As far as Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is concerned, there’s no need for any kind of judicial reforms or changes to ethics laws. His colleagues and their institution, Roberts apparently believe, are just fine, and there’s no point in fixing a problem that doesn’t exist.
As an Associated Press report summarized this week, the high court and its justices are of the opinion that when it comes to ethics, “they will set their own rules and police themselves.”
There may have been a time when such a position was credible, but that time has since passed.
As we’ve discussed, Justice Clarence Thomas is facing an intensifying ethics mess that neither he nor his allies have been able to explain away. Another one of his far-right allies, Justice Neil Gorsuch, is now facing a separate ethics controversy of his own. Americans’ confidence in the high court, meanwhile, has reached depths unseen since the dawn of modern polling.
It was against this backdrop that Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin invited Roberts to testify in early May about judicial ethics rules and potential reforms. The chief justice politely declined in a letter my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin described as “pathetic.”
It appears Roberts is simply hoping the political winds will shift direction, the headlines will fade, and the Supreme Court can go back to expressing indifference to the very idea of accountability.
For every Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, this isn’t good enough. NBC News reported yesterday:
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin and the panel’s other Democrats are calling on Chief Justice John Roberts to answer follow-up questions about ethics principles guiding the Supreme Court. The senators said in a letter to Roberts on Thursday that a statement of principles that he attached to a letter to the committee this week is insufficient on its own.
“The statement of principles raises more questions than it resolves, and we…
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