AOC Gets Personal: Nails Two Justices As ‘Step One’
Impeachment Filed Against Thomas and Alito puts the scare into the “Immunity” ruling
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) is on the warpath.
She can’t yet challenge the Supreme Court’s ruling giving Trump immunity, as she has pledged she will do one day, so she is going instead after two of the Justices themselves.
It is a brave action that channels the anger Americans feel about the rulings of the far-right Supremes.
There are three things crippling American democracy today: the destruction of the limits on campaign contributions (struck down by the Supreme Court in 2014) allowing wealthy donors to buy more legislators, the law giving corporations a ‘personal’ identify so they can invest as if they were human donors, and the Supreme Court’s over-reach into areas that were supposed to be the preserve of elected officials. Money can vote and can set policy.
Trump appointed the majority Justices of the Court in order to protect himself if things went South. Well, things have gone Deep South for Donald, and the Justices are earning their pay.
They recently violated a sacred American precedent that everyone is equal before the law, by ruling that the actions that Trump took in his “official” role as President, were immune from prosecution.
Their reasoning was twisted; they said that a President could not do his job if they had to worry about being prosecuted.
The real situation is that a President should only take actions or make decisions that are moral and thus legal. That is the strength of the agreement between the President and the People. The Justices made up the other nonsense in order to justify breaking a foundational American understanding.
The Court, which has been expanding its power and warping its rulings in the past five years, is creating a new aristocracy, whereby the Court and its President are immune to control by elected representatives.
This is what AOC is really after: to hobble the drive for dictatorship.
She had the nerve to come forward and make the attack, just as four Dem losers were following the lead of Republican media owners and trying to bring down their own President (a move that failed – Biden is still in charge).
She, BTW, is solidly behind Biden.
And her actions are rational, meaningful, earnest and honest.
And on July 10th she demonstrated this by attacking the personal corruption of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
Without control of Congress the measure is sure to fail, but that’s not the point. Dragging Alito and Thomas’ names through the mud will not be a pleasure for them.
But the main point is to start to take down the Supreme Court; make the black-garbed gods begin to feel the People snapping at their robes. They have usurped more and more power, and they need ‘adjustment’.
She said that the Court was in an “unchecked corruption crisis”:
“Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito’s pattern of refusal to recuse from consequential matters before the court in which they hold widely documented financial and personal entanglements constitutes a grave threat to American rule of law, the integrity of our democracy, and one of the clearest cases for which the tool of impeachment was designed.”
She filed three articles against Thomas and two against Alito. She accused both of refusing to recuse themselves from cases that represented conflicts of interest, as well as failing to disclose gifts they have received from special interest donors over their decades on the bench.
The day before AOC’s action, in fact, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) called for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate allegations that Thomas accepted millions of dollars in gifts, luxury travel, and other payments from billionaire benefactors like GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, some of whom may have had financial interests before the court, at least indirectly.
The bribes included yacht trip to Russia and a private helicopter flight to a palace in President Vladimir Putin’s hometown. A fan’s tour of fascist-land.
He then failed to properly disclose these gifts to the public until media outlets like ProPublica began investigating the matter. Thomas alone has received $4-million in gifts during his career, according to the watchdog group Fix The Court.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and other Republican senators on Wednesday blocked a bill requiring the Supreme Court to adopt a code of conduct and create a mechanism to enforce it in the wake of several high-profile controversies
Her Democratic colleague Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who is the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said that the Justices are “embedded” with the “Stop the Steal” movement. Their absolutely wonky decisions – bereft of historic or legal justification – make that accusation more than reasonable.
The kicker about ‘Stop The Steal’ is that Trump himself doesn’t think the election was stolen!
He knows he lost!
Cassidy Hutchinson, top aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows’s top aide, testified that Trump said in mid-December 2020 ‘I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out. I don’t want people to know that we lost.’”
“I don’t want people to know we lost.”
This quote appears in a book being covered in this Sub-stack on Monday, called “Find Me The Votes”, about how Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis has turned into Trump’s most dangerous enemy, having indicted him, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, former chief of staff Mark Meadows, and 16 other co-conspirators for breaking the state’s anti-racketeering law.
And yet the Supreme Court has bought into the notion that the election was ‘stolen’.
Every election Trump loses was ‘stolen’. It’s embarrassing that Supreme Court Justices can’t grasp simple concepts.
If Biden had been convicted of felonies to win the election, the GOP would be lining up to impeach the judges he'd appointed so fast it would make your head spin.
When Chief Justice John Roberts said that the Supreme Court could police itself, he knew that Alito had flown an inverted flag in support of the January 6th coup attempt against America.
He knew that Thomas had been taking bribes for decades.
He knew his own wife had made $10-million selling access to the Court.
He knew Gorsuch had sold property to people who wanted connections with legal decisions.
And here is Roberts saying that ‘no one in above the law including the President’ back in the days before he put the President above the law:
We have a Supreme Court that is out-of-control.
It has extended its power and given presidents a path to dictatorship. It has:
· Given absolute immunity to any president (read: Trump) and ended the tradition that no one is above the law.
