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      in US Politics

      ‘People who are just like me will not be able to vote. That’s nuts’: Virginia to see first Black speaker of the house

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      Five years ago, while working on a high-profile case, the trial lawyer Don L Scott Jr received a call from a reporter. “Hey, is it true that you had gone to prison?” Scott remembers them asking. “I said, ‘It is, and if you want the entire story, before you print it, I hope that you will sit down and talk to me.’”On 10 January 2024, Scott will be sworn in as Virginia’s first Black speaker of the house in the commonwealth’s 400-year-plus history. His rise to the position started in 2018, when that reporter called him. Scott said that although he hadn’t hidden his past before, “it’s not something you put on your résumé either”. That call was a pivotal moment for him, empowering him to share his story widely, and helping him realize that he had the potential to be a politician.After the story was published in the Virginian-Pilot, everyone knew his past, and Scott said he was then able to discuss it more freely, even as an attorney. He thinks the impetus behind the piece might have come from a politician who was concerned Scott would run against him, or from the opposing attorneys on the case, but at this point it doesn’t matter.“They were thinking they were going to drop it on me to hurt me, but what they really did was free me up,” he said. “I got such positive feedback from my community and other folks that I knew that I said, ‘Heck, I’m free now. If I decide I want to run, I can run.’”Eventually, Scott, who’s 58, did run for election to the Virginia house of delegates – and won. Then he won again and again. In his new role as speaker of the house, Scott plans to help lead Virginia Democrats in following through on their campaign promises: namely, codifying Roe v Wade, banning assault weapons and increasing teacher pay.‘There are people who are just like me’On 30 July 1619, Virginia’s house of burgesses, the colonial predecessor to the commonwealth’s current general assembly, met for the first time. About one month later, enslaved Africans were brought to the Virginia colony, marking what is considered to be the start of chattel slavery in the colonial US. In several interviews since his election as speaker, Scott has referenced the historic importance of his nomination: “I know I stand on the shoulders of my ancestors who built that capitol.”Scott was born in Houston, Texas, and raised in a small town by a single mother who hid the family’s poverty so well that Scott didn’t realize how much she struggled until he was an adult. He grew up with five siblings, including his elder sister, Jeta Lenoir, who taught him to read.After his graduation from Texas A&M University, Scott enlisted in the US navy and served a few years before he was honorably discharged. He went on to obtain a law degree from Louisiana State University Law School, but in 1994, shortly after graduating, Scott was arrested on federal drug charges. He served seven years in prison. (Scott has said previously that he made a “bad decision”, but denies having ever handled any drugs.)In Virginia, citizens’ voting rights are not immediately restored after their release from prison – that decision depends on the governor. For almost a decade after rejoining society, Scott was unable to vote. Once his rights were restored in 2013, he was able to finally sit for the bar exam and become a trial lawyer.During his time as a partner at the Breit Biniazan law firm, Scott joined various civic organizations, including his state’s chapter of the NAACP. He started paying closer attention to the difference between what people around him were experiencing and what he saw and heard in courtrooms as a lawyer. As a result, his first campaign for the house of delegates in 2019 focused on criminal justice reform and alleviating poverty.“I came in saying that there are some things that are wrong, that are unfair in our criminal justice system and need to be fixed,” Scott said. “I think people have a misconception about Black communities that are sometimes having tough times and issues with crime. They don’t want to talk about poverty. They don’t want to talk about all the causes of crime. They don’t want to talk about mental health. They just want to say ‘crime’ and look at the outcome.”Scott’s lived experiences continue to inform how he sees the world. He intimately knows what it means to serve time and still be penalized after leaving prison. “I had a nonviolent drug offense that I was sentenced to 10 years [in prison] for,” he said. “There are people who are just like me who are not voting and can’t vote and are smarter than I am. [They] can’t vote because they’re waiting on somebody like Governor [Glenn] Youngkin to restore their rights. I will be speaker with a felony, while other people who are just like me … will not be able to vote. That’s nuts.”As speaker, Scott plans to help mitigate voter disenfranchisement by taking away the governor’s right to determine whether formerly incarcerated people can vote again. He wants to change the state’s constitution so that people have an automatic restoration of rights after completing their sentences. Earlier this year, in a separate voter-rights issue, about 3,000 Virginians were purged from voter rolls “in error”, according to Youngkin’s administration.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Personally, this is important to me, that we take the restoration of rights away from the governor,” Scott said. Of the purged voters, he continued: Youngkin “abused that privilege that he has, that privilege that the people have bestowed on him. He used it arbitrarily and capriciously to deny the franchise – that sacred franchise – from people that he deemed unworthy to vote.”‘You have to deliver’Scott understands the historic nature of his impending leadership position. He also knows that his community and Virginians at large are expecting more than him to just be a face in power.Recently, Scott said, he attended a breakfast meeting with a former governor who was energized by his nomination, but who told him that it was time for the real work to begin. “He said, ‘Now you have to go and be great. You have to be competent. You have to deliver.’ And that’s what our community is looking for. They’re not looking for symbolic wins any more,” Scott recalled. “I’m the first Black speaker, but I’m also a speaker who happens to be Black.”Democrats gained control of Virginia’s state legislature this year, as voters opposed Youngkin’s attempt to pass a strict abortion ban. In addition to codifying Roe v Wade, many of the Democrats who ran and won promised to raise the minimum wage, to ban assault weapons, to pass a responsible gun act and to raise teacher pay.“These are the promises that we made … These are not extreme ideas. I think everybody can agree that we need to do these things, and I think we will,” Scott said.But for the moment, he is taking time to soak it all in.“I’m excited,” he said. “It’s the dream of a lifetime. I feel embarrassed of how much I’ve been blessed. I went to jail in ’94; 2004 is 30 years and I’ll be standing taking my oath. That’s a powerful testament to the power of faith, and the power of resilience.” More

