Hello, Deadline: Legal Blog readers! Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., has been at the forefront of congressional efforts to hold the Supreme Court accountable on ethical and transparency issues. So I thought he’d be the perfect person to speak to in light of the stunning ProPublica report about Justice Clarence Thomas failing to disclose years of lavish gifts from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow. I spoke with the Senate Judiciary Committee member about the court’s ethical problems, how he proposes solving them, and upcoming congressional hearings.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jordan Rubin: You’ve been beating the Supreme Court ethics drum for a while now. With the latest Clarence Thomas revelations, where do you place them in the constellation of the court’s ethical scandals over the years?
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse: I think this is a pretty significant one. Unfortunately, it’s both a pretty significant one and only a thread in a larger tapestry of improprieties. But it does demonstrate how very out of whack the behavior of the justices can be compared to regular federal judges. I don’t think there’s another court in the country that would countenance a member accepting this kind of hospitality without reporting it. And it also puts a very sharp pin on the problem of a court that refuses to allow any investigation of itself where every other federal court in the country has a mechanism for ethics concerns to get investigated and resolved.
JR: On the recent letters you and your colleagues sent to Chief Justice John Roberts demanding he conduct an ethics investigation within the court, what can we really expect the court to do for itself given that the whole self-policing thing is kind of part of the problem here?
SW: Well, there are two problems. One is the refusal to self-police. And that can be solved by simply not refusing to self-police any longer. Every other court, all of the circuit courts of appeal, for instance, have a…
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