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      Alito ‘stunningly wrong’ that Senate can’t impose supreme court ethics rules

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      Senator Chris Murphy has dismissed claims by the supreme court justice, Samuel Alito, that the Senate has “no authority” to create a code of conduct for the court as “stunningly wrong”.The Connecticut Democrat made those remarks in an interview on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, adding that Alito “should know that more than anyone else because his seat on the supreme court exists only because of an act passed by Congress”.“It is Congress that establishes the number of justices on the supreme court,” Murphy said. “It is Congress that has passed in the past requirements for justices to disclose certain information, and so it is just wrong on the facts to say that Congress doesn’t have anything to do with the rules guiding the supreme court.”He continued: “It is even more disturbing that Alito feels the need to insert himself into a congressional debate.”Murphy’s comments came after the Wall Street Journal published an interview with Alito on Friday in which he said: “I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it. No provision in the constitution gives them the authority to regulate the supreme court – period.”During his interview with State of the Union, Murphy went on to criticize the nine-member supreme court’s conservative supermajority. He accused Alito and the court’s other conservatives of seeing “themselves as politicians” rather than impartial jurists.“They just see themselves as a second legislative body that has just as much power and right to impose their political will on the country as Congress does,” Murphy said. “They are going to bend the law in order to impose their rightwing view of how the country should work on the rest of us.”In recent months, several of the supreme court’s conservative justices have found themselves in ethical controversy after reports emerged of their involvement in real estate transactions with Republican billionaire donors, discreet payments from Republican activists, millions of dollars’ worth of luxury trips and thousands of dollars in private school tuition.As a result, many Democrats have called for tighter ethics rules for the supreme court’s justices, who they say lack conduct rules that are comparable to other federal authorities.Earlier this month, the Senate judiciary committee approved legislation to impose tighter ethics rules on the supreme court.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe legislation – which Republicans have adamantly opposed – has slim possibilities of passing in the Senate because it would require at least nine Republican votes. Nonetheless, Democrats say such a measure is a “crucial first step” in restoring public confidence in the nation’s highest court.Murphy said of the committee-approved measure: “It’s why we need to pass this commonsense ethics legislation to at least make sure we know that these guys aren’t in bed having their lifestyles paid for by conservative donors, as we have unfortunately seen in these latest revelations.” More

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      States’ rights make a comeback as Republicans rush to defy Washington

