US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas’s ties to conservative political figures is an American embarrassment, and the question is whether that is shameful enough to the country’s highest-ranking judge to do something about it, the Senate judiciary committee’s chairperson said on Sunday.
“This tangled web around justice … Thomas just gets worse and worse by the day,” Illinois’s senior Democratic senator, Dick Durbin, said on CNN’s State of the Union. “I don’t know what is going to come up next. I thought I heard it all, but disclosures about his activities just embarrass me.”
Durbin, who is also the majority whip in the upper congressional chamber, added: “The question is whether it embarrasses the supreme court and … chief justice [John] Roberts, [who] has the power in his hands to change this first thing tomorrow morning.”
In an interview with host Jake Tapper, the four-term senator called on Roberts to implement a supreme court code of conduct “that finally means something” and requires its nine justices to subject themselves “to at least the minimal standards that apply to all other federal judges”.
“This is the Roberts court,” Durbin said. “History is going to judge him by the decision he makes on this. He has the power to make the difference.”
Durbin’s remarks taking aim at Thomas and Roberts come after days of controversy surrounding the relationships between some high court justices and people with business before their bench.
On Thursday, ProPublica reported that Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow paid for the great-nephew of Thomas – whom the conservative justice raised as a son – to attend a private boarding school. Crow had also provided Thomas luxury travel and resort stays. And he had bought from Thomas a home where the justice’s mother still lives.
Thomas did not declare any of that before siding with the supreme court’s conservative majority in major rulings, including one last year that removed the federal right to an abortion. The Guardian has also reported that Crow had business before the supreme court during his deep friendship with Thomas.
Also on Thursday, the Washington Post published an investigation which found that rightwing legal activist Leonard Leo arranged for Thomas’s wife, conservative activist Ginni Thomas, to receive tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work between 2011 and 2012. Leo made it a point for Ginni Thomas’s name to be omitted from pertinent billing paperwork, and an organization which he leads has repeatedly submitted briefs that outside groups use to share insights with supreme court justices, according to the Post.
Meanwhile, last month, Politico reported that Thomas’s fellow conservative justice Neil Gorsuch pocketed up to $500,000 from a property sale shortly after joining the supreme court but did not disclose that the buyer led a law firm with business before the high court.
Thomas has said he was advised that he didn’t have to declare such gifts but pledged to begin following ethics guidelines. Gorsuch has not commented.
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Some have argued that such disclosures about the relationships between supreme court justices and certain parties amount to exposed corruption. Durbin recently invited Roberts to appear in his role as supreme court chief justice before the Senate judiciary committee to address the reporting on Thomas and Gorsuch.
But Roberts declined and instead simply forwarded “a statement of ethics and principles and practice to which all current members of the supreme court subscribe”.
Durbin countered in a letter that the statement Roberts sent over “raises more questions than it resolves”.
The senator told Tapper on Sunday that everything about the revelations around Thomas and Gorsuch as well as Roberts’s reaction “stinks”.
Seemingly alluding to recent polling which showed that public confidence in the supreme court has plummeted to historic lows, Durbin said: “You shouldn’t have that sort of thing happening at the highest court in America. It just destroys the integrity of the court.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
