After a week of decisions that struck down affirmative action at universities, ruled against President Biden’s college debt cancellation and loosened protections for LGBTQ persons, the Supreme Court has drawn the ire of many – including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who says the Court “has not been receiving adequate oversight.”
Appearing on CNN on Sunday, AOC called attention to the controversies concerning Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas and said a subpoena for Chief Justice Roberts isn’t out of the question.
“We have a senate judiciary committee that is beginning the process of investigating the entanglements and conflicts of interest. Just one to two weeks before the student loan ruling, the country learned that Justice Samuel Alito was accepting gifts from billionaires who were lobbying before the Supreme Court against student loan forgiveness,” she said. “I believe that if Chief Justice Roberts will not come before Congress for an investigation voluntarily, I believe that we should be considering subpoenas, we should be considering investigations.”
The New York congresswoman continued, saying impeachment should also be on the table.
“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 January 6. There also must be impeachment on the table.”
Ocasio-Cortez also said the Court has put its own legitimacy into question.
“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, and in the process they themselves have been destroying the legitimacy of court, which is profoundly dangerous for our democracy.”
The Supreme Court’s decisions this past week inflamed many, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson who issued a scathing dissent in the case that effectively put an end to affirmative action at colleges.
“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat,” the dissent read in part. “But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems.”