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      in US Politics

      Prominent conservative lawyers band together to fight Trump threat

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      Three prominent US legal thinkers have announced a new organisation to champion conservative legal theory within the rule of law, to fight the threat of a second Donald Trump term.“Our country comes first,” the three wrote in the New York Times, “and our country is in a constitutional emergency, if not a constitutional crisis. We all must act accordingly, especially us lawyers.”The authors were George Conway, an attorney formerly married to Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s White House counselor; J Michael Luttig, a retired judge and adviser to Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, who became a prominent January 6 witness; and Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman from Virginia.The authors also rebuked prominent rightwing groups including the Federalist Society for not resisting the former president and his authoritarian ambitions.Their new group, the Society for the Rule of Law Institute, would “work to inspire young legal talent … focus on building a large body of scholarship to counteract the new orthodoxy of anti-constitutional and anti-democratic law … [and] marshal principled voices to speak out against the endless stream of falsehoods and authoritarian legal theories … propagated almost daily,” they said.The Federalist Society and its chair, Leonard Leo, played a key role in Trump’s judicial appointments, installing three hardliners on the supreme court who helped hand down rightwing wins including removing abortion rights and loosening laws on gun control, affirmative action, voting rights and other progressive priorities.Conway, Luttig and Comstock emerged among prominent conservative opponents of Trump, warning of his authoritarian threat before and after January 6, when rioters attacked Congress in an attempt to block Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.Ninety-one criminal charges and assorted civil threats notwithstanding, Trump is now the clear frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination while polling strongly against Biden in battleground states.“American democracy, the constitution and the rule of law are the righteous causes of our times, and the nation’s legal profession is obligated to support them,” Conway, Luttig and Comstock wrote.“But with the acquiescence of the larger conservative legal movement, these pillars of our system of governance are increasingly in peril. The dangers will only grow should Donald Trump be returned to the White House next November.”Trump, they said, would stock a second administration “with partisan loyalists committed to fast-tracking his agenda and sidestepping – if not circumventing altogether – existing laws and long-established legal norms.“This would include appointing … political appointees to rubber-stamp his plans to investigate and exact retribution against his political opponents; make federal public servants removable at will by the president himself; and invoke special powers to take unilateral action on first amendment-protected activities, criminal justice, elections, immigration and more.”Saying Trump tried such attacks when in power but was blocked by lawyers and judges, the authors said the former president would if re-elected “arrive with a coterie of lawyers and advisers who, like him, are determined not to be thwarted again”.Though they said the Federalist Society had long been “the standard-bearer for the conservative legal movement”, they said it had “failed to respond in this period of crisis.“That is why we need an organisation of conservative lawyers committed to the foundational constitutional principles we once all agreed upon: the primacy of American democracy, the sanctity of the constitution and the rule of law, the independence of the courts, the inviolability of elections and mutual support among those tasked with the solemn responsibility of enforcing the laws of the United States.“This new organisation must step up, speak out and defend these ideals.” More

