The entire Supreme Court — all nine justices — released a brief document Tuesday night responding to allegations that the Court’s ethical standards are too lax. The document appears to be the Court’s first response to revelations, first published by ProPublica, that Justice Clarence Thomas frequently takes luxurious vacations funded by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow.
It’s the Court’s most robust public statement on its ethical responsibilities in over a decade. But it hardly seems to respond to the Thomas revelations that prompted it.
The document spends far more time discussing other ethical issues, such as the rules governing when a justice can be paid to teach at a university, than it does discussing the more salient question of whether a sitting justice should be accepting expensive gifts from a wealthy political activist. And the Court’s brief discussion of such gifts suggests that its approach needs to be tightened down considerably.
The document is part of Chief Justice John Roberts’s reply to a letter Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D) sent to Roberts, inviting him or another justice to testify “regarding the ethical rules that govern the Justices of the Supreme Court and potential reforms to those rules.”
On Tuesday evening, Roberts responded with three documents, including a brief letter declining to testify on the grounds that “testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee by the Chief Justice of the United States is exceedingly rare” and has historically involved non-controversial matters.
The most significant document included in Roberts’s response is a three-page “Statement of Ethics Principles and Practices,” which lays out how the justices, who are not bound by the same code of conduct that applies to all other federal judges, approach ethical questions. This document is signed by all nine of the justices, both Democratic and Republican appointees.
The justices’ statement devotes an entire…
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