 The Supreme Court has dramatically overreached its authority. We had two conservative senators in the United States Senate, Senator Manchin and Senator Collins come out with a very explosive allegation that these, that several Supreme Court justices misled them during their confirmation hearings and in the lead up to their confirmation. This is a crisis of legitimacy. We have a Supreme Court justice whose wife participated in January 6th and who used his seat to vote against providing documents that potentially led to evidence of such to investigators in Congress. This is a crisis of legitimacy and President Biden must address that. That was representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explicitly making the case for impeachment and this is admittedly drastic action to take but it is necessary because the Supreme Court has gone rogue and this illegitimate Supreme Court must be reined in in order to save democracy. Now in the event the House Judiciary Committee chose to take up impeachment for purposes of perjury, I don't know that every single case would be successful but is there enough there to claim that these justices under oath misled senators and lied to get their lifetime appointments to the highest court in the land? Absolutely. So before we talk about this any further, take a look at the video that we shared last Friday on the program. It's it's something that you might have already seen but it's well worth watching again. Take a look. I don't have any agenda. I have no agenda to try to overrule Casey. I have an agenda to stick to the rule of law. As a judge, it is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. By it I mean Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood versus Casey then reaffirmed many times. Roe v. Wade decided in 1973 as a President of the United States Supreme Court. He was reaffirmed in Casey in 1992 and in several other cases. So a good judge will consider it as precedent of the United States Supreme Court worthy as treatment of precedent like any other. Roe v. Wade is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. It was decided in 1973. The Supreme Court has reaffirmed the decision. When a decision is challenged and it is reaffirmed, that strengthens its value. I believe the Constitution protects the right to privacy. And I have no reason or agenda to prejudge the issue. What would he have done if he had asked? Senator, I would have walked out the door. It's not what judges do. So some of them may have plausible deniability but I think that there's enough evidence there to suggest that they outright lied. They lied. They said that they wouldn't do this and they did it anyway. Now put yourself in the position of a worker who applied for a job at McDonald's because McDonald's was seeking a Spanish speaking employee because there is a large portion of the population who they're not able to serve because they don't speak Spanish. So they needed someone who spoke Spanish. So that employee said, I speak Spanish. They hire that employee and then it turns out, well, that employee doesn't actually speak Spanish. They're not bilingual. They only speak English and they can't do what they were hired to do. What would happen? Well, at a minimum, that employee would probably be demoted but that employer would likely fire them. So if it's a normal person who lies to get a job, they would be reprimanded. There would be punishment for that. But when a Supreme Court justice lies to get on the highest court on the land, we're supposed to just let them be there, let them continue to destroy democracy. I don't think so. Drastic action must be taken and AOC is right to call for impeachment. Now because the Supreme Court has gone rogue, well, the American people, they agree with AOC here and they also support drastic action. A Politico morning consult poll finds that 62% of Americans now support term limits for justices, 45% support expanding the number of justices on the court. That's now a plurality. 60% of Americans support placing an age cap on justices, 69% support binding justices to a code of ethics and 53% support balancing the court with equal numbers of Democrats, Republicans and independents. Now the American people would not support balancing the court with an equal number of Democrats, Republicans and independents if the court wasn't so explicitly and negatively partisan. But because the Supreme Court has given up all pretenses of objectivity and nonpartisan, you know, jurisprudence, while now the American people see through that and they think, okay, something has to be done because we can't just allow them for the next two to three decades to destroy civil rights and civil liberties as an institution. We have to take drastic action to save the Supreme Court, to save democracy. So that's what needs to be done. AOC is laying it out. The American people are saying, take action over the weekend. There were thousands, if not millions of Americans marching in the streets demanding the Supreme Court undo what they did, demand that Democrats take action. But what are Democrats doing? Nothing. In fact, Joe Biden made it very clear that he is against expanding the Supreme Court. In other words, he's against what a plurality of Americans think is necessary to save democracy. And Democrats, I don't know if there's any leader that plans on doing it, but they should really start calling for impeachment proceedings immediately. Perjury isn't the only thing that you can get these far-right justices for. Clarence Thomas is an insurrectionist. He refused to recuse himself in cases related to January 6th. His wife is an insurrectionist. He's the one Supreme Court justice who voted that Donald Trump doesn't have to turn over documents to the January 6th Select Committee. But yet he's allowed to continue being a Supreme Court justice with a lifetime appointment after he very clearly is unethical, is compromised. I mean, Democrats, they refuse to act. And yes, it is right to call for the codification of Roe, but that is not a permanent solution because if they were to theoretically codify Roe, well, I mean, a Republican state could challenge that, violate that law. It could go up to the Supreme Court and they could strike that down as unconstitutional. And it's unrealistic to expect Democrats to be able to codify every single civil right and civil liberty that we lose. So court reform is a necessity, but Democrats are saying, actually we don't support court reform. In fact, we're not gonna do anything but fundraise, give us a bigger majority, or we do nothing. That's where we're at and it's unacceptable. Think of the message that this sends to the American people. If these Supreme Court justices can potentially commit perjury, can engage in conflict of interest, be insurrectionists and still not see any repercussions. In fact, AOC breaks it down why it's so important that we take action to reform the court right now. If we allow Supreme Court nominees to lie under oath and secure lifetime appointments to the highest court of the land and then issue without basis, if you read these opinions, issue without basis, rulings that deeply undermine the human and civil rights of the majority of Americans, we must see that through. There must be consequences for such a deeply destabilizing action and hostile takeover of our democratic institutions. To allow that to stand is to allow it to happen. 