Democrats haven’t even grabbed their new gavels, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez already wants President Trump back on the impeachment chopping block.
Her allies call it accountability, but Democrats promised voters cheaper groceries.
And AOC just pointed her finger at one more target sitting far beyond the Oval Office.
AOC Just Said the Quiet Part About Her Impeachment Wish List
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) sat down with Manu Raju on CNN’s OutFront and laid out her hopes for the incoming Democrat House.
Raju opened with the drive to impeach Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth. Then he pushed further. “And how high do you go? Do you go after Trump? I mean, do you try to impeach Trump?” he asked.
AOC didn’t blink.
“I mean, I think we should leave all options on the table. Absolutely. I mean, of course, this Supreme Court as well has also kind of legalized a lot of this criminality,” she said.
She wasn’t finished. “Impeachment in this Republican majority at that time was pointing at the Supreme Court. So we’ll see. We’ll approach it. But I think all options are on the table.”
Look hard at the part about the Court. She didn’t accuse a single justice of pocketing a bribe. She didn’t wave around a hidden receipt or a missing disclosure form.
Her grievance boils down to rulings that went against her side. And a ruling is just a justice doing the job the Constitution hands him.
The conservative X account @radleftexposed, which spread the clip, read her remark as a shot at Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. The account pointed out that Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson will never feel the same heat, and it contrasted her priorities with the gas-price talk Democrats leaned on during the campaign.
The Threat Shows Up Every Time She Loses at the Court
Nobody at CNN mentioned the pattern. But anyone who has tracked AOC’s career can spot it in about five minutes.
Her “on the table” line works like a smoke alarm wired to the Supreme Court’s opinion releases. It goes off every time her side loses.
In September 2020, after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and President Trump moved to fill the seat, a reporter asked AOC whether she’d back impeaching Trump or Attorney General Bill Barr to buy time. She answered that Democrats “must consider, again, all of the tools available to our disposal, and that all of these options should be entertained and on the table.” Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) stood right beside her, nodding along.
In June 2022, the Court overturned Roe v Wade in a majority opinion Alito wrote. AOC said the Court had “gone rogue” and told reporters, “I believe impeachment should be on the table. I believe court expansion should be on the table.”
In July 2023, days after another batch of end-of-term rulings, she went on CNN’s State of the Union and said, “There also must be impeachment on the table.”
In July 2024, the Court ruled in Trump v United States that presidents hold immunity for official acts. AOC called the decision “an assault on American democracy” and filed articles of impeachment against Thomas and Alito less than two weeks later.
Four defeats. Four rounds of impeachment talk.
And now comes the fifth, with a House majority behind it.
Her 2024 articles at least dressed the complaint up as an ethics case, with charges about undisclosed gifts and recusals. But listen to how she frames it now that her party has the votes. She skipped the word corruption entirely. She went with criminality the Court supposedly “legalized.”
The ethics costume came off the moment the gavel came within reach.
The Liberal Justices Never Make Her List
If ethics really drove this crusade, the list would look a lot different.
The Associated Press reported in 2023 that Justice Sonia Sotomayor had collected more than $3.7 million from her books since joining the Court in 2009, and that her taxpayer-funded staff pushed colleges and libraries to buy her titles by the hundreds. When Clemson University offered to buy 60 signed copies for a 2017 visit, one of her legal assistants told the school that orders of 400 or more ran typical at other campuses, according to the AP. Her publisher, Penguin Random House, also had matters before the Court in which she didn’t recuse. The Court blamed an inadvertent omission and noted the justices never took up those cases.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson reported accepting four Beyoncé concert tickets worth $3,700 from the singer herself, on top of a nearly $900,000 book advance. A Court spokeswoman brushed it off with a pop-song pun and a question: “Who isn’t?”
AOC filed no articles over any of it. No cable hits demanding subpoenas. Nothing.
But Thomas? Democrats have hounded him since Anita Hill’s accusations in 1991, which he denied under oath before the Senate confirmed him anyway, and the smear campaign never really stopped. Thomas has served 35 years as the most consistent originalist on the Court, and he wrote the 2022 Bruen opinion that knocked down New York’s restrictive handgun permit scheme.
Alito wrote Dobbs.
So the two justices on her hit list happen to be the authors of the two rulings the Left hates most. Funny how that works out.
Jack Smith’s Cases Sit Underneath the Whole Complaint
When AOC mourns the “criminality” the Court supposedly legalized, she’s really mourning Jack Smith’s prosecutions.
