After the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in a ruling Thursday, and on Friday declared President Biden’s student loan forgiveness unconstitutional as well as denying that anti-discrimination laws can compel speech, prominent Maine Democrats are decrying what they see as the politicization of the Court.
[RELATED: SCOTUS Torches Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Promise]
U.S. Congresswoman from Maine’s First District Chellie Pingree tweeted a quote of President Biden’s comment on the Court’s Thursday decision to prohibit race-based college admissions.
“This is not a normal court,” Biden said in a Thursday press briefing, quoted by Pingree in her tweet.
She shared Biden’s statement alongside a Portland Press Herald column she wrote in May of this year calling on the Supreme Court to be expanded.
“Republicans have turned the Supreme Court into an unelected legislature to impose the toxic policies republicans can’t win at the ballot box,” Pingree said in May.
“Congress must #expandtheCourt to balance decades of Republican court-packing,” she said.
In another Thursday tweet, Congresswoman Pingree said that the current Court is the “most divisive Supreme Court in U.S. history,” and that it has “chipped away at the hard won progress we’ve made to build a more equitable country where opportunity is available to everyone.”
[RELATED: Supreme Court Declares Race-Conscious College Admissions Unconstitutional in Harvard Case]
On Friday, after the Court’s decision on 303 Creative LLC v Elenis, which granted that a Christian wedding website designer could not be compelled to create websites celebrating same-sex marriages, Pingree again took to Twitter to slam the “republican court.”
Pingree said the 303 Creative decision sets a “dangerous precedent,” and “sends the message that it’s OK to discriminate,” and called upon Congress to pass the “Equality Act,” an expansion to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Later in the day, Pingree again doubled down on her calls for Congress to expand the court and abolish the filibuster.
“Decision after decision—from overturning Roe v. Wade to revoking affirmative action—this Republican Court continues to impose its severely out-of-touch beliefs on the American people,” Pingree said.
President Joe Biden disagrees with Rep. Pingree, expressing his opposition to expanding the Supreme Court in Thursday interview with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.
“I think they may do too much harm,” Biden said to Wallace, when asked if the conservative majority is “too young and too conservative.”
“But I think if we start the process of trying to expand the court, we’re going to politicize it maybe forever in a way that’s not healthy,” the president said.
“Maybe it’s just the optimist in me — I think that some of the court are beginning to realize their legitimacy is being questioned in ways that it hadn’t been questioned in the past,” he added.
Maine’s Senate Democrats released a statement in a tweet Friday calling the 303 Creative decision “yet another assault on the hard-won rights of the American people.”
“While a right-wing, politically motivated Supreme Court continues to take our country backward, Maine stands against LGBTQ+ discrimination,” the Democratic Senators wrote.
[RELATED: Maine Colleges Respond to Supreme Court’s Ban on Use of Affirmative Action in College Admissions]
“Maine Senate Democrats stand firmly against this attempt to discriminate against the LGBTQ+ community in an opinion barely disguised by its poor legal reasoning,” they wrote.
Democratic President of the Maine Senate Troy Jackson of Aroostook said in a Friday tweet responding to the Senate Democrats’ statement that the 303 Creative decision was “More disgraceful politics from the Supreme Court.”
Despite Pingree’s claim that the Supreme Court is a “Republican Court” and the “most divisive of all time,” and Sen. Jackson’s statement that the Court is showing “disgraceful politics,” statistics from ABC News’ Sarah Isgur on how the Justices split their votes this term paint a different picture.
According to Isgur, 50 percent of the decisions reached by the Supreme Court this term were unanimous in outcome.
In 89 percent of this term’s rulings, at least one liberal Justice was in the majority.
Only 8 percent of rulings were ideologically split 6-3 with the six Republican appointees on one side.
