AOC wants to impeach SCOTUS justices following Trump immunity ruling
- Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she'd file impeachment articles against Supreme Court justices.
- The congresswoman cast the move as an effort to "defend our nation" from "authoritarian capture."
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is ready to impeach Supreme Court justices after the court handed former President Donald Trump a victory in his immunity case.
The Democrat from New York wrote that the court has become "consumed by a corruption crisis beyond its control" and that it's "up to Congress to defend our nation from this authoritarian capture."
The House is set to return from its current recess next Monday.
It was not immediately clear which justices the congresswoman would seek to impeach, though she has previously suggested that Justice Clarence Thomas should be over his failure to disclose lavish trips paid for by Republican billionaires, some of whom had business before the court.
On Friday, the court released an opinion finding that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for most official acts, a ruling that Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested would enable presidents to assassinate their political rivals.
Ocasio-Cortez's impeachment bid is unlikely to go anywhere in the near term: Republicans control the House and Democratic leadership hasn't fully come around to the notion that the justices should face impeachment.
In a statement after the ruling, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said that Democrats would "engage in aggressive oversight and legislative activity with respect to the Supreme Court to ensure that the extreme, far-right justices in the majority are brought into compliance with the Constitution."
But the act of filing impeachment articles represents a significant escalation in Democrats' efforts to exercise greater oversight over the high court, which has faced numerous ethics scandals in recent years while issuing a spate of conservative opinions that have upended decades of precedent, including the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
The last (and only) time a Supreme Court Justice has been impeached was 220 years ago, when Samuel Chase survived an effort to remove him in 1804 over his handling of two politically sensitive trials.