AOC urges Congress to consider ‘subpoenas’ if Chief Justice Roberts does not testify on SCOTUS gift scandal

• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has issued a possible subpoena for Chief Justice John Roberts.

• Roberts has refused to testify before the Senate on ethical issues surrounding the tribunal.

• Several reports have raised questions about whether judges accepted inappropriate gifts.

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised the possibility that Congress would consider subpoenaing Chief Justice John Roberts if he maintains his refusal to testify on ethical questions weighing on the high court.

“And so I believe that… if Chief John Roberts does not voluntarily come before Congress for an investigation, I think we should consider subpoenas,” Ocasio-Cortez told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday on “the state of the nation”. “We should consider investigations.”

Ocasio-Cortez blasted the court repeatedly last week as Roberts and the five other conservative justices handed major victories to the right that effectively ended affirmative action, opening the door to discrimination against LGBTQ+ Americans and scrapped Biden’s current student loan forgiveness plan.

The New York Democrat took particular issue with the court’s decision in Biden v. Nebraska, arguing that Justice Samuel Alito’s acceptance of billionaire Paul Singer’s financing of a lavish fishing trip undermined the court’s “legitimacy.” According to ProPublica, which broke the news of Alito’s Alaska fishing trip, Singer donated millions to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that has taken public positions on a number of cases pending before the court – l One such case was Biden v. Nebraska. Alito, in an extraordinary Wall Street Journal op-ed, denied any wrongdoing or discussing legal matters with Singer.

“SCOTUS corruption undermines its own legitimacy by putting its decisions up for sale,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter after the decision.

While Republicans control the House, Ocasio-Cortez stressed that Senate Democrats are investigating the numerous reports of unreported gifts to judges through the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee. But Roberts has so far refused to appear before the panel.

“The Chief Justice of the United States’ testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee is extremely rare, as would be expected given concerns about the separation of powers and the importance of preserving judicial independence” , Roberts wrote in April in response to the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Dick Durbin’s invitation.

Along with his invitation, Roberts sent a statement on ethics that he said the other eight current justices had agreed to try to follow. But the statement reaffirms the belief that only individual judges should decide whether or not to recuse themselves.

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