Official Congressional Record
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. In this 119th Congress we have watched the President’s followers in Congress surrender to the President one constitutional power after another. Amazingly, the Speaker and the MAGA party have abdicated nearly every single essential power that the Framers exclusively vested in us, Congress, the Representatives of the people. First is the power to declare war, which has been usurped by the President with catastrophic results for the country and without a peep from his sycophants in Congress. Next is the spending power, the power of the purse, the power to appropriate Federal dollars to spending and grant programs and to specify their purposes, powers that have been continually violated in acts of impoundment, nullification, and redirection by the President who has not only effectively shut down the Department of Education, USAID, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but has even helped himself, without any appropriation from Congress, to $1.8 billion of taxpayer money to give away to Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other convicted insurrectionists who attacked this body in order to try to overthrow a Presidential election in January of 2021; Next is the power to impose tariffs and taxes and the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, powers that have been ripped away from us without any protests from the majority so the President could launch preposterous trade wars against the world and aggressively insult and alienate our beloved neighbor and democratic ally Canada. They have abandoned even the power to decide whether or not the President should receive Presidential emoluments, gifts, payments from foreign governments as he piles up a pirate’s treasure of hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts from foreign autocracies and monarchies. They have abandoned the unquestioned exclusive congressional power of Congress to build and exercise control over needful buildings and structures for the national government like the White House; the Reflecting Pool, which they are now calling the strait of warm ooze; and The Kennedy Center. All of these structures are being bulldozed, demolished, desecrated with Presidential graffiti, and renovated according to unilateral and independent executive decisions without even congressional consultation--all for the first time in American history. They are dangerously ceding our power to regulate the times, places, and manner of Federal elections conducted in the States to the post office and to our monarchically minded President who has no constitutional role in elections and was impeached by this Chamber for inciting a violent insurrection to try to overthrow an election, which he lost by more than 7 million votes, 306-232 in the electoral college. So what constitutional power do our colleagues propose to surrender today? Well, it is just a power that Congress has had since the beginning of the Republic under Article III, Section 1: the power to define the composition of the Supreme Court and the number of Justices who serve there. Over the course of our history, Congress has exercised this authority seven different times by changing the number of Justices on the Court. With the Judiciary Act of 1789, Congress established the first Court with six Justices. In 1801, President Adams and Congress shrank it to five Justices. When President Jefferson won in 1800 and came back to power, then it was back to six Justices. In 1807, Congress expanded it to seven Justices when it created the Seventh Circuit, keeping to the congressional tradition of one Justice per Federal Circuit. In 1837, Congress expanded the number of Federal Circuits to nine and then added the corresponding two seats to the Court, bringing the Court to nine Justices. In 1863, Congress briefly added a 10th Federal Circuit during the Civil War and added a 10th Justice, giving Lincoln one more to appoint. In 1866, Congress went back to seven Justices. In 1869, President Grant and Congress increased the Court to nine again with another Judiciary Act, again, matching the number of Justices to Federal Circuits. That is the tradition of circuit riding. Today, we still have nine Justices, although we have 13 Federal judicial circuits, the vast majority of which are not represented by even a single Justice among the nine currently serving on the Supreme Court. In fact, the floor leader from Arizona has not only no Justices from his State on the Supreme Court, there are no Justices from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has 67 million Americans living there. Five of the Justices today come from the New York City metropolitan area, basically one for each borough. Is it really possible that there are not people from other parts of the country who could effectively and honorably serve on the Supreme Court? Well, if we decided this on an originalist basis, we might move to place 13 Justices on the Court to match our 13 Federal circuits or we might go to 6 Justices, which was the original number there. However, MAGA’s proposal is to strip Congress of all authority in the matter, to freeze it and cement it permanently in the constitutional architecture for all time, with the suddenly magic number nine. This is odd. Nine is neither the number of Federal circuits we have-- that is 13--nor is it the original number of Justices Congress placed on the Court. That was 6. Therefore, what is going on here? Well, surprise, surprise, America, it is another partisan power grab by MAGA, our colleagues who fear for the results of the November election, as their policies have brought us nothing but war, inflation, corruption, lawlessness, and a $40 trillion debt, one-quarter of it supplied by this Presidential administration. The MAGA party wants to cement into place a profoundly partisan and lopsided 6-3 Roberts Court that was gerrymandered and engineered by Mitch McConnell after the untimely deaths of Justice Scalia and Justice Ginsburg, each in the final year of a Presidential term. After Justice Scalia died on February 13, 2016, President Obama nominated my constituent, Merrick Garland, to fill the seat. Senator McConnell did not even allow hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee, much less a vote in the committee, much less a vote on the floor. He said he wanted to let the people decide, and 11 months was too close to the next election; forgetting, I suppose, that President Obama had won one of those genuine constitutional 4-year terms in office. That seat sat open for a record-setting 422 days before they filled it with Justice Gorsuch. In other words, they were for an eight-Justice Court during that year, but when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020, less than 2 months before the election, when early voting had already started in some States, Senator McConnell rushed through confirmation hearings and then a final vote for Amy Coney Barrett just 8 days before the 2020 Presidential election took place, laughing about this glaring disparity in treatment, acknowledging what everyone knew: Well, that 1-year rule was just for the Democrats. They were very happy to barrel through that nomination at the last moment. Now, by essentially stealing these two seats from the American people, MAGA has put four of the five seats in the ruling majority rightwing faction in the hands of Justices appointed by two Presidents who lost the Presidential popular vote--George W. Bush in 2010 and Donald Trump in 2016. The rightwing capture of the Court, fueled by corporate dark money and the Citizens United decision, has plunged this Court into a legitimacy crisis, an ethics crisis, and a jurisprudential crisis like has never been seen before in American history. Trump’s followers in Congress now seek to freeze into place the political Court that MAGA built for decades to come. Thus, they urge us to give away another critical power that the Framers vested in us. As gas and diesel prices soar out of control and Trumpflation spirals up for groceries, healthcare, housing, as Trump’s reckless and forever war of choice in Iran spirals downward, and America increasingly stands isolated in the world, MAGA wants to impose a straitjacket clamp-down on our democracy, our freedom, and our constitutional rights. The Roberts Court overthrew Roe v. Wade and destroyed the constitutional right of women to comprehensive healthcare in every State in the country. It demolished the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, and the Callais decision just this term. Also, these fraudulent textualists invented out of thin air Presidential immunity from prosecution for felony crimes committed in office. In Federalist 51, Madison said that the major safeguard against tyranny and despotism in America would be the natural identification and loyalty that Members of Congress would show to our own branch of government. We would stand up for ourselves, Madison thought. ``Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,’’ he wrote, but today’s Republicans show no loyalty to the constitutional architecture of Congress, to our rights, our prerogatives, our powers. They are content just to keep their heads down, to close up shop, to go home as early as possible just to keep their jobs so the President will not mobilize social media and Elon Musk’s money against them in a primary. They want to preserve their survivability, their marketability. What a humiliating and spectacular collapse of the tradition of congressional self-respect and constitutional patriotism. I urge every colleague in this body to oppose this ridiculous constitutional amendment and giveaway of congressional powers, and I reserve the balance of my time.
