Photo by Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via Getty Images
The Supreme Court, man. The ethics scandals just keep piling up. Sure, some members of the Court are *boldly* in favor of an enforceable ethical code for the High Court, but the actual code adopted late last year contains no penalties or any enforcement mechanism.
Sigh.
The SCOTUS ethical dilemma du jour is Justice Samuel Alito’s penchant for flying flags favored by insurrectionists — and his refusal to recuse himself from January 6th-related cases. Not to mention getting caught on tape saying he was fighting “to return our country to a place of godliness.”
But the problem is so much deeper. There’s the two decades of luxury gifts — $5.8 million worth — Justice Clarence Thomas has taken! You’ll recall ProPublica initially released an article detailing the two decades of Justice Thomas receiving travel and other gifts from billionaire Harlan Crow. A few days later, we got more details of the financial entanglement between the two men as it was revealed Crow bought from Thomas three pieces of property — including one Thomas’s mother lives on — and improved it, all with Thomas’s mother never paying rent. Then we got the news Crow paid for schooling for the family member Thomas considers like a son. He was a member of a fancy rich person club, and had bunches of billionaire friends that lavished him with pricey gifts. Even the RV Thomas uses to establish his everyman bona fides was financed by a rich buddy, via a “loan” that was never paid back.
Then there was the questionable Neil Gorsuch real estate deal. The luxury trips taken by Alito — coordinated by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo and lodging provided by GOP donor Robin Arkley II, and so much more.
Members of Congress have been working out what their branch of government can do to stop the free-falling trust in the Court. Senate Judiciary Democrats issued subpoenas when asking nicely didn’t work — not that those have been particularly successful.
Now Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) say they’re planning on introducing legislation to deal with the Supreme Court’s ethics problem. As Ocascio-Cortez said, “And so, it is not a question … of if Congress has jurisdiction and power over the Supreme Court. It is, what power are we going to exercise in order to rein in a fundamentally unaccountable and rogue court?”
As Raskin noted:
“It’s the highest court in the land with the lowest ethical standards. These are the only governmental officials in the land who are not governed by a binding ethics code. There’s no process by which we can hold any of them accountable,” Raskin said.
“And so, we need to clean that up. And that’s why we said we’re going to start with something simple that the whole country will be able to understand immediately and intuitively,” Raskin said. “We want a $50 gift ban for U.S. Supreme Court justices. They make $300,000 a year. Pay for your own lunch and pay for your own vacation.”
Of course, with the sharply partisan politics of 2024 being what they are, any effort to “rein in” the Court will face sharp opposition. Plus, there’s Alito’s self-serving take on separation of powers, declaring he’s above the law, saying, “No provision in the Constitution gives [Congress] the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period.” Now, that’s a wrong take, but Republicans who currently enjoy the undemocratic power wielded by the Court will latch onto it.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.
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