Dem
47
GOP
53
This year, an unknown number of federal judges (the U.S. Marshals Service is not saying), across at least seven states, have received multiple hundreds of pizzas they did not order.
What's the problem here? Well, consider these three facts: (1) the deliveries started in late January/early February (i.e., after January 20); (2) they have often been sent to "Daniel Anderl," which is the name of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas's son, who was fatally shot at Salas' home by a disgruntled attorney posing as a delivery man; (3) the judges receiving the pizzas have generally gotten them during or immediately after hearings in which they ruled against the Trump administration.
The message, obviously, could not be clearer: We know where you live, and maybe next time it won't be a pizza, it will be a bomb, or a packet of anthrax-laced powder, or an armed gunman. Some of the senders of the pizzas have also had them delivered to the houses of judges' relatives, which adds an extra layer of scariness, since the judges have security details, while their relatives do not.
The vast majority of the people sending these pizzas, whoever they are, will not act on their implied threat. We have said it before, and we will say it again: Trumpers are cowards. A person with real courage does not need to make sure they have the biggest and scariest and most automatic gun, nor to blame immigrants for all their problems, nor to treat someone with different political/religious ideas as if they are vermin to be eliminated. That said, it only takes one person, almost certainly one whose mental health is less than 100%.
In the end, somebody had to pay for those pizzas. One hopes that some of the "brave" people who let pizzas do their talking for them were stupid enough to use a credit card or some other traceable payment method. Failing that, if they paid in cash, there have got to be pizza parlors with security cameras. Certainly, the U.S. Marshals Service is on it; one can only hope they nab a few perpetrators in high-profile fashion, in hopes of making other pizza-sending cowards think twice about their actions. (Z)