Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) slammed Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in a speech on Wednesday, saying it is vital that they be impeached after the two have committed innumerable “abuses of power” that have helped lead the country down a dark path.
Speaking on the House floor as she introduced articles of impeachment against the justices, Ocasio-Cortez warned that the deep corruption on display by both justices “infects all it touches” and must be stopped by Congress.
“For the good of the institution and the nation, absent resignation, they must be removed. The proof is undeniable,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “Reasonable Americans will and do believe that Justices Thomas and Alito are prone and subjected to corruption, that the institution failing to punish them is broken, and that consequently, their impeachment is a constitutional imperative and our congressional duty.”
The type of violations committed by the justices represent grave threats to democracy and are exactly why the concept of impeachment was established, she said.
She laid out the evidence against the justices backing her impeachment attempt, highlighting only the most egregious violations exposed over the past years, like Thomas’s decades of accepting at least over $1.5 million in gifts from right-wing billionaire Harlan Crow and refusal to recuse himself from cases that Crow has had before the Court. Crow and Thomas, she noted, only became close after Thomas was appointed to the Court.
“Would a reasonable American question that receiving lavish gifts from Mr. Crow might lead Justice Thomas to have a bias towards his, quote, friend with business before the court? Without a doubt, yes. But did Justice Thomas recuse? No,” she said.
Meanwhile, Thomas’s refusal to recuse from cases related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol despite his wife’s role in organizing the day’s events represents “one of the most shocking examples of conflict of interest in the Court’s history.”
On Alito, she brought up his refusal to recuse from a case involving his billionaire benefactor Paul Singer, netting Singer $2.4 billion, or refusal to recuse from cases surrounding the 2020 election despite flying a flag in solidarity with pro-Donald Trump Christian nationalists after the January 6 attempted coup.
“Would a reasonable person question that Justice Alito’s conduct exhibits and demonstrates reasonable concern for bias in these cases? Absolutely, and without question,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez’s impeachment filing is the strongest response yet to Supreme Court malfeasance, and comes amid a string of extremist decisions made in the last years seeking, as the bench’s right-wing benefactors wish, to overhaul the U.S. government and concentrate power in conservative institutions. The Court has made many decisions overturning decades-old precedents or taking up cases entirely lacking standing in order to erode Americans’ rights or attack left-leaning regulatory powers.
These decisions are undoubtedly related to Alito and Thomas’s ties to major dark money networks that have waged campaigns for many years to have decisions like Roe v. Wade overturned, as Ocasio-Cortez pointed out.
“We cannot ignore and pretend that this corruption is wholly unrelated to the millions of pregnant Americans now suffering and bleeding out in emergency rooms under the court’s unleashing of extreme abortion bans across the United States,” she said. “Nor can we ignore the millions of Americans now suffering hours long wait times in the hot sun, often without water, just to cast a ballot, also a direct result of this corrupt court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act.”
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