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      in US Politics

      Court rules that only US government can sue to enforce Voting Rights Act

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      A federal appeals court shocked voting rights groups on Monday with a ruling that only the US government, not outside groups or citizens, could sue to enforce the Voting Rights Act’s provisions.The civil rights law, which outlaws racial discrimination as it relates to voting, has typically been enforced by lawsuits from these groups, not by the government itself. Now that the Republican-appointed eighth circuit court of appeals has made the ruling by 2-1, this “private right of action” to enforce Section 2 of the law is called into question.The ruling stemmed from a case brought by the Arkansas State Conference NAACP and Arkansas Public Policy Panel over new maps created during redistricting that the two groups allege diluted the voting power of Black voters in the state.While courts at all levels have allowed private claims seeking to enforce the voting rights law for decades, this is an “assumption that rests of flimsy footing”, the opinion written by Judge David Stras, who was appointed by Donald Trump, said. The ruling dissected the law itself, finding it did not include specific language that allows anyone aside from the attorney general to bring enforcement action.In a dissenting opinion, Chief Judge Lavenski Smith said that, though the courts may not have directly addressed the idea of private parties trying to enforce this law, it has repeatedly heard these cases, so it would follow that “existing precedent that permits citizens to seek a judicial remedy”.The ruling is not simply an esoteric question of law: it would dismantle the primary mechanism voting rights groups use to protect against racial discrimination in voting, often in the form of lawsuits challenging electoral maps.Voting rights groups expect the ruling will be appealed to the US supreme court. The eighth circuit ruling applies to the states the circuit court covers: Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.Wendy Weiser, the vice-president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, called the decision “radical” and wrote on X that it was “deeply wrong, and it goes against decades of precedent and practice”. More

