As we celebrate the long Independence Day Weekend, left-wing firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has floated the idea of “impeachment” of conservative Supreme Court Justices over recent decisions that were not to her liking.
The progressive leader from NY called for investigating and possibly impeaching members of the Supreme Court over the weekend after justices issued landmark rulings days earlier with which she disagreed.
“If … Chief Justice John Roberts will not come before Congress for an investigation voluntarily, I believe that we should be considering subpoenas. We should be considering investigations,” 33-year-old Rep. Ocasio-Cortez told host Dana Bash Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“There also must be impeachment on the table. We have a broad level of tools to deal with misconduct, overreach, and abuse of power. And the Supreme Court has not been receiving the adequate oversight necessary in order to preserve their own legitimacy,” Ocasio-Cortez also said.
In the days just prior to AOC’s appearance with Bash, SCOTUS ruled on a number of landmark cases, including student loan forgiveness, affirmative action in college admissions, and freedom of speech and religion for business owners.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist, disagreed with the SCOTUS ruling that said President Biden did not have the authority to unilaterally cancel student loans via the HEROES Act.
Bizarrely, she claimed the ruling on student loan forgiveness somehow represented an “expansion of power” of the high court.
“They are expanding their role into acting as though they are Congress itself,” she said after Bash characterized Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion as saying it was up to Congress, of which she is a member, to make such changes.
AOC claimed that President Biden has the authority, through the Secretary of Education, to force taxpayers to bear the burden of others’ voluntarily undertaken school loans via the Higher Education Act.
When Bash directed the interview to a conversation about the case striking down affirmative action in college admissions, Ocasio-Cortez seized the opportunity to characterize Justice Clarence Thomas as “profoundly disrespectful” toward Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Thomas and Brown, both black, had a robust debate and disagreement around the issue of race and the portrayal of black people as victims.
Bash asked the New York representative, an avowed fan of court-packing, to respond to a clip of President Biden in an appearance Thursday on MSNBC. In the clip, Biden said starting the process of expanding the court could politicize it forever in ways that are “unhealthy” that “I can’t get back.”
“The courts, if they were to proceed without any check on their power, without any balance on their power, then we will start to see an undemocratic and, frankly, dangerous authoritarian expansion of power in the Supreme Court, which is what we are seeing now, from the overturning of abortion rights to the ruling that discrimination and, frankly, stripping the full personhood and dignity of LGBTQ people in the United States,” Ocasio-Cortez said.