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      The message was blunt: “Texas will see you in court, Mr President.”The words of defiance came from Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, making clear that he would not comply with a justice department request to remove floating barriers in the Rio Grande. And Abbott is not the only Republican governor in open revolt against Washington.In May Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a bill allowing the death penalty in child rape convictions despite the supreme court banning capital punishment in such cases. Earlier this month, Kay Ivey of Alabama signed into law a redistricting map that ignored a supreme court ruling ordering the state to draw two Black-majority congressional districts.The disobedience is sure to score points with the Republican base. It reflects a trend that has seen state parties embrace extreme positions in the era of Donald Trump and Maga (Make America great again). And while there has always been tension between states and the federal government, it now comes with the accelerant of political partisanship and blue (Democratic) v red (Republican) state polarisation.“This is an onslaught against the federal government’s reach, power, effectiveness,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “We’re seeing it across the board in immigration, healthcare, education – it is defiance. If you think about America breaking into red and blue states, this is like the culmination. It’s literally the red states separating from the federal government and the rule of national law.”With Democrat Joe Biden in the White House, Republican governors are seeking to assert their independence, with red states such as Florida and Texas styling themselves as bulwarks of resistance even if that means rattling America’s increasingly fragile democracy.In Texas, Abbott has been testing the legal limits of states’ ability to act on immigration for more than two years, erecting razor-wire fencing, arresting migrants on trespassing charges and sending busloads of asylum seekers to Democratic-led cities in other states. The governor recently introduced a roughly 1,000ft line of bright orange, wrecking ball-sized buoys on the Rio Grande to stop migrants from entering the US.This week the justice department sued Abbott over the floating barrier, claiming that Texas unlawfully installed it without permission between the border cities of Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, Mexico. The White House has also raised humanitarian and environmental concerns. Abbott sent Biden a letter that defended Texas’s right to install the barrier and tweeted: “Texas has the sovereign authority to defend our border, under the US Constitution and the Texas Constitution.”The lawsuit is not the first time the Biden administration has sued Texas over its actions on the border. In 2021 the attorney general, Merrick Garland, accused the state of usurping and even interfering with the federal government’s responsibility to enforce immigration laws after Abbott empowered state troopers to stop vehicles carrying migrants on the basis that they could increase the spread of Covid-19.But it is not just a Democratic president feeling the backlash. Even the supreme court, now heavily tilted to the right by Trump’s appointment, is facing defiance from states over rulings that they do not like.The court made a surprise decision that upheld a lower court ruling that a map in Alabama – with one Black-majority district out of seven in a state that is 27% Black – probably violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the voting power of Black residents. But six weeks later the Alabama state legislature approved a new map that failed to create a second majority-Black congressional district.A group of voters who won the supreme court decision say that they will challenge the new plan. A three-judge panel has set a 14 August hearing and could eventually order a special master to draw new lines for the state. The outcome is likely to have consequences across the country as the case again weighs the requirements of the Voting Rights Act in redistricting.Chris England, a state representative and Black Democrat, noted that change in Alabama has often happened only through federal court order. “Alabama does what Alabama does,” he said in a speech. “Ultimately, what we are hoping for, I guess, at some point, is that the federal court does what it always does to Alabama: forces us to do the right thing. Courts always have to come in and save us from ourselves.”In Florida, meanwhile, DeSantis declared that the supreme court had been “wrong” when its 2008 ruling found it unconstitutional to use capital punishment in child sexual battery cases. He signed a law – authorising the state to pursue the death penalty when an adult is convicted of sexually battering a child under 12 – intended to get the court, now under conservative control, to reconsider that decision.The posturing comes within the context of years of anti-Washington rhetoric from politicians led by Trump, who has long railed against the “deep state” and vowed to “drain the swamp”. Other Republicans have used Washington as a punchbag, a symbol of political elites out of touch with ordinary people.Jacobs added: “This has been a battle that’s been going on for hundreds of years. At this moment you’ve got this toxic mixing of state resentment of the national government when in the hands of the other party along with this really virulent populism. What’s unique about this period is pushing back against and defying Washington is now good politics. Ron DeSantis’s main campaign theme is: I said no to Washington.”Trump has also spent years sowing distrust in institutions and fanning online conspiracy theories. Loss of faith in elections led a violent crowd to storm the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. The supreme court has compounded the problem with a series of extremist rulings and ethics scandals. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that the court has a 30% approval rating among registered voters – the lowest since Quinnipiac first asked the question in 2004.Edward Fallone, an associate professor at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, said: “The integrity of the court has definitely been eroded. Both liberals and conservatives have less faith and feel less obligated to follow its rulings. It’s entirely a situation of the supreme court’s own making.“The justices have been acting politically, the shadow docket [where the court rules on procedural matters], the refusal to be transparent about ethics and gifts, and some of the comments that Justice [Samuel] Alito for example has made in public forums that sound more like a politician’s comments.“When the court acts politically then people see it as a political institution. It just follows as night follows day. It’s going to be difficult to have state governors and legislatures follow supreme court rulings when they have less faith in the integrity of the body and the general public has less faith.”Yet until recently, talk of rebellion against the government had seemed to belong only in the history books. The supremacy clause in the US constitution says the federal government, when acting in pursuance of the constitution, trumps states’ rights.In the mid-19th century, southern states believed that they had the right to nullify federal laws or even secede from the Union if their interests, including the exploitation of enslaved labour, were threatened. With the north increasingly turning against slavery, 11 southern states seceded in 1860-61, forming the Confederate States of America. It took four years of civil war to reunite the nation and abolish slavery.A century later, the landmark supreme court case of Brown v Board of Education declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, but many southern states resisted integration and refused to comply with the decision. President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce the desegregation of Little Rock Central high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, in a case known as the “Little Rock Nine”.In 1963, the Alabama governor, George Wallace, declared “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama to express resistance to the court-ordered integration. In response, President John F Kennedy federalised national guard troops and deployed them to the university, forcing Wallace to yield.Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die, said: “Sometimes we have the idea that the local level is where grassroots democracy thrives but actually, in the history of American democracy, federal power has been used for ill but it’s also been used as a democratising force. We haven’t seen this confrontation reach this same level since the 1950s, 1960s.”Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard University, added: “The major breakthroughs in American democracy have come when the federal government has either passed national legislation – think of the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act – or had to intervene.“Major moments of backsliding have happened when the federal government turns a blind eye to what’s happening in the states. The 1890s are replete with examples of the supreme court essentially turning a blind eye to abuses at the state level. So in a way the confrontation between the states and the federal government is a confrontation over democracy.” More

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      Woman in anti-LGBTQ+ supreme court case did make wedding site after all, report says