Attorney General Merrick Garland tapped Smith to run the classified documents and January 6 investigations. Smith raced to stack up constitutionally dubious charges against Trump and pushed for a trial in deep-blue Washington, DC, before voters could weigh in, a schedule built to drag the Republican frontrunner into a show trial and possibly a cell ahead of the 2024 election.
Overreach is nothing new for Smith. The Supreme Court unanimously threw out the corruption conviction of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell in 2016, a case brought by the Justice Department unit Smith once ran. And Senate Republicans released records in 2025 showing his investigation reached into the phone records of sitting Republican senators.
The January 6 case rested on a speech in which Trump told supporters to march “peacefully and patriotically.” The same Democrats who built a criminal case around those words spent the summer of 2020 excusing the mobs that torched a Minneapolis police precinct.
The immunity ruling stalled Smith’s case in Washington, DC. Thomas went further in a separate concurrence, questioning whether Garland had any lawful authority to appoint Smith in the first place. Two weeks later, a federal judge in Florida tossed the classified documents case on that exact ground.
No federal jury ever convicted Trump of the crimes AOC claims the Court “legalized.”
The Last Time a Party Impeached a Justice Over Politics
Americans already ran this experiment once, more than two centuries ago.
Justice Samuel Chase signed the Declaration of Independence, sat on the Court as a fierce Federalist, and campaigned for John Adams in 1800. Thomas Jefferson’s party won that election and took Congress, but the Court stayed in Federalist hands.
Jefferson’s allies decided to fix that. Rep John Randolph of Virginia, with the President urging him on, led the charge, and the House impeached Chase on March 12, 1804.
The Senate held 25 Jeffersonian Republicans and only nine Federalists. Conviction looked like a lock.
It wasn’t. At least six of Jefferson’s own senators crossed over, and on March 1, 1805, the Senate acquitted Chase on every article. He kept his seat until he died in 1811. And in the 221 years since, the House has never impeached another justice.
Jefferson’s own party concluded that a judge’s opinions don’t count as high crimes. AOC wants to relitigate that verdict.
What a Democrat House Does With a Grudge Against the Court
Impeachment in the House takes a simple majority. Conviction in the Senate takes two-thirds, and no party will get there on this. So nobody should expect Thomas or Alito to pack up their chambers.
But removal was never the point. Hearings, subpoenas, and cable-news clips do the real work, chipping away at the Court’s standing until voters grow comfortable with the idea of changing it.
And AOC already told everyone what change she has in mind. Back in 2022, she said “court expansion should be on the table.”
That’s court packing, a scheme to steal control of the Court by jamming in enough new seats, likely pushing the bench to 13, to manufacture a permanent Democrat majority the party can’t win at the ballot box. A packed Court would go after the end of affirmative action, the end of racial gerrymandering that padded Democrat seats in red states, and Dobbs itself. Then it would come for the Second Amendment, free speech, and protections against warrantless spying, while inventing a constitutional right to citizenship for illegal aliens and special legal privileges for gender ideology.
Maybe AOC only means a few hearings. Maybe cooler heads prevail. Not every Democrat signed on in 2022, and Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) publicly balked at the idea of impeaching justices.
But the party that balked in 2022 didn’t hold the gavels. This one will.
Democrats told voters they’d bring down the grocery bill. AOC wants to put a Supreme Court justice on the menu instead.
Sources:
Breitbart, “Ocasio-Cortez on Impeaching Trump: ‘We Should Leave All Options on the Table’”
@radleftexposed on X, CNN OutFront clip of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
The Blaze, “Democrats threaten possible second Trump impeachment over GOP filling SCOTUS vacancy”
The Hill, “Ocasio-Cortez: Supreme Court has ‘gone rogue’”
The Washington Times, “Rep. Ocasio-Cortez says Congress should consider impeachment” (July 2023)
Fox News, “AOC files articles of impeachment against Justices Alito, Thomas”
NBC Washington, “AOC files articles of impeachment against Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito”
The National Desk, “Sonia Sotomayor’s book sales in the limelight: Supreme court ethics questioned” (citing the Associated Press)
Fox News, “Supreme Court defends Justice Sotomayor against report claiming staffers prodded colleges to buy books”
Associated Press, “Justices’ finances reported: $900,000 book advance, Beyoncé tickets and more”
Fox News, “Beyoncé gave SCOTUS Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson concert tickets valued at nearly $4,000”
US Senate Historical Office, “Impeachment Trial of Justice Samuel Chase, 1804-05”
Annenberg Classroom, “Justice Samuel Chase Impeached, Acquitted”
US Supreme Court, Trump v United States (2024)