Rep. Adam Schiff Goes After
‘Partisan’ Supreme Court,
Bids ‘Good Riddance to Tucker Carlson’
House Democrat, U.S. Senate Candidate Also
Discusses Housing Crisis, Homelessness, and More
in Interview with Santa Barbara Independent
by Callie Fausey | May 28, 2023
U.S. Representative Adam Schiff — the California Democrat who was a key player in former president Donald Trump’s two impeachments and the House investigation into efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election — sat down with the Santa Barbara Independent last week to talk about his campaign for the U.S. Senate and his efforts to “restore balance” to the U.S. Supreme Court, which he said is currently “reactionary” and “partisan.”
But first, Schiff shared a little about his background in Santa Barbara. During his last visit in February, he spoke at a rally for Ukraine at the County Courthouse, bagged on Fox News and Tucker Carlson at his meet-and-greet at Faulkner Gallery, and acted chummy with County Supervisor Das Williams.
“It goes back to my wife’s time as a student at UC Santa Barbara,” Schiff said. “So we have a proud connection with Santa Barbara.
“I just think it’s such an incredibly beautiful community and cherished part of our state,” he continued. “During times of difficulty when there’s been flooding and fires, I’ve been in touch with local elected officials, friends, to offer to help in any way to mitigate the dangers and to help people rebuild.
“In the U.S. Senate, I would want to make sure that Santa Barbarians were well-represented and that I was meeting the needs of the community, working with the local House members to address any of the challenges faced by the city and county.”
One of Schiff’s main goals, he said, is to “make the economy work for everyone,” including addressing the high prices of housing and attacking the problem of homelessness.
Needless to say, Santa Barbara has staked its place in the statewide housing crisis, with people all over the region being priced out of the communities they grew up in.
Schiff said that he’s already introduced a number of different bills to address this challenge, including a bill in April to establish an interagency council on housing affordability, as well as other legislation to provide tax incentives to create more affordable housing and more shelter for homeless populations.
“Our police officers and firefighters and teachers should be able to live in the communities that they’re serving,” he said. “I want to continue those efforts and more. I think that the federal government can incentivize the creation of more affordable housing to bring those costs down.”
Schiff referenced a new study that found that the average multifamily housing project in Los Angeles takes nearly four years to build from its initial application to completion. It’d be unsurprising if a similar study in Santa Barbara found a comparable timeframe.
“At that rate, we’re never going to be able to create the kind of housing that we need,” Schiff said. “We need to partner with the state and local governments to make sure that we can create more affordable housing and that we don’t have long, expensive delays that accompany that process.”
Schiff’s conversation with the Indy was only hours before it was revealed that a Florida Republican in the House had filed a motion to have him expelled from Congress.
Representative Anna Paulina Luna, supported by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, claims that Schiff promoted lies about former president Trump’s ties to Russia. She argues the four-year investigation and resulting report from Trump-era special counsel John Durham proves that Schiff pushed a lie that Trump colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election.
Schiff said in an interview with MSNBC that the whole Durham report was “a big bust” and that Republicans are attacking him in response to “this big disappointment for Trump and the MAGA crowd.”
“I’m convinced when this dark chapter of our history is written, it will reflect that those Republican members who lacked the courage to stand up to the most unethical president in U.S. history, Donald Trump, consoled themselves by attacking those who did,” Schiff said in the interview with MSNBC.
On May 23, Luna filed another motion, this time to censure, condemn, and impose a $16 million fine on the congressman. “It will not work,” Schiff tweeted in response, “I will not back down.”
Schiff told the Indy that one of his three main goals in his campaign is “protecting our democracy from the real, continuing threat that Donald Trump and the extreme MAGA crowd pose.”
“When you experience a loss of rights, it is a very definite sign
that your democracy is in decline.”
Earlier this month, he announced the reintroduction of the Judiciary Act of 2023, legislation that would expand the Supreme Court by adding four seats to create a 13-justice bench. He says he would also like to see a code of ethics imposed on the court, as well as term limits.
“We need to expand the court and rebalance it,” Schiff said. “Otherwise, we’re going to have an entire generation of Americans that live with a reactionary partisan court, which is what the current court is. Expanding the court, I think, is important to restoring balance and restoring our rights, like the right to reproductive freedom.”
Schiff said that his support for expanding the court came before the Dobbs v. Jackson decision that overturned the federal right to abortion in 2022. However, he continued, the decision added “great urgency” to his efforts to expand the court.
“When you experience a loss of rights, it is a very definite sign that your democracy is in decline,” he explained. “You know, we’ve all lived in a world where our rights were ever-increasing and our freedoms were increasing: the freedom to speak our minds, the freedom to love the person we love, the freedom to make decisions for ourselves about what to do with our bodies.
“Now those rights are being constrained by this out-of-control Supreme Court, and it’s a threat to democracy. Gerrymandering the House is a threat to our democracy. The Electoral College and the degree to which a president is often elected by a minority of Americans because of the Electoral College — all of these things have done damage to our democracy and resulted in a Supreme Court that is the most unrepresentative body in the country.”
At Schiff’s February meet-and-greet in Santa Barbara, he answered many questions about his time on the January 6 Committee and about the role Fox News played in perpetuating the baseless claim that Donald Trump had won the 2020 election, which fueled the insurrection on January 6.
A month after Schiff’s visit, voting-tech company Dominion Voting Systems’s $1.6 billion defamation suit against the conservative news channel and its parent company, Fox Corp, reached a conclusion. Fox settled with Dominion for $787 million at the last minute in April, before the case could reach opening statements.
Around the same time, Fox fired high-profile mud-slinger Tucker Carlson after he, among other things, exposed his racist beliefs off-the-air in private text messages that recently came to light.
Seeing how popular the topic was at Schiff’s meet-and-greet, the Indy asked the congressmember what he thought about the recent turn of events. Schiff said he was “really grateful Fox had to pay three-quarters of a billion dollars in fines to compensate for the lies they told during the election.
“I wish it could have been a lot more, and I wish it was accompanied by a statement of responsibility,” he continued. “And I wish, frankly, it had gone to trial so that the American people could have heard the testimony about how blatantly Fox lied, how it knowingly lied, and how it did so because it was good for their bottom line.
“So I think the litigation was important, and good riddance to Tucker Carlson, who did nothing but peddle falsehoods and hate. And I think we need to continue to hold Fox’s feet to the fire because their promotion of falsehood continues.”
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