00:00Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And I suppose the court packing like justice itself lies in the eye of
00:08the beholder. But there are many different kinds of court packing. Here's one. When Justice Scalia died in February of
00:162016, when Barack Obama was president, Senator Mitch McConnell announced 10 and a half months before the presidential election that
00:25the Senate would not be considering any replacement.
00:27The Judiciary Committee would not have any hearing. There'd be no vote in committee and there'd be no vote on
00:32the floor. When people asked why, that makes no sense to hold the Supreme Court seat open, to hold that
00:41vacancy open for nearly a year.
00:43He said it was too close to the next presidential election and the people should decide. Of course, the people
00:49had decided in electing Barack Obama to one of those genuine, bona fide, four-year terms in office, like every
00:56other president.
00:57Well, we've got a controlled experiment about what would happen because that was held open. Merrick Garland was nominated by
01:06Barack Obama and was left twisting in the wind for nearly 11 months after the death of Justice Scalia.
01:14Then Trump, when he got in, was able to nominate Neil Gorsuch to the seat in his first week in
01:22office. And that seat was open for 422 days. And Mitch McConnell bragged about it, calling it the most consequential
01:32decision of his entire public career.
01:34And, of course, it cemented the rapid movement of the Supreme Court to the right to incarnate the mega agenda
01:43on the Supreme Court.
01:45Well, look, here's what happened when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Now, she died on September 18th, 2020, so close to
01:53the next election, which was less than two months away,
01:57that early voting had started in a lot of the states. So it wasn't even two months away.
02:03And then the Democrats asked Mitch McConnell, some reporters asked Mitch McConnell, well, of course, you're not going to have
02:10hearings or vote or anything in the next few weeks, are you?
02:12And he laughed it off. He laughed off the suggestion that they would maintain the same rule that they had
02:18used to block Merrick Garland and President Obama from having a seat.
02:24And then they rammed through the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett within two months, consolidating the right-wing, anti-choice,
02:33anti-environmental regulation, anti-labor, anti-voting rights, anti-democracy majority on the Supreme Court.
02:40Had the original McConnell rule been applied or even a reasonable approach taken with just a few weeks before the
02:49election,
02:50that Supreme Court seat would have been filled by President Biden, not by Donald Trump.
02:55Biden won that election, by the way, by more than 7 million votes, if you're interested in what the people
03:01want, 306 to 232 in the Electoral College.
03:03I know some people came down to overthrow the election, attack our police officers in order to accomplish a political
03:11coup to deny that.
03:12But that's what happened. So right there, we've got two seats officially stolen by Mitch McConnell and the Republican Senate,
03:21giving them a 6-3 mega court with a majority of the court now made up of nominees of presidents
03:26who lost the popular vote.
03:30Lost the popular vote. Roberts and Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, all nominated the court by justices, by
03:39presidents who lost the popular vote.
03:41Now, if you don't believe that this Supreme Court has conceived and achieved a remarkable transformation in constitutional jurisprudence,
03:54ethics and behavior on everything from abortion to voting rights to political corruption cases,
04:01then you don't have to believe me or you don't have to believe your own eyes.
04:05Just listen to Donald Trump, who openly says it's really OK for them to be loyal to the person that
04:11appointed them to almost the highest position in the land,
04:15a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
04:17He berates and vilifies justices and judges up and down the federal system who disagree with him
04:22or who he feels have been insufficiently robotic in their loyalty to the mega agenda.
04:28It's true. He doesn't want a justice loyal to the people, as the good chairman of the subcommittee says, or
04:35the Constitution.
04:35He wants a Supreme Court loyal to him and whatever is going to advance his interests, his money, his family,
04:42his corporations.
04:43He's got a Supreme Court majority so robotically loyal that they will pluck a doctrine out of thin air,
04:50nothing to do with originalism, nothing to do with textualism,
04:53out of thin air to insulate the president from liability for felony crimes committed in office.
05:00We went for more than two centuries without any president ever claiming the right to commit crimes under his office
05:08and not to be prosecuted for it. But here we are today.
