MSNBC Guest Murphy: ‘The Texas Legislature Should Be Impeached for Treason’

Law professor Wendy Murphy said Tuesday on MSNBC that the Texas legislature should be impeached for treason for passing a law banning abortions after six weeks into a pregnancy.

Murphy said, “I think that it is so clear that the six-week abortion ban is unconstitutional. What everybody should be talking about is whether a state can avoid complying with the Constitution by passing a law that forbids the courts to correct them when they do it.”

She continued, “So, in my opinion, the Texas legislature should be impeached for treason. What they did was not just offend women’s rights by enacting a law that they knew and discussed openly would be unconstitutional, so they knew that what they were doing is antithetical to their mandate, which is to pass laws that are constitutional and only laws that are constitutional. By doing what they did and then enacting an adjunctive law that said we’ll make it impossible for the courts to get involved. So we’ll usurp the Constitution by this kind of covert way of making the law immune if you will from the courts getting involved to correct it.”

Murphy added, “Now, this is the way that our system of government works in this very nice balance, right? That each of the three branches of government — judicial, executive and legislative, hold each other accountable to make sure that they don’t act outside their authority. When the legislative branch acts outside its authority by enacting an unconstitutional law, we have entitled as a democracy to have the courts get involved to correct that. Well, the way that they enacted this provision that said only the private person can enforce the six-week abortion ban. Then they conspired all the private persons who would fight to uphold the law to keep it out of the courts. That is absolutely treasonous and a scandal way beyond the abortion ban because of a threat to our democracy. If I were at the Department of Justice and I had the ability, I’d take some kind of action against the legislature for doing this. I don’t know if they can be criminally prosecuted, but at a minimum, can we try to impeach the entire body? This is truly destructive to our very form of government at its foundation.”

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