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      in Elections

      Groups increasingly use defamation law to ward off US election subversion

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      Groups seeking to protect US democracy from a renewed threat of subversion in the presidential race next year wield a new weapon against Donald Trump and his accomplices: the little-used law of defamation.Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the My Pillow CEO, Mike Lindell, and conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza are among the individuals named in a spate of high-profile defamation cases targeting those who tried to overturn the 2020 election. Prominent rightwing media outlets such as Fox News and Gateway Pundit are also on the hook.Already the legal pain is mounting. Giuliani has been found liable for defaming two election workers in Georgia whom he falsely accused of criminally miscounting votes in 2020 in favour of Joe Biden.The case will go to trial in December with Giuliani facing possibly swingeing punitive damages.Lindell has notched up millions in legal fees in the $2bn defamation suits that have been brought against him by the voting machine firms Dominion and Smartmatic for falsely saying they rigged the count. His ongoing libel woes follow the April settlement in which Fox agreed to pay Dominion a shattering $788m for broadcasting similar lies.“This is lawfare,” Lindell protested in an interview with the Guardian. “Lawfare hasn’t been used in our country since the late 1700s, and that’s what they are doing.”The lawsuits are designed in part as a strategy of deterrence. Those pressing the libel suits hope that anyone contemplating a renewed assault on next year’s presidential election, in which Trump is once again likely to be the Republican candidate, will look at the potentially devastating costs and think twice.“We aim to demonstrate that there is no immunity for spreading intentional and reckless lies,” said Rachel Goodman, a lawyer with the non-partisan advocacy group Protect Democracy. “Ensuring accountability for intentional defamation is a crucial part of deterring election subversion from happening again in 2024.”Protect Democracy currently has five defamation suits on the go against individuals and outlets who propagated election denial. The defendants include Giuliani, the Gateway Pundit and the beleaguered undercover video outfit Project Veritas.D’Souza is being sued over his widely derided and debunked movie 2000 Mules. In it he depicted a Black voter in Georgia, Mark Andrews, as a “mule” who illegally deposited ballots in a drop box when in fact he legally delivered the votes of his own family.The fifth case concerns Kari Lake, the Arizona Republican who refused to accept her defeat in that state’s gubernatorial contest last year. The plaintiff is the top election official in Maricopa county, Stephen Richer, whom she falsely accused of injecting 300,000 phoney ballots into the count to swing the race against her.Defamation law has traditionally been sparingly used in the US, given the very high bar that plaintiffs have to meet. Under the 1964 supreme court ruling New York Times Co v Sullivan, they have to be able to show “actual malice” on behalf of the accused.“When lawsuits are brought against public figures they can only prevail if they can show that the speaker knew that the statements were false, or very likely false, and made recklessly without further investigation or caring for the truth,” said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA.The first Protect Democracy suit to reach trial will be that against Giuliani. A jury will convene in a federal court in Washington DC on 11 December to decide the scale of damages he will have to pay.Giuliani waged a “sustained smear campaign” against two Georgia poll workers in the 2020 count of absentee ballots, Protect Democracy alleged. The mother and daughter duo, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, became the targets of a conspiracy theory in which they were said to have packed bogus ballots into “suitcases” which they then surreptitiously counted five times, transferring victory to Biden.Giuliani called their actions “the crime of the century”, and labeled them “crooks”.Georgia election officials and police investigators categorically disproved the falsehoods within 24 hours of