GOP Packed the Supreme Court — Ranking Member Raskin's Opening Statement at Hearing

[0:00] his opening statement. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And I suppose the court packing like [0:08] justice itself lies in the eye of the beholder. But there are many different kinds of court packing. [0:15] Here's one. When Justice Scalia died in February of 2016, when Barack Obama was president, [0:22] Senator Mitch McConnell announced 10 and a half months before the presidential election that the [0:27] Senate would not be considering any replacement. The Judiciary Committee would not have any hearing [0:32] there'd be no vote in committee and there'd be no vote on the floor. When people asked why that makes [0:38] no sense to hold the Supreme Court seat open, to hold that vacancy open for nearly a year, he said [0:46] it was too close to the next presidential election and the people should decide. Of course, the people [0:52] decided in electing Barack Obama to one of those genuine bona fide four-year terms in office like [0:58] every other president. Well, we've got a controlled experiment about what would happen because that [1:05] was held open. Merrick Garland was nominated by Barack Obama and was left twisting in the wind [1:11] for nearly 11 months after the death of Justice Scalia. Then Trump, when he got in, was able to [1:21] nominate Neil Gorsuch to the seat in his first week in office. And that seat was open for 422 days. [1:31] And Mitch McConnell bragged about it, calling it the most consequential decision of his entire public [1:36] career. And of course, it cemented the rapid movement of the Supreme Court to the right to [1:43] incarnate the mega agenda on the Supreme Court. Well, look, here's what happened when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. [1:51] Now, she died on September 18th, 2020, so close to the next election, which was less than two months [1:59] away, that early voting had started in a lot of the states. So it wasn't even two months away. And then [2:06] the Democrats asked Mitch McConnell, some reporters asked Mitch McConnell, well, of course, you're not [2:12] going to have hearings or vote or anything in the next few weeks, are you? And he laughed it off. He [2:16] laughed off the suggestion that they would maintain the same rule that they had used to block Merrick [2:23] Garland and President Obama from having a seat. And then they ran through the nomination of Amy Coney [2:30] Barrett within two months, consolidating the right wing anti choice, anti environmental regulation, [2:37] anti labor, anti voting rights, anti democracy majority on the Supreme Court. Had the original [2:44] McConnell rule been applied, or even a reasonable approach taken with just a few weeks before the [2:51] election. That's that Supreme Court seat would have been filled by President Biden, not by Donald [2:57] Trump. Biden won that election, by the way, by more than seven million votes. If you're interested in [3:02] what the people want 306 to 232 in Electoral College. I know some people came down to overthrow the [3:08] election, attack our police officers in order to accomplish a political coup to deny that. But that's [3:15] what happened. So right there, we've got two seats officially stolen by Mitch McConnell and the [3:22] Republican Senate, giving them a six three mega court with a majority of the court now made up of [3:28] nominees of presidents who lost the popular votes, lost the popular vote. Roberts and Alito, Gorsuch, [3:36] Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, all nominated the court by justices by presidents who lost the popular vote. [3:43] Now, if you don't believe that this Supreme Court has received, has conceived and achieved a remarkable [3:53] transformation in constitutional jurisprudence, ethics and behavior on everything from abortion to voting [4:01] rights to political corruption cases, then you have to believe me or you don't have to believe your own [4:07] eyes. Just listen to Donald Trump, who openly says it's really OK for them to be loyal to the person that [4:14] appointed them to almost the highest position in the land, a justice of the US Supreme Court. He [4:19] berates and vilifies justices and judges up and down the federal system who disagree with him or who [4:25] he feels have been insufficiently robotic in their loyalty to the mega agenda. It's true. He doesn't [4:33] want a justice loyal to the people, as the good chairman of the subcommittee says, or the Constitution. He [4:38] wants a Supreme Court loyal to him and whatever is going to advance his interests, his money, his family, [4:44] his corporations. He's got a Supreme Court majority so robotically loyal that they will pluck a doctrine [4:51] out of thin air, nothing to do with originalism, nothing to do with textualism, out of thin air to [4:57] insulate the president from liability for felony