Even before the Dobbs decision was made, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) explicitly threatened the Court. “Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whihrlwind and you will pay the price,” the Senator said at a rally held in March of 2020. “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
Though Schumer later walked these comments back, stating “I shouldn’t have used the words I did,” while claiming that “in no way was I making a threat”, other members of the Legislative Branch have also felt free to make disparaging comments about the members of the Supreme Court. “The US supreme court has been ‘captured and corrupted by money and extremism’, provoking a ‘crisis of legitimacy’ that threatens the stability of US democracy, warned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Speaking during a round table on Capitol Hill, the New York Democratic representative accused the court of ‘delegitimizing itself through its conduct’. ‘A group of anti-democratic billionaires with their own ideological and economic agenda has been working one of the three co-equal branches of government,’ she said.”
Shortly after making these comments, AOC backed up her rhetoric by bringing Articles of Impeachment against Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, on the flimsiest of pretexts.
These charges will be discussed in more detail in a forthcoming article, but suffice it to say, her case against Justice Alito in particular could not be more ludicrous. Involving a fishing trip he took with an industrialist decades ago, AOC also references the Justice’s wife flying an American flag upside down, which the New York Democrat alleges is “widely understood to be an expression of support for the criminal efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and was a symbol displayed by those who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
Regarding Justice Thomas, AOC alleges that “[o]ver the course of at least 15 years, Justice Thomas (has) received gifts of significant value from Harlan Crow without reporting the source, description, and value of such gifts. Throughout such time, Mr. Crow has served on the Board of Directors of the American Enterprise Institute, which regularly files amicus briefs in Supreme Court cases and whose position Justice Thomas has regularly adopted.”
Justice Thomas has disclosed these gifts, which are mostly trips to conferences around the world over a number of years. As is discussed in the forthcoming article, there may be some appearance of impropriety for Justice Thomas in his acceptance of these gifts, but no actual wrongdoing.
Further, neither Impeachment will ever move forward (at least, not while Republicans are in control of the House of Representatives). But coming after the leak of the draft of the Dobbs decision, and the personal threats made by Senator Schumer, these Articles of Impeachment are another attempt by Democrats to impugn the integrity of the Court and its members.
Now Democrats can also rely upon someone from within the Court itself to help their efforts to discredit the US Supreme Court.
We have previously discussed the efforts made by Congressional Democrats to “pack” the Supreme Court with additional, and presumably more left-leaning justices. Add to this onslaught President Biden’s comments made during his most recent State of the Union address.
As described by NBC News, “Joe Biden did what was once unthinkable: directly challenge Supreme Court justices about one of their opinions, addressing them personally. Biden brought up the conservative majority’s landmark reversal of Roe v. Wade. He had begun to read an excerpt of the decision when he began a brief aside, looking right at the justices sitting in the front row. ‘With all due respect, justices, women are not without … electoral or political power,’ he said. Then, in what appeared to be an ad-libbed moment, he added, ‘You’re about to realize just how much …’ before Democrats in the chamber jumped to their feet and cheered.”
To their credit, the Justices did not visibly react to this Executive Branch attack on the Judicial Branch. But for just how long can the Supreme Court continue to function under this relentless Democrat siege?
Judge John Wilson served on the bench in NYC