If the Supreme Court had a code of conduct and suddenly decided to scrap it as big questions swirled about potential conflicts, it would be a scandal of massive proportions. So why isn’t the bipartisan bill to replace nothing with something and require the court write its own enforceable ethics rules, like those that apply to all other federal judges, a must-pass piece of legislation?
Because politics. The likes of Sen. Lindsey Graham claim the push amounts to an “unseemly effort by the Democratic left,” which is twisting facts to “delegitimize” the current conservative court.
Oh, really? It was Justice Clarence Thomas, not Democrats, who failed to disclose gifts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from a conservative donor, causing the most recent rupture. For at least four years, the high court has tried and failed to reach consensus on such a code — an acknowledgment that many current occupants of that bench see the need for such a policy.
And it is no less a respected conservative jurist than Mike Luttig, who was on George W. Bush’s high court short list, who wrote, “For its part, the Supreme Court should want, without quibble, to subject itself to the highest possible professional and ethical standards that would render the court beyond reproach, because such would ensure to the fullest extent possible that the court is always beyond reproach in its non-judicial conduct and activities….Whether the Supreme Court is subject to ethical standards of conduct or not is emphatically not a partisan political issue and must not become one.”
Put another way, it’s Graham and his ilk who, in claiming petty partisanship, are projecting their agenda on others.
Already, federal law requires all high-ranking officials, including justices, to file annual financial disclosure forms listing their outside income and investments. But the judicial code of conduct that applies to jurists goes further, requiring them to avoid “the appearance of impropriety in all activities” and laying out a process to investigate allegations of misconduct.
Make the high court adopt its own code.
— New York Daily News