Giuliani airing them. The suitcases turned out to be ballot storage boxes and the counting process was entirely normal, yet he continued to repeat the lies for months.Freeman and Moss faced a prolonged harassment campaign, including death threats from Trump supporters. At its peak, Freeman was compelled to flee her own home and to shutter her online business.In July, in an attempt to avoid disclosing evidence to the plaintiffs, Giuliani admitted that he had made defamatory statements and caused the pair emotional distress. The following month a federal judge ruled he was liable for defamation – leaving the jury to decide only the scale of damages.Goodman said the case summed up why Protect Democracy was bringing defamation suits against election denialists. “Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss were Americans doing their civic duty, and they were put in the crosshairs of this election subversion machine – we should not stand for that.”Most defendants have tried to shield themselves behind the first amendment right to free speech. In Arizona, Kari Lake has attacked the lawsuit against her as an attempt to “punish or silence” her “core free speech about the integrity of the 2022 election”.In his Guardian interview, Lindell said: “I have a first amendment right. These defamation cases are damaging free speech – people are afraid to speak out, to come forward with anything.”Protect Democracy countered that the first amendment does not provide blanket protection for mendacity. “It does not protect those who knowingly spread lies that destroy reputations and lives,” Goodman said.Nina Jankowicz, an expert on disinformation, also rejects the idea that the first amendment shields reckless falsehoods. She is suing Fox News for what she claims were the “vitriolic lies” the channel spread about her in 2022 in her role as head of a newly created federal unit combatting misinformation.Jankowicz resigned from the Disinformation Governance Board, which was also disbanded, barely three weeks into the job. Her defamation complaint quotes the former Fox News star Tucker Carlson calling her a “moron” on air and labelling her unit “the new Soviet America”.Jankowicz said she took the decision to sue because she could see no other route to correct the public record. If there was a free speech component, she said, it was that her rights had been violated, not those of Fox News.“Their intention was to silence me, just as the defamation of election workers in Georgia was designed to silence them. That’s pretty un-American.”Fox has moved to have Jankowicz’s case dismissed, arguing that she has failed to meet the actual malice standard. A ruling is expected soon.The billion-dollar question is: can it work? Can the strategy of deploying defamation as a deterrent force denialists to think twice before they embark on renewed election subversion in 2024?Jankowicz, despite pressing ahead with her own libel suit, remains skeptical. “I haven’t seen any change in how these rumors and outright lies are being spread yet, and I do worry for 2024,” she said.She added that change would only come “when we see more big settlements, or juries siding with plaintiffs”.Parties accused of peddling anti-democratic lies certainly remain vociferous. The Gateway Pundit, the far-right website which Protect Democracy is suing for having published the same falsehoods as Giuliani about the Georgia poll workers, has used the lawsuit as a fundraising tool.Lindell said that he would never be silenced, and continued to insist that his statements about Dominion’s rigging of the 2020 election were “truths”. “I will continue to tell the truth, nothing’s going to stop me from speaking out. I’m not scared,” he said.There are though tentative signs of a shift in behavior. The far-right channel One America News backtracked on its lies about the Georgia poll workers last year after having settled its defamation suit with Freeman and Moss. Since then the outlet has been dropped by several major cable providers.In the wake of the huge defamation settlement between Fox and Dominion, Dinesh D’Souza and Trump himself complained that Fox News refused to give air time to 2000 Mules.Goodman is optimistic that defamation suits can help shore up the US’s shaken democratic norms. “This is about accountability as a way of ensuring that our democracy can get back on track,” she said. More

