organization for Women sued a man named Joseph Scheidler under RICO.
If that acronym sounds familiar, it should. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was passed in 1970 to prosecute the Mafia. It was designed for organized crime (for extortion, loan-sharking, murder-for-hire, drug trafficking). The law’s creators never imagined it would be pointed at a Catholic pro-life activist from Chicago who organized sidewalk protests outside abortion clinics.
But that’s exactly what NOW did. Their legal theory was straightforward: pro-life protesters were running a criminal enterprise. Scheidler, his Pro-Life Action League, Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue, and a handful of other defendants were (according to NOW’s lawyers) racketeers. Not metaphorically. Literally. The charge was that their protests constituted extortion under the Hobbs Act, which requires that the defendant obtain property from the victim.
Protesters don’t obtain property. They hold signs. They pray. Sometimes they block doors (which is already illegal under trespass laws). But NOW’s attorneys needed RICO because RICO allows treble damages and nationwide injunctions. Regular trespass charges don’t shut down a movement. RICO does.
The trial court threw it out. No economic motive, no RICO case. The 7th Circuit agreed. Case closed.
Except it wasn’t.
NOW appealed to the Supreme Court. In 1994, the Court ruled 9-0 that RICO doesn’t actually require an economic motive. The case went back for trial. That was bad news for the defendants, because it meant the legal theory (protest-as-racketeering) was technically viable.
In 1998, after a seven-week trial, a jury found the defendants guilty of 121 acts of extortion and violence. The court issued the first-ever nationwide injunction against pro-life activists. Treble damages. The works.
Scheidler appealed. Back to the Supreme Court.
In 2003, the Court reversed the verdict 8-1. The majority held that the protesters hadn’t committed extortion because they never obtained property from anyone. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who was nobody’s idea of a pro-life advocate) joined the majority. She and Justice Breyer wrote a concurrence explicitly drawing parallels between pro-life protests and civil rights demonstrations. Read that again. Ginsburg compared pro-life protesters to civil rights marchers and sided with the protesters. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference filed an amicus brief making the same argument.
The logic-and-reason thread running through this series just surfaced again: even people who supported abortion rights couldn’t defend what was being done to suppress opposition to it.
So: 8-1 reversal. Clear ruling. The Supreme Court ordered the lower courts to reverse “all predicate acts.” That should have ended it.
Except it didn’t.
The 7th Circuit read “all predicate acts” as narrowly as humanly possible. They claimed the Supreme Court only meant the 117 extortion acts, not the 4 remaining acts classified as “threats of violence.” They tried to keep the injunction alive on those four acts alone. A near-unanimous Supreme Court had told them to shut it down. They found a crack and wedged themselves into it.
Back to the Supreme Court a third time. In 2006, the Court reversed again, 8-0. The Hobbs Act doesn’t cover violence unrelated to robbery or extortion. Period. Shut it down entirely.
NOW still wrangled over costs for years afterward. The case finally concluded in 2014 (when the 7th Circuit ordered NOW to pay the defendants $63,000 in legal costs). Twenty-eight years. Three trips to the Supreme Court. Two near-unanimous reversals. And a lower court that kept trying to resuscitate a dead case because the Collectivist position required it.
Joseph Scheidler was told to settle. Repeatedly. For decades. He refused. Thomas Brejcha of the Thomas More Society defended him through the entire 28-year ordeal. Scheidler later wrote a memoir about it. The title tells you everything: Racketeer for Life.
This is the pattern. When logic and law don’t support the Collectivist position, you don’t abandon the position. You abandon logic and law. You classify protesters as racketeers. When the Supreme Court says you’re wrong, you reinterpret “all” to mean “some.” When they say you’re wrong again, you drag the process out for another decade. The goal was never to win the legal argument. The goal was to make opposition so expensive (in time, money, and personal suffering) that people stop opposing.
(If you’ve noticed a similar pattern in the legal targeting of people who publicly question gender ideology, from Canadian father Robert Hoogland jailed for referring to his child by biological sex, to British women investigated by police for stating biological facts on social media, you’re watching the same machinery with a fresh coat of paint.)
Tomorrow, Part 5: The Pattern.