‘Profoundly disrespectful’: AOC responds to Justice Thomas’ criticism of Justice Jackson
Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joins CNN's Dana Bash to respond to the Supreme Court's decisions on affirmative action and LGBTQ rights.
Pressley, Ocasio-Cortez call for changes to the Supreme Court
The calls come after the Supreme Court handed down a slate of decisions decried by many Democrats.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) joins female House Democrats at an event at the Capitol in Washington on July 15, 2022. | Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
By KELLY GARRITY
07/02/2023
House progressives are calling for changes to the Supreme Court following a slate of decisions affecting affirmative action, student debt cancellation and LGBTQ protections.
“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,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Ocasio-Cortez has called for changes to the high court, including expanding the number of justices on the bench. In ending federal abortions rights last year, and landing a blow to LGBTQ protections in a decision out Friday, the court is signaling “a dangerous creep toward authoritarianism,” she said.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), another prominent House progressive, also slammed the Supreme Court’s recent rulings on Sunday, saying if the court were a caucus in Congress, would be the “bootstrapper forced to birth don’t say gay caucus.”
“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,” Pressley said during an interview on MSNBC’s “The Katie Phang Show.” “It is nothing but intersectional oppression,” she added.
Both members of Congress said that every option should be on the table when it comes reining in the court’s power and reforming its ethics.
“We should be considering subpoenas and investigations. We must pass much more binding and stringent ethics guidelines,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“I think everything should be on the table,” Pressley said when asked whether she supports adding more seats to the nine-justice bench. “[Here’s] 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.”
Any bills to expand the court have little chance of passing in a divided Congress. And even if they do, President Joe Biden does not support the change. Doing so would be a “mistake” he said last week.
The calls come after the Supreme Court handed down a slate of decisions decried by many Democrats.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) joins female House Democrats at an event at the Capitol in Washington on July 15, 2022. | Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
By KELLY GARRITY
07/02/2023
House progressives are calling for changes to the Supreme Court following a slate of decisions affecting affirmative action, student debt cancellation and LGBTQ protections.
“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,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Ocasio-Cortez has called for changes to the high court, including expanding the number of justices on the bench. In ending federal abortions rights last year, and landing a blow to LGBTQ protections in a decision out Friday, the court is signaling “a dangerous creep toward authoritarianism,” she said.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), another prominent House progressive, also slammed the Supreme Court’s recent rulings on Sunday, saying if the court were a caucus in Congress, would be the “bootstrapper forced to birth don’t say gay caucus.”
“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,” Pressley said during an interview on MSNBC’s “The Katie Phang Show.” “It is nothing but intersectional oppression,” she added.
Both members of Congress said that every option should be on the table when it comes reining in the court’s power and reforming its ethics.
“We should be considering subpoenas and investigations. We must pass much more binding and stringent ethics guidelines,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“I think everything should be on the table,” Pressley said when asked whether she supports adding more seats to the nine-justice bench. “[Here’s] 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.”
Any bills to expand the court have little chance of passing in a divided Congress. And even if they do, President Joe Biden does not support the change. Doing so would be a “mistake” he said last week.
US supreme court ‘creeping dangerously towards authoritarianism’, AOC says
Congresswoman’s comments come days after nation’s highest court released batch of incendiary and far-reaching rulings
Richard Luscombe
Congresswoman’s comments come days after nation’s highest court released batch of incendiary and far-reaching rulings
Richard Luscombe
THE GUARDIAN
Sun 2 Jul 2023 17.49 BST
The conservative supreme court is “creeping dangerously towards authoritarianism”, the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Sunday, raising again the unlikely scenario of impeaching justices for recent actions.
Her comments came just days after the nation’s highest court released a batch of incendiary and far-reaching rulings striking down affirmative action in colleges, LBGTQ+ rights and Joe Biden’s student loan relief program.
“These are the types of rulings that signal a dangerous creep towards authoritarianism and centralization of power in the court,” she told CNN’s State of the Union.
“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 right now.
“They are expanding their role into acting as though they are Congress itself. And that, I believe, is an expansion of power that we really must be focusing on, the danger of this court and the abuse of power.”
Referring to ethics scandals that have involved two of the conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, Ocasio-Cortez repeated previous calls for Congress to look at removing them, a proposal that would be dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled House.
Senate Democrats and independents who caucus with them, meanwhile, hold only a slim majority.
Alito is accused of not disclosing gifts from a rightwing billionaire who lobbied for the court to end Biden’s loan relief program. Thomas is also alleged to have taken undeclared gifts, among other alleged transgressions, prompting an ethics watchdog last month to urge him to resign.
“We must pass much more binding and stringent ethics guidelines, where we see members of the supreme court potentially breaking the law,” she said.
“There also must be impeachment on the table. We have a broad level of tools to deal with misconduct, overreach and abuse of power in the supreme court [that] 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.”
Ocasio-Cortez also called on Biden to expand the court to 13 justices, something the president has said he is unwilling to attempt.
