Chief Justice John Roberts was a no-show at Tuesday’s hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on potential Supreme Court ethics reform. Nor were any of the eight other justices present. None of this was a surprise, as Roberts declined the invitation from committee chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill., in writing last week.
In that letter, Roberts cited the separation of powers as barring his attendance but attached a “Statement on Ethics Principles and Practices” that all nine justices had signed. Ranking member Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., framed this on Tuesday as the justices all agreeing fully with the content of Roberts’ letter and rejecting the idea that congressional oversight was at all appropriate. This is at best a stretch of what Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson intended with their signatures; at worst, it is a sign that even the three “liberal” justices are willing to place the Supreme Court’s consolidation of power above any ideological disagreements with their colleagues.
As former federal judge Jeremy Fogel rightly pointed out in his testimony, two concurrent discussions were going on during Tuesday’s hearing. The first, which he was keen to participate in, dealt with how the Supreme Court could be more transparent and open about the ethical standards it follows and how those standards could be enforced. The other was almost entirely about the politics surrounding the recent revelations about Justice Clarence Thomas’ major ethical lapses and the lesser offenses by other conservative members of the court.
The committee’s Democrats, to their credit, used the latter issue as a launching point to highlight the necessity of the former. The committee’s Republicans, on the other hand, spent almost all of their time either counterattacking liberal criticisms of Thomas, pointing out times liberal justices like Jackson needed to file corrections to their financial disclosures or otherwise denouncing the hearing as a…
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