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      in US Politics

      The US supreme court’s new ‘ethics code’ is an embarrassment | Moira Donegan

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      One of the unspoken rules of the US supreme court is that the justices will never admit that they were wrong, and no one else is allowed to admit it, either.Last week, in oral arguments in United States v Rahimi – which asks whether it is constitutional to take guns away from men who are subject to domestic violence restraining orders – the solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, had to dance around this rule very delicately as she represented the federal government. The federal law disarming abusers had been thrown into question by a ludicrous and dangerous test for all gun restrictions that the supreme court instituted in its 2022 Bruen decision, one which makes it difficult to impose new gun laws if those laws aren’t sufficiently similar to ones on the books from either the revolutionary or civil war eras.It’s a ridiculous test, one that is self-evidently not workable. But Prelogar couldn’t say that; instead, she said that lower courts had simply misinterpreted the court’s perfect test, making mistakes of methodology; that the prospect that domestic abusers could be rearmed, leading to the murders of thousands of American women, was not a result of the court’s reckless, short-sighted and self-interested decision making, but a result of other people’s mistakes. She asked them not to clean up their mess, but to “clarify” their thinking.Something similar to Prelogar’s solicitous fiction about the justices’ infallibility was evident in the justices’ own missive, issued on Monday, declaring that the court would adopt a code of conduct. On the surface, this looked like a positive step. The supreme court has come under fire in recent months for its justices’ flagrant abuses of their station: their familiarity with billionaires who shower them with gifts and vacations; their lavish lifestyles and magically disappearing debts; their willingness to appear at fundraisers for political groups, and reluctance to recuse themselves from cases involving their family members, friends or financial interests.But none of this was a real problem, the justices assured us. These concerns, they claim in a statement accompanying their new code of conduct, were not legitimate, and certainly not the product of any actual mistakes or nefariousness on the justices’ part. Rather, they were merely the result of the failure of the silly, misinformed and stupid public to understand that the court, in its mighty wisdom, is already perfectly ethical.“The absence of a Code,” the justices wrote, “has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.” However did Americans get that impression?It is meaningful that the justices issued this code of conduct; it means that the public pressure on the court – which has been the subject of outrage and disgust since its 2022 Dobbs decision eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion, and which has subsequently come under increased scrutiny for its indifference to either the appearance or the reality of conflicts of interests – is working.The justices often make it clear that they read their own press, but they do not often deign to make any changes to their actual behavior, or to try to discipline their own institution. More often than not, they suggest that such gestures would be beneath them. Not so with the code of conduct, which signals that the justices admit that there is at least some obligation they have to the American people. As the legal commentator Chris Geidner put it, “They have acknowledged that the public rightfully has expectations that they will behave in an ethical way.” It’s better than nothing.But not much better. The new code of conduct, the justices assure us, is merely a formalization of guidelines to which they already adhered, a claim which on its own raises doubts about the code’s sufficiency. The code is based on a binding code of conduct that is applied to judges on the lower courts – but significantly weakened in its application to the supreme court justices.The commanding word “shall” that characterizes the lower courts’ code of conduct is softened throughout, in the supreme court version, to “should”. Prohibitions on corruption are dotted with exonerating qualifiers, like Swiss cheese. Where the lower courts’ code says judges shall not “lend the prestige of the judicial office to advance the private interests of the Justice or others” or “convey or permit others to convey that they are in a special position to influence the Justice”, the supreme court modifies this influence-peddling prohibition with a loophole big enough to drive Clarence Thomas’s RV through: the modifier “knowingly”.This kind of softening edit appears throughout the code: its strained language and convoluted application of exceptions seems like the product of vociferous intra-court infighting, or the lobbying of certain justices to ensure that their own questionable ongoing conduct can be excepted from the code. This might be the code’s one silver lining: its language seems evidence of chaos, disagreement and discord on the court, reminding us that even though we are stuck with this conservative supermajority, they are also stuck with each other.Even this weakened and exception-ridden code, it should be noted, has no enforcement mechanism. There is no way to investigate whether a justice has broken the code, no way to adjudicate the question of his or her wrongdoing, and no way to discipline him or her for any violation. The question of how to interpret the code, how to abide by it, and what to do in the event that it is broken is left entirely to the justices themselves – just like all their ethical questions were before.This response to questions about the court’s ethics with a defiant insistence that they will only ever police themselves is consistent with the way the justices have responded in the past. This is, after all, the same court that has refused to cooperate with congressional oversight of its own ethical misdeeds and appearance of corruption just this year, with the chief justice, John Roberts, issuing a contemptuous refusal to appear before the Senate judiciary committee in April. Justice Samuel Alito, meanwhile, opined to the Wall Street Journal this summer that Congress had no right to impose oversight or regulation on the court – that the justices and their power are immune from the principles of checks and balances.A belief that the court is its own sole and highest authority was also evident the last time the justices tried to explain away their own misconduct, when they issued a “Statement of Ethics Principles and Practices”. Like this code of conduct, that statement, published just this past April, also had no enforcement mechanism; like this one, it seemed more designed to quell public outrage about the court than to meaningfully circumscribe the justices’ behavior. No one fell for it that time, either.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in Elections

      Former Fox News reporter sues after he was allegedly fired for protesting January 6 coverage

