{"id":27207,"date":"2023-07-04T13:34:07","date_gmt":"2023-07-04T20:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=27207"},"modified":"2023-07-04T13:34:08","modified_gmt":"2023-07-04T20:34:08","slug":"us-supreme-court-creeping-dangerously-towards-authoritarianism-aoc-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/07\/04\/us-supreme-court-creeping-dangerously-towards-authoritarianism-aoc-says\/","title":{"rendered":"US supreme court \u2018creeping dangerously towards authoritarianism\u2019, AOC says"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Congresswoman\u2019s comments come days after nation\u2019s highest court released batch of incendiary and far-reaching rulings<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Richard Luscombe<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

2 Jul 2023 12.49 EDT (theguardian.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conservative supreme court is \u201ccreeping dangerously towards authoritarianism\u201d, the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez<\/a> said on Sunday, raising again the unlikely scenario of impeaching justices for recent actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her comments came just days after the nation\u2019s highest court released a batch of incendiary and far-reaching rulings<\/a> striking down affirmative action in colleges, LBGTQ+ rights and Joe Biden\u2019s student loan relief program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThese are the types of rulings that signal a dangerous creep towards authoritarianism and centralization of power in the court,\u201d she told CNN\u2019s State of the Union.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Senate Democrats and independents who caucus with them, meanwhile, hold only a slim majority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alito is accused of not disclosing gifts<\/a> from a rightwing billionaire who lobbied for the court to end Biden\u2019s loan relief program. Thomas is also alleged to have taken undeclared gifts, among other alleged transgressions<\/a>, prompting an ethics watchdog last month to urge him to resign<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe must pass much more binding and stringent ethics guidelines, where we see members of the supreme court potentially breaking the law,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd in the process, they themselves have been destroying the legitimacy of the court, which is profoundly dangerous for our entire democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ocasio-Cortez also called on Biden to expand the court to 13 justices<\/a>, something the president has said he is unwilling to attempt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her comments reflect a wave of Democratic outrage at the decisions, which came after Donald Trump\u2019s appointments of justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett gave conservatives a 6-3 majority on the supreme court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ocasio-Cortez\u2019s fellow progressive Ayanna Pressley, Democratic congresswoman for Massachusetts, was equally scathing on MSNBC\u2019s Katie Phang show, calling the conservative majority \u201cfar-right extremists\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey 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,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The panel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Biden put it after an address at the White House on Friday: \u201cThis is not a normal court.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A poll released Sunday<\/a> by ABC\u2019s This Week showed that 52% of Americans believed that justices ruled \u201cmainly on the basis of their partisan political view rather than on the basis of the law\u201d, a significant rise from January 2022 when only 38% felt that way.skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The poll, however, did show that a majority, 52%, approved of the decision ending affirmative action<\/a> in colleges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cthat may have never happened<\/a> in the first place\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re seeing more of these cases, of these circumstances that are designed to get people spun up and [are] designed to chip away at rights,\u201d he told CBS\u2019s Face the Nation on Sunday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou look at the supreme court taking away a woman\u2019s right to choose, Friday\u2019s decision diminishing \u2026 same sex couples\u2019 [quality of life], you look at a number of the decisions, they pose the question, \u2018Did we just live to see the high-water mark of freedoms and rights in this country before they were gradually taken away?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBecause 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other interviews on Sunday, two prominent Republican presidential candidates said they supported the supreme court\u2019s recent rulings, with one, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, accusing Democrats of hypocrisy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFor 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,\u201d Christie said on State of the Union.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNow, when the court makes decisions they don\u2019t like, all of a sudden the court is \u2018not normal\u2019. This is a results-oriented type of judgment. Instead, what they should look at, is the way they analyze the law.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Former vice-president Mike Pence, speaking on CBS, praised the website ruling. He said: \u201cI\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe supreme court drew a clear line and said yes to religious liberty.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Congresswoman\u2019s comments come days after nation\u2019s highest court released batch of incendiary and far-reaching rulings Richard Luscombe 2 Jul 2023 12.49 EDT (theguardian.com) The conservative supreme court is \u201ccreeping dangerously towards authoritarianism\u201d, the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Sunday, raising again the unlikely scenario of impeaching justices for recent actions. Her… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[387,483],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27207"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27207"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27209,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27207\/revisions\/27209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}