Liberal Democrats Decry Supreme Court’s ‘Authoritarianism,’ Call for Congressional Investigations and Court-Packing

Stung by a series of rulings by the court that didn’t go their way, liberal Democrats in Congress are taking to the airwaves to denounce what they say is the Supreme Court’s “dangerous creep toward authoritarianism” and calling for new checks on the power of the nation’s highest court.Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Congress should issue subpoenas for justices on the court and be considering impeachment of justices who defy what she called “the will of the people.”“We have a broad level of tools to deal with misconduct, overreach, and abuse of power,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “And the Supreme Court has not been receiving the adequate oversight necessary in order to preserve their own legitimacy. And, in the process, they themselves have been destroying the legitimacy of the court, which is profoundly dangerous for our entire democracy.”The Democrat-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee is said to be beginning the process of investigating potential conflicts of interest by the justices, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. The committee, she said, should demand that Chief Justice John Roberts — who declined an invitation to testify about the court’s ethical guidelines before the Senate Judiciary Committee in April — testify before Congress or be subpoenaed.“We should be considering investigations. We must pass much more binding and stringent ethics guidelines where we see members of the Supreme Court potentially breaking the law,” she added.Allowing the court to continue unimpeded by checks on its power, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said, will lead to “an undemocratic and, frankly, dangerous authoritarian expansion of power in the Supreme Court.” Its rulings during the most recent term “are the types of rulings that signal a dangerous creep towards authoritarianism and centralization of power in the court.”A fellow member of the so-called “squad” in the House, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, said in an appearance Sunday on MSNBC’s “The Katie Phang Show” that the court is guilty of what she termed “intersectional oppression” and its membership should be expanded to blunt the power of the court’s current conservative majority.“They continue to overturn the will of the majority of the people and to make history for all the wrong reasons, legislating from the bench and being political from the bench,” Ms. Pressley said. “This is a Supreme Court that has been emboldened in rolling back the hands of time, undermining and rolling back what should be fundamental civil human rights. So everything should be on the table — reform and expansion.”President Biden has rejected the idea of expanding the court, however, saying — unlike Mses. Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez — it would “politicize it maybe forever in a way that is not healthy.”“Maybe it’s just the optimist in me,” Mr. Biden said during an interview with MSNBC Thursday. “I think that some of the court are beginning to realize their legitimacy is being questioned in ways that had not been questioned in the past.”The last time a president attempted to change the number of justices on the Supreme Court was 1937, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt — angry about the conservative court’s ruling on his New Deal — tried to convince Congress to pass a law allowing him to appoint an additional justice for each of the sitting nine justices over the age of 70 at the time. The so-called “court packing plan” would have given him the right to appoint six additional justices, bringing the total on the court to 15.The law, however, was greeted with considerable skepticism by the voting public and outright hostility in Congress. The Senate Judiciary Committee, which never allowed the law to come to a full vote of the upper chamber, called the bill “an invasion of judicial power such as has never before been attempted in this country.”“It is essential to the continuance of our constitutional democracy that the judiciary be completely independent of both the executive and legislative branches of the government,” a report to Congress by the committee stated. “It is a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.”

Liberal Democrats Decry Supreme Court’s ‘Authoritarianism,’ Call for Congressional Investigations and Court-Packing

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