· Dismissed concerns that federal officials take bribes,
· Taken away the power of agencies to interpret statutes,
· given the OK to public use of machine guns,
· Kicked the homeless out onto the streets,
· Reinforced the steel silo from which it rules by saying that it is completely unaccountable to any other agency, and
· Said that Trump is immune from any activity performed in the course of his duty…which it could have said months ago and send it back to the lower courts for a ruling before the election.
All of this new power is on top of a book I reviewed a few weeks ago called “The Shadow Docket – How the Supreme Court uses stealth rulings to amass power and undermine the Republic.”
With unsigned and unexplained “shadow” rulings, the Court decides thousands of cases each year. These are often little more than vehicles for the exercise of partisan political power. In fact, the sum of written rulings is only about 1 percent of the Court’s total output in any given year.
A Supreme Court ‘silent’ ruling on the Texas six-week abortion ban, for example, allowed bans on abortions to go into effect ten months before the big public case overruling Roe. The verdict for their coming Roe ban was in front of everyone, but we all missed it because it came from the shadows.
Alito took a luxury fishing vacation in Alaska with Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire, and accepted a private jet trip that would have cost more than $100,000 if he paid for it out of his own pocket. He has also been recorded as saying that America needs to return to a “place of godliness”, evidently forgetting that the US is founded as a secular, not a religious, nation.
While he was enjoying a luxury yacht, the Court ruled that states are allowed to criminalize the homeless for sleeping outside. Evidently this is not “cruel and unusual” punishment, which would have been in violation of the Eighth Amendment. After all, the homeless can easily sleep indoors…no, maybe not…
The three liberal Justices were of the same mind as Justice Sotomayor, who wrote in dissent that “The [Court] majority focuses almost exclusively on the needs of local governments and leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested.” She argued that “It is possible to acknowledge and balance the issues facing local governments, the humanity and dignity of homeless people, and our constitutional principles.”
The Court now enters eagerly into areas where it has now expertise or experience. As noted earlier, a recent decision destroyed an earlier prohibition against machine guns, striking down a ban on ‘bump stocks’. Its decision allows civilians to convert AR-15–style rifles into automatic weapons that can fire at a rate of 400–800 rounds per minute. To reach this result, says Slate, Justice Thomas’ opinion for the court tortures statutory text beyond all recognition. They flout the “ordinary meaning” of the law, adopting an “artificially narrow” interpretation that will have “deadly consequences.”
The Court is also making itself the expert over medication, taking over the job of the FDA. When it rejected a challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s decades-long approval of the drug Mifepristone for pregnancy terminations, it based its rejection on the fact that the plaintiffs lacked the standing to sue—not that the FDA’s expertise holds. This case will come up again, when someone invents a better standing, and the Supreme Court will – mark my words – rule against the FDA and its years of trials to presume that it has the expertise to overturn the distribution of Mifepristone.
And of course the topper of all, has been the Roe case overturning the right to abortion. Again, the Justices searched for some desperate reason to cancel it, and came up with the notion that we should not recognize rights that are not mentioned in the constitution.
According to them, only centuries-old historical evidence could possibly justify the protection of an unenumerated fundamental right. They pretend they can divine the original ideas of some dead white men. If those ideas are in conflict with what the Justices want to prove, they will be discarded anyway.
Roe v. Wade, of course, is not in the Constitution. Neither is the right of people of different races, or of the same sex, to marry, or to use contraceptives, or in fact to be a free person if you happen to be Black.
BUT IN FACT when the Founders added the Bill of Rights to the Constitution in 1789, it was understood that no list of protected rights could possibly be exhaustive. As future Supreme Court Justice James Iredell observed, “Let any one make what collection or enumeration of rights he pleases, I will immediately mention twenty or thirty more rights not contained in it.”
The cup of liberty was intended to be as large as the future needed.
Except for religious bigots on the Supreme Court.
The Court does not seem to consider the impacts of its decisions – it does not have to, because it is not accountable to anyone…it is unelected. Its rulings on abortion have led to higher infant deaths in Texas, for example, not a ‘right to life’ result. And more women are getting sterilized today than ever before – again, not exactly a right to life outcome. This had to be a wrenching and irreversible decision for thousands of women. What are we doing to our society? The Court is a wrecking ball, not a social stabilizer.
Alito’s take on the Roe abortion ban was exactly the same. It is patent nonsense. It is confused history and a reach to an unintended and invented concept called “originalism”. The Founding Fathers never intended their laws to be unchanging – they anticipated change and welcomed in. Alito’s ruling, as one expert said, goes on for pages and pages, 30 pages - there are 69 footnotes - and he says nothing. “Alito is probably the worst justice on the current Supreme Court, and that's saying a lot.”
In addition to Ocasio-Cortez, the impeachment articles were co-sponsored by Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif.; Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-N.J.; Delia Ramirez, D-Ill.; Maxwell Frost, D-Fla.; Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; and Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y.
Bad news, John.
That’s about to change.
AOL is leading the way, and while it may not work in the short run, I am certain that the Republicans will be badly beaten in November and that the Court’s make-up will change.
From fascist to liberal-democrat.
And the corruption – endemic to Republicans – will stop, once elected representatives have put in place a real code-of-ethics for an out-of-control Supreme Court.
Outstanding column, Barry. I had little idea of the depths of the Court's depraved rulings and little clue about Chief Justice Robert's complicity with Alito, Thomas and the others. AOC will deserve a medal when her goal is achieved.