Mitch McConnell - Press Release

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered the following remarks today on the Senate floor regarding the Supreme Court:

“The Supreme Court is under attack. Prominent Democrats say that it must do what they want and not what the laws and Constitution require.

“They’ve incited violence against the Court. We’ve had to put Justices under 24/7 police protection.

“Even so, a deranged young man is about to go on trial for trying to kill a Justice and his family while they slept in order to change the outcome of a case.

“In polling last year, the Court was the branch of government with the highest level of trust from the public.

“But that hasn’t stopped Democrats from devoting the last eight years to an all-out campaign against the Court’s legitimacy – and ultimately against its very existence.

“Radical liberals have called for court packing.

“Influential members of this body, including the Senior Senator from Rhode Island and the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, have threatened ominously that ‘perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured’.

“The Left wages daily warfare against the Justices— illegally picketing their neighborhoods with impunity, trying to harm their spouses’ careers, and even spying on what kinds of flags they fly in their yards.

“Today, the Biden-Harris Administration – which desperately wants these radical votes – is once again jumping into the fray.

“After talking to a Harvard Law extremist—who had helped then-Senator Biden stage-manage the character assassination of Robert Bork almost 40 years ago—they’ve decided that the time has come to eliminate the Supreme Court as we know it.

“In his op-ed, the President says he wants term limits on Justices. Never mind what the Constitution says. Never mind the advice-and-consent role of the Senate. President Biden and his leftist allies don’t like the current composition of the Court so they want to shred the Constitution to change it.

“He wants what he calls an ‘ethics code’ – but that already exists. What the President is actually proposing is a stealth process for people other than Justices to decide cases. Again, Constitution-be-damned.

“The fact is that President Biden himself came to office and stood up a commission to investigate whether to change the Supreme Court.

“This morning, the President thanked this commission for its ‘insightful analysis’ that supposedly informed his reform proposals.

“Never mind that this commission—co-chaired by one of his closest political confidantes—didn’t actually recommend that he do anything!

“On the contrary it explained, in detail, the challenges posed by hairbrained ideas like term limits. As one of its members noted, quote: ‘We ought to be really careful about tinkering with [the Supreme Court] because you just don’t know what the consequences could be.’

“Why is the Biden-Harris Administration so willing to put the crown jewel of our system of government—the independent judiciary—to the torch? Because it stands in their way.

“Don’t take my word for it, they’re running ads about it!

“With pictures of the Justices on screen, one commercial intones that the Supreme Court has made the President ‘above the law’ because the former President ‘asked them to.’

“What happened to respecting court decisions?

“The Biden-Harris Justice Department took an extreme position in the prosecution of their electoral opponent. And they lost.

“Rather than accepting that they lost, the Biden-Harris Administration has responded with a full-scale attack on the Justices who ruled against them.

“This from the folks who love to remind us that ‘You can’t only love your country when you win.’

“Perhaps the President and Vice President should take a good look in the mirror.”

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