Democratic Congressman Charlie Crist had some heated words aimed at Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Crist is the former Republican governor of Florida and will be running now as a Democrat for that position again in hopes of defeating incumbent Gov. Ron DeSantis in November.
Crist says that both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh should be impeached because they lied under oath during their Senate confirmation hearings.
This challenge was made because the two justices joined in a majority decision from the Supreme Court that ruled to overturn two landmark abortion cases, Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. After this decision, the issue of the legality of abortion will go back to the individual states.
Crist wasn’t alone in his disdain for the conservative justices. Both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer accused them of lying without exactly mentioning their names.
Crist was much clearer. He posted on Facebook, “Today’s ruling makes clear that Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh lied to Congress when they testified, under oath, that in their view Roe v. Wade was settled precedent. Perjury is a crime. If perjury is found to have occurred, the correct remedy is impeachment.”
There has not been any evidence surfaced that either Gorsuch or Kavanaugh actually did lie under oath. But that did not keep Pelosi and Schumer from joining in the harsh treatment.
“Several of these conservative Justices, who are in no way accountable to the American people, have lied to the U.S. Senate, ripped up the Constitution and defiled both precedent and the Supreme Court’s reputation – all at the expense of tens of millions of women who could soon be stripped of their bodily autonomy and the constitutional rights they’ve relied on for half a century,” Pelosi and Schumer wrote in a joint statement.
Much of the attention has been focused on the three justices, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, who were appointed by former President Donald Trump and confirmed by the Senate.
Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first nominee, refused to take a position on the Roe v. Wade case while being interviewed, according to NPR. During his hearing in 2017, Gorsuch was asked a question by U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and he replied that he would have ended the discussion if Trump had asked him to overturn Roe.
When Kavanaugh was interviewed in 2018, he said that Roe had been “settled as a precedent of the Supreme Court,” and was “entitled the respect under principles of stare decisis.”
The majority opinion for this decision was written by Justice Samuel Alito. He was joined by the three justices appointed by Trump and by Justice John Roberts.
The rationale from Alito was that Roe was “egregiously wrong from the start.” He wrote that the reasoning was exceptionally weak and that it has led to damaging consequences. The opinion stated that the ruling in both Roe and Casey did not settle the national debate, but enflamed it and created more division in the country.
Alito wrote that it was time to “heed the Constitution,” and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.
He went further saying that the right to an abortion was not deeply rooted in America’s history or its traditions. The truth is that there was an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion from the earliest experiences of common law in our country.
Former President Donald Trump spoke with Fox News on this issue and said that now we would be giving rights back to where they should have been long ago. He said, “This brings everything back to the states where it has always belonged.”