Her comments reflect a wave of Democratic outrage at the decisions, which came after Donald Trump’s appointments of justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett gave conservatives a 6-3 majority on the supreme court.
Ocasio-Cortez’s fellow progressive Ayanna Pressley, Democratic congresswoman for Massachusetts, was equally scathing on MSNBC’s Katie Phang show, calling the conservative majority “far-right extremists”.
“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,” she said.
The panel’s most controversial ruling last year, written by Alito, reversed its 1973 decision on Roe v Wade and ended almost half a century of federal abortion protections in the US.
As Biden put it after an address at the White House on Friday: “This is not a normal court.”
A poll released Sunday by ABC’s This Week showed that 52% of Americans believed that justices ruled “mainly on the basis of their partisan political view rather than on the basis of the law”, a significant rise from January 2022 when only 38% felt that way.skip past newsletter promotion
The poll, however, did show that a majority, 52%, approved of the decision ending affirmative action in colleges.
Condemning the ruling that allowed a Colorado website designer to refuse business from a same-sex couple, transport secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is openly gay, noted the court addressed a situation “that may have never happened in the first place”.
“We’re seeing more of these cases, of these circumstances that are designed to get people spun up and [are] designed to chip away at rights,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday.
“You look at the supreme court taking away a woman’s right to choose, Friday’s decision diminishing … same sex couples’ [quality of life], you look at a number of the decisions, they pose the question, ‘Did we just live to see the high-water mark of freedoms and rights in this country before they were gradually taken away?’
“Because up until now, not uniformly, but overall, each generation was able to say they enjoyed greater inclusion, greater equality, and more rights and freedoms than the generation before.”
In other interviews on Sunday, two prominent Republican presidential candidates said they supported the supreme court’s recent rulings, with one, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, accusing Democrats of hypocrisy.
“For decades the Democratic party cheered a supreme court that went outside the constitution and made extra-constitutional decisions, in my opinion, because the decisions went in a philosophical direction that they liked,” Christie said on State of the Union.
“Now, when the court makes decisions they don’t like, all of a sudden the court is ‘not normal’. This is a results-oriented type of judgment. Instead, what they should look at, is the way they analyze the law.”
Former vice-president Mike Pence, speaking on CBS, praised the website ruling. He said: “I’m a Bible believing Christian, I believe marriage is between one man and one woman, and I believe every American is entitled to live, to work, to worship, according to the dictates of their conscience.
“The supreme court drew a clear line and said yes to religious liberty.”
The conservative supreme court is “creeping dangerously towards authoritarianism”, the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Sunday, raising again the unlikely scenario of impeaching justices for recent actions.
Her comments came just days after the nation’s highest court released a batch of incendiary and far-reaching rulings striking down affirmative action in colleges, LBGTQ+ rights and Joe Biden’s student loan relief program.
“These are the types of rulings that signal a dangerous creep towards authoritarianism and centralization of power in the court,” she told CNN’s State of the Union.
“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 right now.
“They are expanding their role into acting as though they are Congress itself. And that, I believe, is an expansion of power that we really must be focusing on, the danger of this court and the abuse of power.”
Referring to ethics scandals that have involved two of the conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, Ocasio-Cortez repeated previous calls for Congress to look at removing them, a proposal that would be dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled House.
Senate Democrats and independents who caucus with them, meanwhile, hold only a slim majority.
Alito is accused of not disclosing gifts from a rightwing billionaire who lobbied for the court to end Biden’s loan relief program. Thomas is also alleged to have taken undeclared gifts, among other alleged transgressions, prompting an ethics watchdog last month to urge him to resign.
“We must pass much more binding and stringent ethics guidelines, where we see members of the supreme court potentially breaking the law,” she said.
“There also must be impeachment on the table. We have a broad level of tools to deal with misconduct, overreach and abuse of power in the supreme court [that] 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.”
Ocasio-Cortez also called on Biden to expand the court to 13 justices, something the president has said he is unwilling to attempt.
Her comments reflect a wave of Democratic outrage at the decisions, which came after Donald Trump’s appointments of justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett gave conservatives a 6-3 majority on the supreme court.
Ocasio-Cortez’s fellow progressive Ayanna Pressley, Democratic congresswoman for Massachusetts, was equally scathing on MSNBC’s Katie Phang show, calling the conservative majority “far-right extremists”.
“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,” she said.
The panel’s most controversial ruling last year, written by Alito, reversed its 1973 decision on Roe v Wade and ended almost half a century of federal abortion protections in the US.
As Biden put it after an address at the White House on Friday: “This is not a normal court.”
A poll released Sunday by ABC’s This Week showed that 52% of Americans believed that justices ruled “mainly on the basis of their partisan political view rather than on the basis of the law”, a significant rise from January 2022 when only 38% felt that way.skip past newsletter promotion
The poll, however, did show that a majority, 52%, approved of the decision ending affirmative action in colleges.
