Democratic “Squad” member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., slammed the U.S. Supreme Court for what she called an “abuse of power” Sunday, following landmark decisions this past week rejecting affirmative action and Biden’s student loan debt plan. She proposed impeachment and subpoenas be put into play in order to limit the justices’ power.
“The Supreme Court is far overreaching their authority,” Ocasio-Cortez said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“And I believe, frankly, that we really need to be having conversations about judicial review as a check on the courts as well,” she added.
The Supreme Court issued the last decisions of its term this past week, among them rejecting the use of race as a factor in admissions, ruling in favor of a Christian web designer who refuses to make a same-sex wedding websites, and striking down President Biden’s student loan debt cancellation plan. Democrats have considered the rulings to be attacks on the left, denouncing the court as “illegitimate.”
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“These are the types of rulings that signal a dangerous creep toward authoritarianism and centralization of power in the courts,” Ocasio-Cortez said Sunday. “In fact, we have members of the court themselves with Justice Elena Kagan saying that the court is beginning to assume the power of a legislature.”
Ocasio-Cortez has been a vocal proponent for court-packing and limiting the court’s power, going as far as to tell CNN’s Dana Bash that subpoenas and impeachment should be placed on the table for consideration.
“And so I believe that if Chief Justice Roberts will not come before Congress for an investigation voluntarily, I believe that we should be considering subpoenas,” the Democrat representative said. “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, as we saw in the refusal with Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from cases implicating his wife in Jan. 6.”
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“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,” she continued. “And in the process, they themselves have been destroying the legitimacy of the court, which is profoundly dangerous for our entire democracy.”
Unlike Ocasio-Cortez, the president recently clarified his position against expanding the court during an interview on MSNBC on Thursday. Biden said progressive efforts to expand the Supreme Court would “politicize it maybe forever in a way that is not healthy.”
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“And I think, look, I think maybe it’s just the optimist in me. 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,” he continued.
AOC did, however, make headlines shortly after the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling, after she suggested the high court isn’t serious about its “ludicrous ‘colorblindness’ claims” or else it would have “abolished” legacy admissions.
Ocasio-Cortez shared her thoughts on the ruling on Twitter, noting that “70% of Harvard’s legacy applicants are white” and that the Supreme Court “didn’t touch that – which would have impacted them and their patrons.”
Many social media users were quick to call the congresswoman out, saying that the issue of legacy admissions – the practice of giving preference to children of alumni. – was not before the court.
Fox News’ Brianna Herlihy and Kyle Morris contributed to this report.
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