05:11The Supreme Court, we must acknowledge, has been a profoundly conservative reactionary institution
05:18for the vast majority of our history.
05:20And what did the Supreme Court ever do for enslaved people between the founding of the Civil War?
05:25Nothing other than in 1857 in the Dred Scott decision cement their subjugation into place,
05:31saying that the African slave and his descendants have no rights a white man is bound to respect in any
05:38way.
05:38And then even after the Civil War, after the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments
05:43drawn from the blood, sweat, and tears of the Union and the people who fought to defend our country
05:49against the Confederacy, the Supreme Court gutted the meaning of the Reconstruction Amendments
05:55in the civil rights cases.
05:56And then in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, constitutionalized the reign of Jim Crow,
06:03separate but equal.
06:04So we have a couple decades around the Warren Court, maybe the first few years of the Berger Court,
06:10where the Supreme Court acted on the side of the people.
06:13Brown v. Board of Education striking down American apartheid, the white primary line of cases,
06:21Terry v. Ohio, Roe v. Wade.
06:23But it didn't last long before it all sank away with the Rehnquist Court and the Roberts Court.
06:30And now they've returned to the historic baseline of political white supremacy.
06:34They wiped out our Voting Rights Act, first in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013,
06:40and a couple months ago in the Calais decision.
06:44And we are about to see, they're not going to be able to accomplish it all in 2026,
06:47but by 2028, we will probably see all white congressional delegations from the Deep South,
06:54wherever the Republicans control the state legislatures.
06:57Okay, that is court packing.
06:58That's political packing by a packed Supreme Court.
07:03The court today has a legitimacy crisis,
07:05not just because of the way it's been composed and stacked and packed and gerrymandered
07:09and divided by Mitch McConnell, who laughs about it.
07:15He thinks it's funny what they did.
07:17Why do some people want 13 circuits, Mr. Chairman?
07:20Very, 13 members of the court.
07:23You don't need a conspiracy theory for that.
07:25There are 13 federal circuits in America.
07:28And traditionally, the Supreme Court has been made up of the number of justices equal to the number of circuits.
07:33And we've got 13 circuits, but we only have nine justices.
07:37So that means that under the best of circumstances,
07:41four entire federal regions, four federal circuits will be left out completely.
07:45And it's much worse than that today,
07:47because we've got five justices from New York City alone, one for each borough.
07:52But you're telling a majority of the people who live in a majority of the states
07:57that they can't find anybody qualified to serve on the Supreme Court.
08:01So that's the answer to that particular question.
08:04But we've got a complete, structural, ethical, jurisprudential crisis in the Supreme Court,
08:10whose name is in the gutter because of these terrible decisions that they keep issuing,
08:16like the overthrow of Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Casey,
08:22the complete construction out of thin air of immunity of presidents to commit felony crimes while in office,
08:33and so on.
08:34And I hope that this court will do its best to try to behave like a Supreme Court.
08:38But there are things that we can do.
08:40And I introduced one bill yesterday called the SCOTUS Act.
08:45And the SCOTUS Act is creating a new way for cert to be granted,
08:51because this Supreme Court is obviously acting like a legislature.
08:54I mean, they set up an agenda where they want this case about the Voting Rights Act.
09:00They want to destroy it.
09:01Oh, now it's time for us to overthrow abortion rights.
09:04We're going to take that case.
09:05All right.
09:06A lot of countries don't leave the agenda-setting authority to the court itself.
09:11And certainly we should not leave it in the hands of this Supreme Court.
09:16It belongs with the 13 federal circuits.
09:18We should have a panel made up of the chief judge of each federal circuit or their designee,
09:23if they want another judge to do it.
09:25And they should decide when there is a meaningful circuit split or a federal question
09:29that should go up to the Supreme Court.
09:31This court obviously cannot be trusted with that agenda-setting authority.
09:35Let's begin to create a real Supreme Court in the country by moving in this direction.
09:43And I thank you, Mr. Chairman.
09:44I yield back to you.
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