crimes committed in office. We went for more than two [5:03] centuries without any president ever claiming the right to commit crimes under his office and not to [5:11] be prosecuted for it. But here we are today. The Supreme Court, we must acknowledge, has been a [5:18] profoundly conservative reactionary institution for the vast majority of our history. And what did the [5:23] Supreme Court ever do for enslaved people between the founding the Civil War? Nothing other than in [5:28] 1857 in the Dred Scott decision cement their subjugation into place, saying that the African slave and his [5:37] descendants have no rights a white man is bound to respect in any way. And then even after the Civil War, [5:42] after the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments drawn from the blood, sweat, and tears of the [5:48] Union and the people who fought to defend our country against the Confederacy, the Supreme Court gutted the [5:55] meaning of the Reconstruction Amendments in the civil rights cases. And then in 1896, in Plessy versus [6:01] Ferguson, constitutionalized the the reign of Jim Crow, separate but equal. So we have a couple decades [6:08] around the Warren Court, maybe the first few years of the Burger Court, where the Supreme Court acted on [6:14] the side of the people. Brown versus Board of Education striking down American apartheid, the white primary [6:22] line of cases, Terry versus Ohio, Roe versus Wade. But it didn't last long before it all sank away with [6:29] the Rehnquist Court and the Roberts Court. And now they've returned to the historic baseline of political [6:36] white supremacy. They wiped out our Voting Rights Act first in Shelby County versus Holder in 2013 [6:42] and a couple months ago in the Calais decision. And we are about to see they're not going to be able to [6:48] accomplish it all in 2026. But by 2028, we will probably see all white congressional delegations [6:55] from the Deep South, wherever the Republicans control the state legislatures. Okay, that is court [7:00] packing. That's political packing by a packed Supreme Court. The court today is a legitimacy crisis, [7:07] not just because of the way it's been composed and stacked and packed and gerrymandered and divided by [7:13] Mitch McConnell, who laughs about it. He thinks it's funny what they did. Why do some people want 13 [7:21] circuits, Mr. Chairman? Very 13 members of the court. You don't need a conspiracy theory for that. [7:27] There are 13 federal circuits in America. And traditionally, the Supreme Court has been made up [7:33] of the number of justices equal to the number of circuits. And we got 13 circuits, but we only have [7:38] nine justices. So that means that under the best of circumstances, four entire federal regions, [7:45] four federal circuits will be left out completely. And it's much worse than that today, because we've [7:51] got five justices from New York City alone, one for each borough. But you're telling a majority of the [7:57] people who live in a majority of the states that they can't find anybody qualified to serve on the [8:03] Supreme Court. So that's the answer to that particular question. But we've got a complete [8:08] structural, ethical, jurisprudential crisis in the Supreme Court, whose name is in the gutter [8:14] because of these terrible decisions that they keep issuing, like the overthrow of Roe versus Wade, [8:22] Planned Parenthood versus Casey, the complete construction out of thin air, of immunity of [8:31] presidents to commit felony crimes while in office, and so on. And I hope that this court will do its [8:38] best to try to behave like a Supreme Court. But there are things that we can do. And I introduced [8:44] one bill yesterday called the SCOTUS Act. And the SCOTUS Act is creating a new way for cert to be granted [8:54] because this Supreme Court is obviously acting like a legislature. I mean, they set up an agenda [8:59] where they want this case about the Voting Rights Act. They want to destroy it. Oh, now it's time for [9:04] us to overthrow abortion rights. We're going to take that case. All right. A lot of countries don't [9:11] leave the agenda setting authority to the court itself. And certainly we should not leave it in [9:16] the hands of this Supreme Court. It belongs with the 13 federal circuits. We should have a panel made up [9:22] of the chief judge of each federal circuit or their designee if they want another judge to do it. [9:27] And they should decide when there is a meaningful circuit split or a federal question that should [9:32] go up to the Supreme Court. This court obviously cannot be trusted with that agenda setting authority. [9:38] Let's begin to create a real Supreme Court in the country by moving in this direction. And I thank [9:46] you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back to you. [9:47] Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back to you.