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      A Colorado woman who claimed her state’s support for same-sex marriage barred her from designing wedding websites, fueling a case that last month delivered a major US supreme court blow to LGBTQ+ rights, appears to have designed at least one wedding website before it was scrubbed from her archive.The discovery, by the New Republic, followed reporting by that outlet and the Guardian which showed the request for a site for a same-sex wedding that lay at the heart of the 303 Creative v Elenis supreme court case appeared to have been a fabrication.Represented by the rightwing Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the web designer behind 303 Creative, Lorie Smith, argued that her right to free speech, regarding her opposition to same-sex marriage, was “chilled” by a Colorado anti-discrimination law.Claiming Smith was unable to design any wedding websites at all, for fear of falling foul of the state law, her attorneys told the supreme court: “For six years, she has been unable to speak in the marketplace.”The six conservative justices who dominate the court ruled for Smith, delighting rightwingers and faith groups but appalling LGBTQ+ groups and other advocates of equal treatment under the law.Questions over the supposed request for service have lingered. On Monday, the New Republic added to such disquiet.The progressive magazine said that by using the Wayback Machine, a service from the Internet Archive, a researcher found what appeared to be an image of a wedding website designed by Smith around 2015.The image, in a folder of “Recent Website Projects”, showed a couple walking on a beach, under a couple’s names and section headings including “You’re invited”, “Schedule”, “Accommodations” and “Travel Guide & FAQs”.The name of the woman in the couple on the site matched the name on another image, for “Healthy4LifeColorado.com”. Other images were for a church, a site about French bulldogs and a campaign site for a Republican state politician. The last image matched a site currently live.The apparent wedding site was found by Kate Redburn, a fellow at Columbia Law School in New York.They told the New Republic: “I couldn’t believe it. The idea that she hadn’t made any wedding websites for anyone was so baked into the narrative around this case.”The magazine said “a Colorado woman whose name matched the name of the bride” did not respond to requests for comment.Through the ADF, Smith “acknowledged she had made the website as a gift for a family member and had subsequently removed it from her online portfolio before the lawsuit was filed”.On Twitter, the ADF accused the New Republic of “manufacturing its fifth desperate attack” on Smith.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Why? To impugn Lorie and delegitimise the landmark supreme court ruling in 303 Creative that protects every American’s free speech rights.”Saying Smith had “nothing to hide”, the ADF said she designed the wedding site as a gift for her sister in 2014, around the time she “started exploring whether she could create custom wedding websites as part of her business consistent with her faith”.The New Republic said the ADF “did not answer our questions about what knowledge its lawyers had of the website on Smith’s site”.Jennifer Pizer, chief legal officer at Lambda Legal, who worked on the 303 Creative case, described why questions about its provenance and conduct remained important, in light of the ruling handed down last month.“I think the public reaction we’re seeing is probably a mix of surprise, shock and anger that this case seems to have been contrived, and probably also that such an important court ruling might well have been based on facts that were not entirely true,” Pizer told the New Republic.“People seem to be expressing understandable distress at the idea that this impactful case was won by people who might have misled the court – it’s alarming for multiple reasons.”The ADF, Pizer said, “has been gunning for this result – and not just this result, but has been gunning to win licenses to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people and ways to undermine civil rights laws more broadly for many years.” More

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      Donald Trump: Arizona attorney general investigating attempts to overturn 2020 vote, reports say – as it happened

