Even as the Democrats’ feeble legislative attempt to codify federal protections for abortion rights goes down in flames, many Washington elites are directing their attention and anger toward the same target: no, not right-wing judges reaching their ideological hands into millions of people’s bodies, but instead the protesters peacefully demonstrating outside the homes of Supreme Court justices who are about to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Prominent Republican lawmakers, conservative operatives, and Beltway pundits are demanding the government arrest demonstrators — and to do so, they are citing a McCarthy-era statute passed to stop people from protesting the prosecutions of alleged communists. Ignored in the discourse is a past ruling from the Supreme Court effectively blessing conservative protests at the homes of abortion clinic workers.

The largely manufactured outrage is the latest distraction designed to shift attention away from the issue at hand: the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority is about to deny basic reproductive rights to tens of millions of people in roughly half the country.