Lapointe: Impeach Supreme Justices Thomas and Alito?

When she entered the United States House of Representatives, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Detroit famously vowed to remove then-President Donald Trump.

“We’re going to impeach the mother-fucker,” Tlaib promised in 2019.

Indeed, Democrats in the House did so twice , but failed both times to win enough Republican Senate votes to convict Trump and ban him for life from the office he is now trying to re-capture.

Representing parts of Detroit’s west side and some western suburbs, Tlaib is running this year for her fourth term. In a speech on the House floor late last week, she eschewed the salty language used on Trump but sent the same message to Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

“Thomas and Alito need to be impeached and removed from the bench now,” Tlaib said . “Our country deserves a Supreme Court that’s acting in the best interest of the American people, not a court that is accepting bribes and doing the bidding of right-wing extremists.”

Thomas has been cited for accepting more than $4 million in gifts during his 33 years on the Court, Tlaib said. Alito has led the Court’s radical right wing into Christian fundamentalism, including the revocation of a woman’s constitutional right to choose abortion.

Both men’s wives publicly supported Trump’s “Stop the Steal” lie of 2020 that triggered an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Both have refused to recuse themselves from continuing cases involving either Trump or the imprisoned lynch-mob rioters he calls “patriots” and “hostages.”

“We need direct action to hold these unhinged extremists accountable,” Tlaib said, referring to Thomas and Alito, adding, “It’s time to expand the Supreme Court. It’s time for reforms.”

In recent weeks, the conservative-packed Court has issued three decisions on important issues that show which way the wind would blow during a second Trump administration.

Although the Republican candidate is a convicted felon in New York, that does not bar him from campaigning for the White House again against President Joe Biden.

During his four years, Trump appointed three reactionary Justices — Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — who joined Thomas, Alito, and Chief Justice John Roberts in overturning Roe v. Wade .

Unless the Court is expanded, the stranglehold of these ideological zealots might last decades.

Their recent decisions include:

• Reversal of a prohibition on bump stocks that turn semi-automatic assault weapons into de facto machine guns; it is the sort of addition to a firearm that makes it much more efficient during a gun massacre because you can kill more people faster; who could oppose that?

• A false “victory” for abortion rights in keeping legal, for now, the medicine abortion pill called mifepristone; they based their decision on narrow grounds of legal “standing” of the plaintiffs, leaving open a dozen doors for more sophisticated attacks under another Trump regime.

• A ruling against labor unions that makes it harder for the National Labor Relations Board to take court action against companies that fire union organizers. In other words, union organizers, if you get fired for organizing, the Court will not have your back (unless you give Justice Thomas a free ride on your private jet).

Tlaib’s chances of advancing a bill of impeachment and removal of two Justices would remain a mere wish unless Democrats were to take back the White House in November along with both branches of Congress. That’s far-fetched but not out of the question .

It might depend on the strength of the backlash in the electorate against the Court and its abortion decision in 2022. The issue is not tracking in the polls, but it didn’t either in the 2022 midterms until Democrats and liberals won some stunning victories, including abortion rights in Michigan .

Impeachment attempts at the high court are not unprecedented; the John Birch Society tried removing Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and the 1960s when he sided with the Civil Rights movement. In some ways, the right-wing Birchers were like the red-hatted MAGAts of today: ornery and menacing.

Besides, Tlaib’s threat of removal through impeachment is basically a shot across the bow against a Court that sails in its own sea like a pirate ship, blown by its own winds, charting its own map. Its public approval is plummeting .

At a fund-raiser in Los Angeles on Saturday night, Biden was asked about the possibility of Trump winning the election and naming even more Court justices.

“It’s one of the scariest parts,” Biden said . “The Supreme Court has never been as out of kilter as it is today. I mean never.”

The haughty Thomas might be the clubhouse leader in grift and graft. There is something insolent about him. As a Court nominee, he turned viscerally creepy to play the race card ( “high-tech lynching” ) as a disingenuous defense against accusations by a Black woman of sexual harassment.

His declaration of victimhood had nothing to do with the allegations. She said he bragged about his love of pornography and he joked of pubic hair on his Coke can. But his racial blubbering saved his nomination thanks in part to Joe Biden of Delaware, then the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Alito, with his supercilious and overbearing Catholicism, has seemingly mistaken the Constitution for the New Testament and has consequently declared himself to be America’s self-appointed Pope and the enforcer of the Court’s Opus Dei faction. Or, think of him simply as a Christian Ayatollah.

Should Tlaib wish to examine a Michigan connection as to how Thomas and Alito operate, she should look to Michigan’s Hillsdale College, a Christian nationalist fortress of the right-wing culture wars and a farm system for Supreme Court clerks.

These clerks do more than file papers. They research cases, steer Justices toward opinions, and find rationales for their decisions. On the Hillsdale College website, under the headline “Supreme Assignment,” the school brags about its Court influence.

Hillsdale had already sent six graduates to the Court as clerks in two decades, the page says, before adding the three new names of Eliot Gaiser, Garrett West, and Manuel Valle, who recently completed their terms.

“Gaiser and West clerked for associate Justice Samuel Alito,” the Hillsdale website says, “while Valle clerked for associate Justice Clarence Thomas.”

All three worked there during the debates for the Dobbs decision. No doubt the clerks know well how that gristly sausage got made. Perhaps they might even know who leaked the decision early.

Wouldn’t it be interesting for an aggressive legislator like Tlaib to question people like these guys under oath?