Cori Bush — Rep. Bush Highlights “Myth of Impartiality” of Supreme Court at Oversight Committee Roundtable

Speaker 1: Congresswoman Bush, our distinguished colleague from St. Louis

Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you, Ranking Member Raskin and Vice Ranking Member Ocasio-Cortez for convening this important roundtable. St. Louis and I are here today to tell some hard truths about the myth of impartiality of Supreme Court justices. Many of my colleagues have lamented the clear and egregious violations of the measly, newly implemented ethics standards that exist for the court

is

Speaker 2: it appalling that Justice Alito and his wife showed public support

Speaker 3: for the Stop the Steal movement in the days after January 6, after the insurrection, while the court was ruling on the 2020 election case? Absolutely! And yes, the recordings of them that were released just yesterday provide a revealing glimpse at their extremism

Speaker 4: But this scandal, we know, is just the latest example of the longstanding corruption and the extremism of the right-wing

Speaker 3: injustices. The truth is the Supreme Court has never been completely impartial. They weren't impartial in 1857 in the Dred Scott v. Sanford case, a

Speaker 4: case arising out of my district in Missouri, where the Supreme Court decided black people could not be considered American citizens. No surprise, because the

Speaker 2: Dred Scott court had four people who... enslaved black people on it. Justices, I'm calling their names, James Moore Wayne, Peter Daniel, John Campbell, and John Catrone. The U.S. Supreme Court wasn't

Speaker 3: impartial in 1927 when a vile eugenicist, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

Speaker 4: wrote the opinion in Buck v. Bell, upholding the forced sterilization of people with disabilities, or in 1986 when the majority of Supreme Court justices and Bowers v

Speaker 3: Hardrick display, quote, an almost obsessive

Speaker 2: focus on homosexual activity, unquote, according to their

own peer

Speaker 2: justice, I keep saying justice, Justice Harry Blackmun in his dissent. This obsession led them to green light the criminalization of gay and lesbian relationships in that decision. I could go on and on, but in the interest of

time, The

Speaker 2: sooner that we accept the emperor has no clothes, obvious truth, the better equipped we would be to put in meaningful safeguards to prevent people with clear bias and vested monetary interest in the outcome of the U.S. Supreme Court cases from deciding

Speaker 4: those same cases

At

Speaker 4: minimum, Justice Alito should recuse himself from all cases related to the 2020 election. The Senate Judiciary Committee should investigate

Speaker 2: And depending on the facts, there should be an impeachment inquiry, as is true for Justice Thomas and his many, many outrageous scandals. But both Justice Alito and Thomas can spare themselves. They can spare

Speaker 4: the federal judiciary and our country from further humiliation by resigning right

now. But we

Speaker 2: obviously we can't count on these men to do the right thing. This is why I, along with my colleagues, have reintroduced the Judiciary Act, this

Speaker 4: Congress, a bill that will add four seats to the U.S. Supreme Court, bringing the bench from nine to 13 justices. This is just one of the many crucial reforms needed to dilute and control the almost limitless power

these

Speaker 4: corrupt justices yield. We know that the corruption of the Supreme Court, it affects us all in the next month, including its blatantly pro-insurrection wing, will rule on access to medication abortion, the rights of unhoused people, and Trump's claim of immunity against prosecution

Speaker 2: in connection with January 6th. Their lack of neutrality has been so irrefutably documented that Congress genuinely, if Congress genuinely wants to restore the public confidence in the judiciary, it must remove the lawless justices. enact ethics reform, expand the court, and institute term limits. So, Professor Shah, I'd like

Speaker 5: to ask you about the decisions that these far-right corrupt justices are handing down. What does this mean for real people like in St. Louis? So can you talk about the real harms that are caused on our communities by these SCOTUS decisions

Speaker 6: Sure. You know, I mentioned in my opening some of the impact, some of the regulations that have been targeted in some of the recent administrative law cases. Maybe I'll just say

a couple

Speaker 6: of words about the abortion cases on the court's docket right now. So the court is considering an outlandish challenge brought in Texas to Mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in the medication abortion protocol, brought by a group of anti-abortion doctors with the most tenuous of claims to a legal right to be in court, challenging the FDA's approval and regulatory decisions. And yet, a district judge in Texas sided with them on both their ability to be in court and their substantive claims of invalidity of the FDA's approval. The Fifth Circuit rolled that back to a degree, but did agree that some of what the FDA had done, loosening restrictions on access to mifepristone, was unlawful. The case never should have been allowed to be heard in the first place, so the Supreme Court is currently deciding what it's going to do with that case. I think most likely the standing analysis below is too much even for the Supreme Court to accept, and so that case will be thrown out on standing grounds, and so mifepristone will remain available on the terms it is currently available on. But

the

Speaker 6: There's another case waiting in the wings brought by a group of states instead of doctors, and that case I think could well be before the Supreme Court in a year or two. So we're talking about access to often needed, widely used medication that is the most common method of ending a pregnancy across the country, and the court has the ability to render that essentially unavailable to all Americans