Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, said yesterday that he would support impeaching Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan over their participation in the Supreme Court’s marriage equality case whenever “the public is ready” for such proceedings.
King, a guest on Iowa talk radio host Jan Mickelson’s program, took a call from a listener who said of the justices who voted to strike down same-sex marriage bans, “I submit that these are rogue justices and they can be impeached and removed by Congress.”
King told the caller that he agreed with him, but “impeachment itself,, we have learned throughout history, is a political decision” and the timing is “up to the will of the people.”
“That provision does exist, and let’s hear what the public has to say,” he added. “If that were put up before me today, and I think I mentioned Ginsburg and Kagan as being two that had been conducting same-sex marriages on their spare time and did not recuse themselves, I would put up the vote to remove them from office. And I’d like to see that case heard again and it would come down four-to-three and it in the end it would come back to the states for that decision, where it should be. But I don’t know if the public is ready for that.”
Mickelson then asked King about Sen. Ted Cruz’s idea of establishing retention elections for Supreme Court justices — similar to those in Iowa in 2010 that resulted in three state supreme court justices losing their jobs in retribution for marriage equality votes — which King said he thought was “a pretty good idea.”
But in the near term, King said, the nation must turn to “nationwide civil disobedience” in defiance of the marriage decision. He also repeated his plan for states to “abolish civil marriage” in order to deny the benefits and responsibilities of marriage to gay and lesbian couples.
“By doing so we can avoid the litigation that’s coming at every one of our churches,” he said, claiming that gay rights advocates “will not stop until they can force a priest to conduct a same-sex marriage at the altar of a Catholic church.”
Earlier in the program, King went on a long tangent linking the U.S. Constitution not only to the Magna Carta and to Greek and Roman law, but also to the New Testament.
“You can go piece by piece of this all the way through the history of the foundation of western civilization to get to the underpinnings of the pillars of American exceptionalism,” he said. “And we seem to have forgotten about those underpinnings and now we’re at this place where there is no right and wrong and the rule of tyranny of whoever can get leverage in whatever form and five justices in the Supreme Court setting a policy that turns over thousands of years of human experience.”
“This Constitution is rendered an artifact of history if we let this stand,” he warned.