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      Fox News is being sued by a former Capitol Hill reporter who accuses the network of discriminating and retaliating against him because he refused to appease Donald Trump and the former president’s supporters by propagating lies about the “stolen” 2020 election.Jason Donner, who worked for Fox News for 12 years as a Capitol Hill reporter and producer, accuses the network of firing him because he spoke out against the coverage of Trump’s stolen election lie and the storming of the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. He was the victim of a wider purge of the newsroom, the lawsuit claims, designed to hold up the network’s ratings by playing along with election denial.The suit, which is being heard by a federal court in Washington DC, gives a vivid account of Donner’s experiences during the January 6 insurrection. Once rioters had entered the Capitol building, he sheltered along with other reporters in the news booths connected to the Senate.As they were hiding, and while reports were coming in of shots fired outside the House chamber, Fox news was broadcasting that the event was “peaceful”. Donner called the newsroom, the suit says, and exclaimed: “I don’t want to hear any of this fucking shit on our air ever again because you’re gonna get us all killed.”The suit claims that after Fox News became the first media outlet to call Arizona for Joe Biden shortly before midnight on election night in 2020, the network faced a furious backlash from Trump and his supporters. Ratings suffered.“To win back viewership and pledge its loyalty to President Trump, Fox’s corporate leadership purged the news division and those reporters who spoke out against claims of election fraud,” it states.Donner also objected to the conspiracy theories being touted by Fox’s star host at the time, Tucker Carlson, who has since been fired. Donner particularly objected to Carlson’s Fox Nation program, Patriot Purge, but was told by a manager, the suit says, that there was “nothing they could do because Tucker has gotten bigger than the network”.The former Fox News reporter claims that retaliation against him began in the spring of 2022. “It became evident to Donner he was now being targeted for speaking out against the false reporting on the election and the January 6 insurrection,” the lawsuit contends.Donner was fired on 28 September 2022 on what he claims were pretextual grounds related to the sick day he had taken two days previously having fallen ill after a Covid-19 vaccination.The new suit is one of a spate of litigation that Fox is fielding relating to its handling of the stolen election lie. In April, the company settled with the voting equipment company Dominion for $787.5m in a defamation suit over false allegations about the firm’s involvement in “rigging” the 2020 election.A similar $2.7bn suit from another voting machine company, Smartmatic, is ongoing. More

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      in US Politics

      Uphold integrity, avoid impropriety: key rules of supreme court ethics code

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      The newly-published code of conduct for the US supreme court justices, issued on Monday in the wake of a series of ethics scandals, drew immediate criticism for its seemingly begrudging tone.“For the most part, these rules and principles are not new,” the nine justices write in the introduction labeled statement of the court, adding: “The court has long had the equivalent of common law ethics rules.”Critics also noted that no method of enforcement is detailed in the 14-page document, making participation by the nine-member bench effectively voluntary.Summary of the main points, at a glance:
      A justice should uphold the integrity and independence of the judiciary
      This short clause states that justices “should respect and comply with the law, and act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence” in the court.
      A justice should avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all activities
      A three-pronged requirement covering respect for the law, not allowing “family, social, political, financial, or other relationships” to influence their conduct or judgment; and not being a member of any group that discriminates on the grounds of race, sex, religion or nationality.
      A justice should perform the duties of office fairly, impartially and diligently
      This essentially requires the panel to close their ears to outside voices when deliberating, or during any other aspect of their duties; and to keep their own mouths closed about cases they are working on.The clause also deals with disqualification of justices, stating they must stand down from cases in which their impartiality “might reasonably be questioned”. It gives possible scenarios, including where justices or immediate family members have certain pre-existing friendships or relationships with any parties in a case.A financial relationship alone would not be grounds for disqualification if the justice or family member “divests the interest that provides the ground for disqualification”.
      A justice may engage in extrajudicial activities that are consistent with the obligations of the judicial office
      The most detailed of all the clauses, this one allows justices to follow a wide range of “law-related pursuits”, plus “civic, charitable, educational, religious, social, financial, fiduciary, and government activities” as well as engaging in speaking, writing, lecturing and teaching.There are caveats: the justices “should not”, for example, appear at events for political parties or campaigns; at fundraisers that are not law-related or for non-profit groups; or at any event where a party has “a substantial financial interest” in the outcome of any case before the court.A justice can serve as a trustee or member of a law-related or non-profit group. Receiving financial reimbursement or compensation is fine, but the amount must be limited to the “actual or reasonably estimated costs or travel, food or lodging reasonably incurred”.
      A justice should refrain from political activity
      The final and shortest clause. No holding political office, speaking for a political party or candidate, and definitely no fundraising for, or donating to, one. Any justice seeking political office is expected to resign from the bench. More

