Furious Democrat Unloads on Supreme Court Justice, Claims Wealthy MAGA Allies Have Hijacked the System and Dragged America Back Into the Jim Crow Era
Rep. Hank Johnson used his opening remarks of House Judiciary Committee hearing to deliver a sweeping indictment of what he called a decades-long conservative plot to capture the Supreme Court, and he didn’t spare Chief Justice John Roberts in the process.
The Georgia Democrat opened with a string of examples designed to paint a picture of an administration operating without guardrails, from Kash Patel’s taxpayer-funded snorkel tour of Pearl Harbor to a $1.8 billion relief fund for Jan. 6 defendants secured in exchange for dropping a personal lawsuit Trump filed against the IRS.
“For decades, MAGA Republicans have systematically chipped away at the impartiality of our third branch,” Johnson said during the May 21 meeting. “They have already delegitimized our judiciary, yet they now stand before the American people pretending to be guardians of judicial integrity.”
Johnson then traced the origins of the conservative legal movement back 50 years, invoking a memo written by then-future Justice Lewis Powell that he argued set the entire machinery in motion.
“The Roberts Court is the culmination of a plot that began 50 years ago,” he said. “Wealthy donors and corporate interests spent billions of dollars to reshape the judiciary in their image.”
The consequences, Johnson argued, are now impossible to ignore. He ticked through the Roberts Court’s record with barely concealed fury, gutting campaign finance law, stripping reproductive rights, granting Trump sweeping immunity, and dismantling what remains of the Voting Rights Act.
“The court has put the nail in the coffin of the Voting Rights Act, dismantling protections that generations of Americans fought, marched, and died for,” he said.
Johnson closed by invoking Abraham Lincoln, and then delivering his sharpest line of the morning.
“Our nation is now in Jim Crow 2.0,” he said. “A nation where the right to vote once again can be diluted, restricted, or simply ignored, and where the voices of rich and powerful people carry more weight than the voices of ordinary Americans. But particularly Americans who look like me.”