<span class="dsq-postid" data-dsqidentifier="20645 https://www.themainewire.com/?p=20645">8 Comments
sorry chellie , your the one who needs to be reformed. you and your marxist party trying to destroy our country with your insane beliefs that are extremely out of touch with the founding AND BELIEFS in GOD of our country, as well as some of your republican colleagues in the disgusting corrupt city, washington D.C. that stole OUR country form its people many many many years ago when your scum corrupt party incorporated the U.S. {THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA}. the court finally seems to be trying to return OUR country, the PEOPLES country , to the CONSTUTION that our founders wrote giving the people GOD GIVEN RIGHTS! not rights made from or given by any man or POLITICIANS!!!!!! or UNELECTED / SELECTED BUERACTICS !!!!!!!!
and as for your friend, SOTOMAYOR , it seems to her to be ok when SEVERAL business open to the public ,WORLD WIDE PUBLIC i might add , block, sensor and literally ban people and world renowned PEOPLE from speaking ,REFUSING TO SERVE THEM on their public platforms is ok !!!!!!!???????? and since when do we give “PROTECTED CLASS” status to some people and ignore other peoples god given rights? ???????? you and all of the rest of you in that CORRUPT BEYOND BELIEF WASHINGTON D.C. SWAMP ARE NO BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE, ANYWHERE ! “WE ARE ALL CREATED EQUAL GIVEN RIGHTS BY GOD, AND PROTECTED BY GOD FROM POLITICIANS, JUDGES,AND GOVT’S ETC. !!! JUST LIKE YOU ALL. get out THE PEOPLES GOVT. AND TAKE THE REST OF THE CORRUPT SWAMP WITH YOU.
Well said Craig
Yes I agree…well said Craig. The collusion of government and big business is known as corporate fascism. It is the tactic used by the Dems beginning with Obama, to shut down the conservatives and fundamentally transform this country. Remember Michelle saying we’d have to change our history….currently happening before our eyes. Read below and excerpt from President George Washington’s first inaugural speech:
“By the article establishing the Executive Department, it is made the duty of the President “to recommend to your consideration, such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” The circumstances under which I now meet you, will acquit me from entering into that subject, farther than to refer to the Great Constitutional Charter under which you are assembled; and which, in defining your powers, designates the objects to which your attention is to be given. It will be more consistent with those circumstances, and far more congenial with the feelings which actuate me, to substitute, in place of a recommendation of particular measures, the tribute that is due to the talents, the rectitude, and the patriotism which adorn the characters selected to devise and adopt them. In these honorable qualifications, I behold the surest pledges, that as on one side, no local prejudices, or attachments; no seperate views, nor party animosities, will misdirect the comprehensive and equal eye which ought to watch over this great assemblage of communities and interests: so, on another, that the foundations of our National policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality; and the pre-eminence of a free Government, be exemplified by all the attributes which can win the affections of its Citizens, and command the respect of the world.
I dwell on this prospect with every satisfaction which an ardent love for my Country can inspire: since there is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity: Since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained: And since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”
Well said from all. When the leftists and fellow Marxists don’t get their way they throw a tantrum and want to change the system in their favor but when it goes their way everything is fine. I’m looking forward to the day when we can send Chellie and her fellow swamp creature Angus packing. It is regrettable that tar and feathers aren’t in fashion anymore.
Great work Maine Wire. It’s nice to finally see some honest reporting in Liberal Land. .
Well said everyone. The only people out of touch are all the DemoCommunists like or Representatives in Congress and the Senate. They have zero concern for us and only care for the money going into their pockets and how much power they can exert.
Extremely well written from all here.
Who is divisive and out of touch is Chellie, along with Angus, bent on destroying this country for their own enrichment.
The Demo-Communist fingerpointing so clearly identifies what THEY are doing to the country.
The Supreme Court is doing the job they are sworn to perform, as our Founding Fathers designed. with divine inspiration.
Thank you to the Court, The Maine Wire and all who wrote here.
Chellie’s husband bought the Portland Press Herald so no one would criticize her.
Apparently you have never had the word NO said to you and if you have we must change the rules.