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      in US Politics

      US supreme court announces ethics code amid pressure over gift scandals

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      The US supreme court has finally responded to mounting pressure over a spate of ethics scandals engulfing some of its senior rightwing justices by publishing its first ever code that sets out the “rules and principles that guide the conduct of members of the court”.The 14-page document follows months of increasingly sharp criticism of the justices and their failure to apply to themselves basic ethical rules that bind all other judges in the US. Even as they released the code, however, the justices maintained their defensive posture, insisting in a brief statement that the furore of recent months had been a “misunderstanding”.The statement said that the absence of a code had led in recent years to the “misunderstanding that the justices of this court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules”.The newly published code is signed by all nine justices, and lays out the basic guardrails within which they are expected to behave. The first page states baldly that “a justice should avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all activities”.In a section labelled “Outside Influence”, the code says that the nine members of the court should not “knowingly convey or permit others to convey the impression that they are in a special position to influence the justice”.Although the new code is designed to quell the growing disquiet over the court’s ethical standards, the instant reaction to the guidelines was not effusive. Several experts on judicial ethics pointed out that it lacks any mechanism for enforcement, leaving the justices effectively to police themselves.Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a non-partisan group which advocates for reform, said the guidelines were largely “a copy-and-paste job” from the lower courts’ code. In the absence of any enforcement system, “how can the public trust they’re going to do anything more than simply cover for one another, ethics be damned?”The president of the non-partisan watchdog group Accountable.US, Caroline Ciccone, said that without a clear enforcement mechanism, “this ‘code of conduct’ is just a PR stunt to appease the American public as it demands better from its supreme court.”The cloud of ethical trouble that has consumed the court descended in April when ProPublica published a series of bombshell reports exposing the lavish international travel and vacations Clarence Thomas enjoyed through the largesse of the Republican megadonor Harlan Crow. Later reports revealed that Crow paid for tuition for Thomas’s great-nephew.A fellow conservative justice, Samuel Alito, has also found himself embroiled in ethics disputes after ProPublica revealed he had been treated to an undisclosed fishing holiday in Alaska by the billionaire Paul Singer.Amid a billowing public debate about the dubious ethical standards of the court that is responsible for upholding the country’s judicial authority, there was resistance from some justices to address the crisis. Alito threw fuel on the fire by telling the Wall Street Journal that Congress had no power to regulate the supreme court – a view that has been roundly dismissed by several constitutional law scholars.The chief justice, John Roberts, who is more attuned to public opinion, appears to have been working behind the scenes to find a compromise that all nine justices could sign up to. In May, he told a legal event in Washington: “I want to assure people that I’m committed to making certain that we as a court adhere to the highest standards of conduct.”The code includes a section setting out when justices should recuse themselves from cases. It specifically states that the justices must disqualify themselves when their spouse has “an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding”.In January 2022, the supreme court rejected by a vote of eight to one a request by Donald Trump to block White House records being handed to the House investigation into the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. The only dissent came from Thomas.Thomas’s wife Ginni Thomas had been actively involved in efforts to undermine Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election. It later transpired that texts between her and Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows were among the batch of documents that were the subject of the supreme court ruling.Another provision in the code says “a justice should not speak at an event sponsored by or associated with a political party or a campaign for political office”. It adds that a justice should not “knowingly be a speaker, a guest of honor, or featured on the program” of a “fundraising event”.In September ProPublica revealed that Thomas had been the draw at least two donor events bankrolling the rightwing network of the energy tycoons the Koch brothers. More