Condemning the ruling that allowed a Colorado website designer to refuse business from a same-sex couple, transport secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is openly gay, noted the court addressed a situation “that may have never happened in the first place”.
“We’re seeing more of these cases, of these circumstances that are designed to get people spun up and [are] designed to chip away at rights,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday.
“You look at the supreme court taking away a woman’s right to choose, Friday’s decision diminishing … same sex couples’ [quality of life], you look at a number of the decisions, they pose the question, ‘Did we just live to see the high-water mark of freedoms and rights in this country before they were gradually taken away?’
“Because up until now, not uniformly, but overall, each generation was able to say they enjoyed greater inclusion, greater equality, and more rights and freedoms than the generation before.”
In other interviews on Sunday, two prominent Republican presidential candidates said they supported the supreme court’s recent rulings, with one, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, accusing Democrats of hypocrisy.
“For decades the Democratic party cheered a supreme court that went outside the constitution and made extra-constitutional decisions, in my opinion, because the decisions went in a philosophical direction that they liked,” Christie said on State of the Union.
“Now, when the court makes decisions they don’t like, all of a sudden the court is ‘not normal’. This is a results-oriented type of judgment. Instead, what they should look at, is the way they analyze the law.”
Former vice-president Mike Pence, speaking on CBS, praised the website ruling. He said: “I’m a Bible believing Christian, I believe marriage is between one man and one woman, and I believe every American is entitled to live, to work, to worship, according to the dictates of their conscience.
“The supreme court drew a clear line and said yes to religious liberty.”
The high court had rejected the White House trying to use the HEROES Act.
ByTal Axelrod
July 2, 2023
California Rep. Ro Khanna on Sunday praised President Joe Biden's continued efforts to cancel federal student loan debt after the Supreme Court struck down his initial plan to forgive up to $20,000 for some borrowers.
Biden said Friday that he will now rely on the 1965 Higher Education Act to try to enact debt forgiveness, rather than the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (HEROES) Act of 2003, on which his initial plan was based.
"I am pleased that the White House is invoking the Higher Education Act," Khanna, a progressive Democrat, told ABC "This Week" co-anchor Jonathan Karl. "I do hope that the White House will make sure that the interest doesn't accrue starting in September. I know the president has said he isn't going to refer students to the credit agency. I also believe under the Higher Education Act he can stop the interest accrual."
While Khanna said he was supportive of Biden's new path forward -- and would like there to be a broader payment pause while the administration pursues more ways to legalize loan forgiveness -- he sharply criticized the Supreme Court.
MORE: SCOTUS student loan ruling could be a 'modest headwind' against economic recovery: Economists
He argued the justices overstepped their bounds and "usurped the authority of Congress" by limiting how the HEROES Act can be used, rather than deferring to legislators, "just because they think Congress gave too much power to the president."
The post-9/11 era HEROES law enabled the U.S. education secretary to "waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision" regarding student loans to initially protect borrowers impacted by terror attacks. That law was later altered to include people affected by "a war or other military operation or national emergency" -- with Biden maintaining that the COVID-19 pandemic qualified.
Karl noted on "This Week" that the Supreme Court's analysis rejected the White House's arguments, even citing a comment made by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2021 that Biden "can postpone [student loan debt]. He can delay. But he does not have that power [to cancel it]. That has to be an act of Congress."
The high court's conservative majority on Thursday ruled 6-3 that Biden did not have the authority under the HEROES Act to issue sweeping federal student loan cancellation, which the White House had hoped to do for more than 40 million borrowers.
In this Feb. 28, 2023, file photo, Rep. Ro Khanna questions witnesses during a hearing of a special House committee dedicated to countering China, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C.
Alex Brandon/AP, FILE
Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the opinion knocking down Biden's plan, found that precedent "requires that Congress speak clearly before a Department Secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy."
Khanna, on "This Week," took another view.
"We can have an argument that the HEROES Act passed in 2003 shortly after 9/11 was way too broad in giving that kind of authority to the president and the secretary. I don't believe it was the case. That's a legitimate argument. The place to make that argument is in the United States Congress," he said.
"It's not for unelected justices to override what Congress has passed. And that's what this court is doing. It's very dangerous," he continued. "They are basically reinterpreting congressional statute to fit their ideological preconceptions."
MORE: Biden outlines 'new path' to provide student loan relief after Supreme Court rejection
While the White House had long resisted discussing what other avenues they might pursue if the student loan cancellation program was rejected, the president on Friday said he will invoke the Higher Education Act to allow Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to "compromise, waive or release loans under certain circumstances."
But it's currently unclear how much forgiveness would be enacted under this strategy.
The White House will also implement a 12-month "on-ramp repayment program" during which the government will not refer borrowers who miss payments to credit agencies.
"This new path is legally sound," Biden said in remarks after the Supreme Court ruling. "It's going to take longer. And in my view, it's the best path that remains to student debt relief to as many borrowers as possible as quickly as possible."
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