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.
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.”
