Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., joined in a July 8 letter with fellow Congressman Ted Lieu, D-Calif., to the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, asking the body to make a formal determination if U.S. Supreme Court justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch lied while they were testifying during confirmation hearings regarding the possibility of them overturning 1973’s Roe v. Wade abortion decision.
“As nominees during their confirmation hearings, the justices did not tell the American people, or the United States Senate that Roe was ‘egregiously wrong from the start,’ or that ‘Roe and [1992’s] Casey represent an error that cannot be allowed to stand,’” the letter said, quoting from the current court’s majority opinion that overruled the 50-year-old precedent. “In fact, they expressed the exact opposite position.”
The Democratic firebrand and Lieu are the latest voices to challenge the justices for not saying outright during the hearings that they opposed, and would overrule, the prior court’s decision, thereby lying under oath.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., both accused the justices of lying during the hearings and in conversations with them prior to being confirmed.
It is not the first time AOC has leveled these charges at Gorsuch and Kavanaugh since the controversial decision came down in June.
During a televised interview on NBC’s "Meet the Press" in late June, Ocasio-Cortez called for the pair of jurists to “be impeached” for “lying” during the hearings.
“They lied,” the New York Times reported Ocasio-Cortez saying during the interview, adding at another point that “there must be consequences for such a deeply destabilizing action and hostile takeover of our democratic institutions. I believe that lying under oath is an impeachable offense.”
The July 8 letter asks the Senate committee to “make its position clear on whether justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch lied under oath during their confirmation hearings,” and to “call out” their actions.
“We must call out their actions for what they were before the moment passes, so that we can prevent such a mendacious denigration of our fundamental rights and the rule of law from ever happening again,” the letter concludes.
In the landmark decision, the majority opinion listed several cases where the high court reversed prior “stare decisis” rulings like 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson, which said that segregated schools were not unconstitutional as long as they provided “equal” resources to black students as their white counterparts, which was overturned in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, ruling that racially separate schools were not equal, and therefore unconstitutional.
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