Leading Democrats have promised to investigate and issue subpoenas to Supreme Court justices, and they will be in a position to do just that when they assume the majority in Congress in January.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., expected to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, previously said he and Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., expected to lead the House Judiciary Committee, were coordinating an effort to investigate and subpoena Supreme Court justices in the next term.
A GOP minority could filibuster a Senate subpoena, but “cannot block a Jamie Raskin House subpoena,” Whitehouse said in August in Des Moines, Iowa. “We need to clean up the mess at the Supreme Court,” he said, according to the Iowa Capital Dispatch.
“He [Raskin] and I are already working together. We are already meeting monthly to plan,” Whitehouse told the Iowa crowd, according to the Washington Times.
The plan to investigate the Supreme Court is just more lawfare, said Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution.
“We know that Democrats use power to stifle any dissent from their party line,” Schmitt told the Daily Signal.
“They don’t like that the Supreme Court has justices who are dedicated to upholding the Constitution, so they resort to lawfare to justify packing the court with judicial activists who would undermine core tenets of our constitutional republic,” he continued.
Raskin has said he supports expanding the size of the Supreme Court to 13 justices. Whitehouse has previously denied he supports expanding the court.
President Franklin Roosevelt tried and failed to expand the size of the Supreme Court out of frustration at justices rejecting several of his initiatives. A Democrat-controlled Congress ultimately defied Roosevelt’s court-packing push.
Schmitt, a former Missouri attorney general, warned that this effort to intimidate the high court threatens the constitutional separation of powers.
“Democrats constantly cry wolf about authoritarianism while trying to destroy the Supreme Court and the independence of the judiciary,” Schmitt said. “Democrats don’t care about lowering prices or helping American families—Democrats care about political retribution and lawfare, and their baseless attacks on the Supreme Court are a key part of that attack on the American constitutional order,”
In the weeks leading up to the election, both Whitehouse and Raskin commented about reasons to investigate the high court.
In an October CNN interview, Raskin said, “Senate Democrats have got to do whatever they can to try to restore some balance to the Supreme Court.”
He faulted the Supreme Court for not having a binding ethics code, comparing it to state supreme courts that have tangible discipline for violating the code.
“It’s the only Supreme Court in America, we got 51 of them, it’s the only one that doesn’t have a binding ethics code,” Raskin said. “They’re taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in trips all over the world from their billionaire sugar daddies. So, there are serious problems on the Supreme Court, and we hope that our colleagues on the Senate side will bear down on that. And we will have a lot to say about that, too, in the House Judiciary Committee.”
This push is a break from past political norms, said Zack Smith, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
“There is a separation of powers concern here if Raskin and Whitehouse try to intimidate and bully the court and threaten with court packing,” Smith told the Daily Signal. “Typically, when justices testify before the court, as with Justices Barrett and Kagan this year, it’s about budget requirements. What Raskin and Whitehouse are talking about is just another attempt to politicize the court.”
Whitehouse is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, and Federal Rights. He is also a former Rhode Island attorney general.
“We need to do a lot of investigating,” Whitehouse told the Iowa crowd in August, adding that “not enough people know the story about how the court got captured by a bunch of creepy right-wing billionaires.”
Neither Whitehouse’s nor Raskin’s spokesperson responded to inquiries for this story on Thursday and Friday.
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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]
