Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin said Sunday that “everything is on the table” as the panel scrutinizes new ethics concerns around Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
“The bottom line is this: Everything is on the table. Day after day, week after week, more and more disclosures about Justice Thomas – we cannot ignore them,” the Illinois Democrat told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
“The thing we’re going to do first, obviously, is to gather the evidence, the information that we need to draw our conclusions. I’m not ruling out anything,” he added.
ProPublica reported recently that, for years, Thomas has accepted lavish trips and gifts from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, which have gone mostly unreported on the justice’s financial disclosures. Crow also purchased several real estate properties, including the home where Thomas’ mother lives, from the Thomas family and paid boarding school tuition for Thomas’ grandnephew, according to ProPublica.
The extent to which these transactions and hospitality should have been reported by Thomas has been the subject of debate among judicial ethics experts, who have noted that a recently closed loophole for certain “personal hospitality” may have covered some of the luxury trips.
Thomas has said he followed the advice of others in deciding what required disclosure and, in a statement last month, noted that that Crow did not have business before the court.
But Durbin said Sunday the recent revelations “just embarrasses me” as he called on Chief Justice John Roberts to impose a code of conduct on the court. Roberts previously declined Durbin’s request to voluntarily testify in a hearing on Supreme Court ethics.
“I must respectfully decline your invitation,” Roberts wrote in a letter to Durbin, which was released by a spokesperson for the high…
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