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Floor Speech

We have three branches of government here. We have the legislative, executive, and judicial branch. This would be an unconstitutional overreach. This would undermine the Court's ability to operate effectively. And it has been a continued effort by our friends on the Democratic side to undermine a Court they don't like.

Here is what the Supreme Court has done: In April of 2023, all nine Justices signed a statement on ethics, principles, and practices specifying the ethics, principles, and practices they follow. In March of 2023, the Committee on Financial Disclosures formally amended the personal hospitality regulations in a manner that now requires more complete disclosure. In November of 2023, all nine Justices promulgated a code of conduct.

The Court is taking these problems seriously. The question is, What are we up to here? We are trying not to empower the Court or reform the Court; we are trying to attack it right at the end of the term.

I remember very well when the majority leader, Senator Schumer, went to the Court and said, right in front of the Court itself:

I want to tell you, Gorsuch; I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.

This is really about the way the Court decides cases that our colleagues on the other side really don't like.

So all I would say is that there are provisions in this bill that should bother anybody that cares about an independent judiciary.

Judicial investigative panels in section 2 of this bill are made up of lower court judges who would actually preside over their bosses. There is one Supreme Court here. It is unnerving to have a group of lower court judges basically handing an investigative panel the ability to investigate the Supreme Court--the constitutionally designated Supreme Court.

Recusal--that has been up to the individual Justices since the Court's founding. This bill would create a panel of judges to decide when a Supreme Court Justice should be recused. Again, that just puts the Court in, I think, disarray and fundamentally assaults the one Supreme Court we have.

All I can say is that section 7, where you have to have disclosures of amicus briefs, would make it very hard for certain people to register their opinions about a particular matter before the Court because they could get destroyed by the media, they could get destroyed by special interest groups, and I think that chills out the ability of people to petition the Court apart from politics.

So my hope is that not only will we stop this exercise now, we will stop it forever.

With that said, I withhold my objection at this time.
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