After the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s so-called “travel ban” on Tuesday, Democratic National Committee Deputy Chair Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) ripped Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, saying he voted with the majority at the behest of his “paymasters.” Justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy and Gorsuch all voted to uphold the Trump administration’s policy.
As The Washington Free Beacon reports, Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, compared the SCOTUS decision to the Court’s infamously racist decisions in Dred Scott and Plessy vs. Ferguson.
Speaking with CNN’s Kate Bolduan, Ellison ranted, “It just proves one thing. If you steal and rip off a Supreme Court justice [seat], then you can try to jam any kind of nasty, racist, ugly policy you can down the throats of the American people. … That’s what I feel.”
Bolduan responded, “You are really upset about this.”
Ellison continued, “Our country has gone through some ugly days,” pontificating that the SCOTUS decision would ultimately languish in the “dust bin of history,” saying, “Discrimination and racism and hatred and religious bigotry is never going to be winning in the end.” Referring to President Trump celebrating the decision, Ellison snapped that the “gloating braggart is not going to win at the end of the day,” then targeted Gorsuch, fulminating:
Gorsuch really should not be on the Supreme Court. He may be there, but he’s not there properly. You know, you can do that. You can jam in a Supreme Court by denying a sitting president their right to appoint the Supreme Court justice. That is exactly what happened, and Gorsuch has just done what his paymasters sent him there to do. It’s a shame.
Ellison has made some outrageous comments before, including a comment after 9/11 that seemingly compared President George W. Bush to Hitler, saying, “It’s almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it, and it put the leader [Hitler] of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted.”