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Congress should consider impeaching conservative Supreme Court justices if they lied under oath during their Senate confirmation hearings, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Sunday.
Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the New York Democrat noted that two senators — Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., and Susan Collins, R-Maine — have said they were misled by multiple Supreme Court nominees who said during their confirmation hearings they would not try to overturn Roe v. Wade. On Friday, they did just that, overturning the 49-year-old ruling that legalized abortion in the U.S.
“ “I believe lying under oath is an impeachable offense.””
“They lied,” Ocasio-Cortez said, according to an NBC transcript. “If we allow Supreme Court nominees to lie under oath and secure lifetime appointments to the highest court of the land and then issue — issue without basis, if you read these opinions — rulings that deeply undermine the human civil rights of the majority of Americans, we must see that through.”
“There must be consequences for such a deeply destabilizing action and the hostile takeover of our democratic institutions,” she added. “And what makes it particularly dangerous is that it sends a blaring signal to all future nominees that they can now lie to duly elected members of the United States Senate in order to secure Supreme Court confirmations and seats on the Supreme Court.”
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Echoing the sentiment of Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Ocasio-Cortez questioned the Supreme Court’s legitimacy: “This is not just a crisis of Roe, this is a crisis of our democracy. The Supreme Court has dramatically overreached its authority.”
Speaking on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday morning, Warren blasted Friday’s ruling and called for the Supreme Court to be expanded.
“This court has lost legitimacy. They have burned whatever legitimacy they still may have had after their gun decision, after their voting decision, after their union decision,” she said, according to an ABC transcript. “They just took the last of it and set a torch to it with the Roe v. Wade opinion.”
“I believe we need to get some confidence back in our court and that means we need more justices on the United States Supreme Court,” Warren said.
