Rep. Peter DeFazio Investigating Impeachment For Chief Justice John Roberts
With Democrats increasingly outraged over the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision that allowed unlimited corporate spending in elections — a change conservatives have been more successful at taking advantage of — a Democratic congressman is raising the prospect of impeaching the Supreme Court’s chief justice over the issue.
“I mean, the Supreme Court has done a tremendous disservice to the United States of America,” Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) told The Huffington Post on Tuesday. “They have done more to undermine our democracy with their Citizens United decision than all of the Republican operatives in the world in this campaign. They’ve opened the floodgates, and personally, I’m investigating articles of impeachment against Justice Roberts for perjuring during his Senate hearings, where he said he wouldn’t be a judicial activist, and he wouldn’t overturn precedents.”
Continue reading… HuffPo link above
“I don’t know why they’d feel uncomfortable, they made the decision. Look, the president disagreed, and polls show 80 percent of the country disagrees with that decision. The president would have said that in that room had they been sitting in that row or not been there at all.”
“Do you think John Roberts knows or cares how people get elected? I think we’ve had enough of them. I think what we need are people on that bench who have been legislators, people who are lawyers, people who are academics. You look at our Supreme Court and all these people, all they know is working with people in black robes. We have got to change that.”
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…”decorum” dictates that the targets of the criticism sit silently and not respond until later, once the speech is done. That’s how speeches work. Only Supreme Court Justices would depict their being subjected to such a mundane process as an act of grave unfairness (and, of course, Roberts’ comrade, Sam Alito, could not even bring himself to abide by that decorum).
What makes Roberts’ petty, self-absorbed grievance all the more striking is that this is what judges do all the time. It’s the essence of the judicial branch. Federal judges are basically absolute tyrants who rule over their courtroom and those in it with virtually no restraints. They can and do scold, criticize, berate, mock, humiliate and threaten anyone who appears before their little fiefdoms — parties, defendants, lawyers, witnesses, audience members — and not merely “decorum,” but the force of law (in the form of contempt citations or other penalties), compels the target to sit silently and not respond.
”“…while anyone is free to criticize the court, the sight of a president dressing down the justices in front of Congress was “very troubling.”
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on President Obama’s remarks about the court during the State of the Union. Roberts also told the law school class today in Alabama ”he wonders if justices should attend State of the Union addresses anymore.”
GW Hatchet Judge Sonia Sotomayor and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. had what might turn out to have been a dry run when they presided over moot court in 2006 at George Washington University. Political Memo - In Confirmation Fight, Language Is a Battlefield: NYTimes
