The Non-childless Cat Lady Suing the Government
An Instagram creator says she’s being targeted by the Secret Service
Amanda McGonigle of Falmouth, MA, is not a childless cat lady.
But her Instagram account, @catsonacouch, has been trolling Vice President JD Vance since its launch in August 2024. Its name comes from a comment Vance made on Fox News back in 2021. As a Senate hopeful in Ohio, he said, “We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”
After Vance joined Trump’s ticket, the cat-lady quote resurfaced, and McGonigle introduced her account. “This petty cat account exists purr-ly to troll the current administration & have more followers than JD Vance,” it announced, complete with an image of Vance’s head affixed to a couch with cartoon arms and legs. As of this writing, @catsonacouch boasts 1.9 million followers to Vance’s 2.9 million. It features comments such as “Vance cured my impostor syndrome” and “Vance is a sentient jar of mayonnaise.”
Now, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, McGonigle is suing parts of the federal government. She alleges that she was barred from attending a May 14 event in Bangor, ME, at which Vance was present to discuss his task force against fraud in government agencies. The event was taxpayer-funded, and McGonigle says that her exclusion violated her First Amendment rights.
The 24-page suit, filed July 7, alleges that after McGonigle registered for the event and received a confirmation that she could attend — as shown via screen shots in the complaint — Secret Service agents stopped her in line, called her “Amanda” by name, told her it was a private event she could not attend, and added, “We know where you stand.”
“It’s absurd that the Secret Service is wasting their time tracking a satirical cat account on social media,” McGonigle said through the ACLU upon filing the suit. “But the First Amendment protects our right to criticize the government, and it’s well within my rights to say that I think JD Vance is an unlikeable idiot.”
The ACLU is taking the case very seriously. Lead ACLU attorney Anahita Sotoohi told The Preamble that the ACLU is concerned about escalation against McGonigle. “We’re trying to demonstrate a real fear that if Amanda continues to try to engage in speech protected by the First Amendment, keeps running the account, and wants to continue to attend vice presidential events and act as any audience member would, some kind of criminal penalty will evolve or a criminal charge will be made against her.” As the suit puts it, being “excluded from such events, and remaining in a restricted area of a building or grounds where a Secret Service protectee (the Vice President) is or will be temporarily visiting, could subject Ms. McGonigle to criminal penalties.”
The suit goes on to claim the events of May 14 were already an escalation. McGonigle registered to attend a Vance event on May 5 in Des Moines, IA, but did not receive any confirmation, which she and her attorney see as an earlier move to bar her from a public event in response to her speech.
Sotoohi thinks McGonigle’s case reflects a broader effort to chill criticism of the Trump administration. “She is one example, one person in a pattern in this administration. They are very thin-skinned, and retaliate in ways that violate the First Amendment or are very close to violating the First Amendment. It’s very much in the vein of politicizing the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] to go after Jimmy Kimmel.”
The administration has yet to comment on the lawsuit.
The suit names as defendants Sean M. Curran, director of the Secret Service, and John Hiller, director of Presidential Advance (which plans events with the president or vice president). It cites several precedents related to public forums or viewpoint discrimination:
Matal v. Tam (2017), in which the Supreme Court unanimously found that a trademark could not be banned because of its message. Justice Alito wrote, “Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’”
Rosenberger v. Rector (1995), a 1995 case in which the justices found, by a 5–4 vote, that a public university violated the First Amendment by denying funds to a religious publication when secular publications received funds.
A Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals holding in 2019 that an elected official’s Facebook page could not exclude dissenting comments or participation.
Vance walks it back in new book
In his latest memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, published June 16, Vance laments the childless cat lady quote.
“One of the dumbest things I ever said came when I argued that ‘childless cat ladies’ across the Democratic Party were running our country into the ground… The comment caused two firestorms: the first when I made it, the second years later during a political campaign… It was a boneheaded comment, intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating.”
He goes on to write that the comment, while “enraging… had the added benefit of distracting from the actual point I wanted to make, which was that our society is becoming pathologically hostile to having kids.” Vance said that he “could have made that point much more effectively, and with the benefit of showing a little charity to the many Americans who — some for reasons beyond their control — don’t have children.”
There has been little charity on @catsonacouch since the lawsuit was filed. McGonigle — a mother of two children whose day job is VP of marketing and growth at a software firm, according to her LinkedIn page — has been basking in the media attention, showing numerous article screenshots against a backdrop of her riding in a car or lying on a couch, or of images of cats on parade. A recent post offers journalists an array of new Vance insults, some of them unprintable.
What does McGonigle want? According to the lawsuit, for the court to “declare that excluding [her] from official vice presidential events in retaliation for her protected speech and expression is unconstitutional; declare that Defendants’ viewpoint-based exclusion of [her] from official vice presidential events is unconstitutional; enter an injunction prohibiting Defendants from excluding [her] from official vice presidential events in retaliation for her protected speech and expression or based on her viewpoint; [and] award Plaintiffs their costs, including reasonable attorneys’ fees.”
And, to recall her first post on Instagram, more followers than JD Vance.
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