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. Do you think lying in a confirmation hearing is an impeachable offense? I believe so. I believe so. I believe lying under oath is an impeachable offense. I believe that violating federal law in not disclosing income from political organizations as Clarence Thomas did years ago is also potentially an impeachable offense. I believe that not recusing from cases that one clearly has family members involved in with very deep violations of conflict of interest are also impeachable offenses. And I believe that this is something that should be very seriously considered, including by senators like Joe Manchin and Susan Collins. She's absolutely correct there. And it's nice to see at least one Democrat speak up and say, hey, maybe we should start holding elites to the same standard that we hold peasants to. I mean, they very obviously, at a minimum, some of them possibly committed perjury, others have engaged in a plot to overthrow democracy. Maybe we should do something. But you see, the message that has been sent to the American people time and again is that elites can get away with basically doing anything and peasants will get prosecuted. How many elites have been arrested for breaking the law when it comes to January 6th versus how many just people who stormed the Capitol were prosecuted and they should be in jail. They should be arrested for trying to overthrow democracy, but the individuals who egged them on the elites, they're the ones who should also face accountability, but we just don't see that time. And again, our public officials, they commit war crimes. They commit acts of violence against the American people and nothing is done to them. Now for once, when democracy is literally at stake, now is not the time to be cowards. Now is the time for Democrats to step up. But Democratic Party leadership has proven that they are not going to meet this moment. Now, surprisingly, in that same interview with AOC, Chuck Todd shared an article by Jason Lincoln's published in the New Republic that really breaks down why Democratic Party leaders are terrible, quite frankly. The reason why they don't want to hold the GOP accountable is because they rely on the GOP's success in order to galvanize their own base and then in turn be successful themselves. Lincoln argues, thanks to the Supreme Court's June docket, this is a boom time for coordinated multi-year strategies, so much so that you wonder, do the Democrats have any of their own up their sleeve? Alas, for the Democrats, the flowers of such labor seem unlikely to bloom any time soon, but what is sprouting from the roughly-tilled soil of our politics is a clear distinction between the two parties' theories of change. For the GOP, change comes after long periods of hard work, steady funding and maintaining enthusiasm and momentum through periods of setback. For Democrats, change is reactive, coming only after the GOP's ambitions have hurt just enough people to make Republicans rule untenable. It's clear that the first approach is proving more successful and more durable than the other. There are worrying signs that Democrats have been conditioned to believe that the key to their success comes through periodic collapse that there is a perverse comfort to be taken in the courting of imminent disaster. At the moment, Democrats' hopes for the midterms lie in the potential galvanization of voters that might or might not follow the gutting of reproductive freedom and across the country, Democrats are trying to help extremist candidates win GOP primaries in the hopes that those candidates will be less competitive in the general elections. Larry Summers believes that whipping inflation will require higher unemployment rates and Democrats are listening. Even the strange reluctance among national Democrats to rise to the defense of the LGBTQ community, amid daily genocidal rhetoric of Republicans, suggests that they're counting on some amount of mayhem to inspire a normalcy-inducing backlash. It's quite depressing to live in a political system where one party can only ascend to power on the backs of the victims the other party leaves behind. So we're in a situation where only one of the two major political parties knows how to successfully wield power. And unfortunately, it's the party that wants to kill us and kill the planet. Republicans know how to make use of a majority. We never hear excuses about the parliamentarian or the filibuster or a couple of rogue Republicans who refuse to go along with their party. They make sure that every single person gets in line and they carry out their agenda. They have short-term and long-term goals and they get them accomplished, whereas Democrats, they have fundraising emails that they probably pre-wrote anticipating the fall of Roe v. Wade and they ask their base to send them 15 bucks so they can expand their majority so they can maybe begin to do things, even if public opinion polls show that they will lose at least the house. I mean, this is why we are in this predicament because Democrats, they have no cohesivition and the reason why they don't have a policy agenda, short or long-term goals is because what they need to do to galvanize their base would conflict with what their donors want. So they've chosen their donors over their base and so this is why we hear excuses time and again. Well, we can't do it. We only have a slim majority in the Senate. Well, the parliamentarian, the filibuster, mansion, cinema. Oh, well, we can't pass this using reconciliation. They don't know how to wield power. They don't know how to govern, whereas Republicans do. The party that wants us dead. The party that wants to restrict women's rights take us back to the 1950s and act a theocracy. They're getting what they want. And so the Democratic Party leadership, they have to go and that means people like AOC can't be afraid to name and shame members of leadership. Sure, we've seen individuals like AOC and Bernie Sanders tepidly condemn what Democratic Party leaders are doing or won't do, but you have to name and shame them and you have to let people know that they must demand people like Nancy Pelosi step down. Joe Biden must immediately announce that he is not going to seek a second term so the Democratic Party can have a robust primary in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election. This is not okay. The Democratic Party is incapable of meeting this moment.