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      From 3h agoArizona’s Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes is moving forward with an investigation into efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory in the crucial swing state, the Washington Post reports.Mayes’s inquiry is the second known attempt by a state to hold the former president accountable for the effort to disrupt Biden’s win. Fani Willis, a Democratic prosecutor in Fulton county, Georgia, is reportedly close to obtaining indictments in her investigation of Trump’s campaign to overturn Biden’s win in that state. Separately, justice department special counsel Jack Smith is still investigating the former president over the January 6 insurrection, and the broader campaign to prevent Biden from entering the White House.Here’s more from the Post’s report:
      Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) assigned a team of prosecutors to the case in May, and investigators have contacted many of the pro-Trump electors and their lawyers, according to the two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe the probe. Investigators have requested records and other information from local officials who administered the 2020 election, the two people said, and a prosecutor has inquired about evidence collected by the Justice Department and an Atlanta-area prosecutor for similar probes.
      It is unclear if the investigation will broaden into other attempts to undermine President Biden’s victory in the state, including a pressure campaign by Trump and his allies to thwart the will of voters and remain in office.
      Dan Barr, Mayes’s chief deputy, said the investigation is in the “fact-gathering” phase. He declined to say whether subpoenas have been issued and which state statutes the team thinks might have been broken.
      “This is something we’re not going to go into thinking, ‘Maybe we’ll get a conviction,’ or ‘Maybe we have a pretty good chance,’” he said. “This has to be ironclad shut.”
      The Secret Service announced it closed the investigation into the cocaine discovered at the White House earlier this month without naming any suspects, but Republicans seem to want to keep the matter alive. Several lawmakers, including House speaker Kevin McCarthy, expressed skepticism at the agency’s conclusion, part of a pattern of attacks on federal law enforcement by the GOP’s right wing. Meanwhile, the Democratic leader of the Senate judiciary committee Dick Durbin outlined plans to continue pressing the supreme court to tighten its ethics, after a series of reports found questionable ties between the justices and parties with interests in its decisions.Here’s what else happened today:
      Arizona’s attorney general is moving forward with an investigation of Donald Trump and his attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory in the state three years ago, the Washington Post reported.
      Florida governor Ron DeSantis remains far below Trump in support among Republicans, but NBC News obtained a memo outlining his campaign’s strategy for success in the presidential primaries.
      Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican, accused Democrats of seeking to retaliate against conservative supreme court justices.
      Durbin left open the possibility of his committee investigating liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor after a report emerged of her staff asking institutions to buy her book.
      Far-right Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene was among lawmakers who raised their eyebrows at the Secret Service’s decision to close the investigation into the White House cocaine.
      A spat has broken out between Republican former president Mike Pence and a prominent progressive Democrat over Israeli president Isaac Herzog’s plans to address Congress next week during his visit to Washington DC.Ilhan Omar, a progressive Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, announced she would not attend Herzog’s speech, citing a 2019 episode in which Israel said fellow progressive Democrat Rashida Tlaib, who is of Palestinian origin, could visit family in the West Bank, but only if she avoided promoting the boycott campaign against the country:This afternoon, Pence, who is seeking the GOP’s nomination for president, took direct aim at Omar, one of only three Muslims currently serving in Congress and the only Somali-American:Back at the Capitol, Republicans continue to complain about the Secret Service’s conclusion that it can’t identify who left cocaine at the White House.Here’s Tennessee congressman Tim Burchett’s take, as captured by CNN:Ron DeSantis may be considered frontrunner Donald Trump’s biggest challenger for the Republican presidential nomination, but polls have consistently shown that it’s not a particularly close race.Take this one from Morning Consult released on Tuesday. It shows Trump with 56% support among potential GOP primary voters, and DeSantis in second with a measly 17%. If there’s any news there, it’s that entrepreneur and first-time candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is in third place with 8%, ahead of more experienced Republicans like former vice-president Mike Pence and senator Tim Scott.NBC News has obtained a confidential memo from the DeSantis campaign laying out their strategy in the GOP’s primary process. The Florida governor plans to aim for success in the first states that vote, particularly New Hampshire, and focus less on “Super Tuesday”, when 14 states will hold primaries on 5 March.Here’s more from their story:
      Ron DeSantis is trying to reassure donors and activists that his campaign only looks stalled.
      A confidential campaign memo obtained by NBC News lays out what the Florida governor’s presidential campaign sees as its path forward: focusing on the early states, refusing to give up on New Hampshire, not yet investing in “Super Tuesday” battlegrounds, zeroing in on DeSantis’ biography and sowing doubts about his competitors — particularly Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C.
      “While Super Tuesday is critically important, we will not dedicate resources to Super Tuesday that slow our momentum in New Hampshire,” the memo states. “We expect to revisit this investment in the Fall.”
      The document, dated July 6, is labeled a “confidential friends and family update” and makes clear that it’s “not for distribution.” Its details about the campaign’s strategy are far more in-depth than what has been shared publicly.
      As DeSantis’ ability to surpass Donald Trump as leader of the Republican Party is now an open question among the GOP faithful, the memo is an effort by the governor’s top aides to reach out to donors to provide more clarity on their path forward.
      Across the DeSantis political universe there is a heightened awareness of the importance of the early states and the reality that DeSantis will burn out without strong performances there. It means that even as the group has a plan in place now, the strategy is subject to change.
      “From my understanding, if we don’t see a bump in the polls, we are basically going to shut down the idea of a national operation,” a DeSantis-aligned operative told NBC News.
      Donald Trump’s top opponent for the Republican presidential nomination is governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, which used to be considered a swing state, but lately has trended towards the GOP. The Guardian’s Sam Levine and Andrew Witherspoon report that the DeSantis administration is carrying out a crackdown against groups that are trying to encourage people to vote:Florida Republicans have hit dozens of voter registration groups with thousands of dollars of fines, the latest salvo in an alarming crackdown on voting in the state led by Governor Ron DeSantis.At least 26 groups have cumulatively racked up more than $100,000 in fines since September of last year, according to a list that was provided by Florida officials to the Guardian. The groups include both for-profit and nonprofit organizations as well as political parties, including the statewide Republican and Democratic parties of Florida.The fines, which range from $50 to tens of thousands of dollars, were levied by the state’s office of election crimes and security, a first-of-its-kind agency created at the behest of DeSantis in 2022 to investigate voter fraud. Voter fraud is extremely rare, and the office has already come under scrutiny for bringing criminal charges against people who appeared to be confused about their voting eligibility.Donald Trump’s legal trouble is both criminal, and civil. As the Associated Press reports, the former president yesterday suffered a setback in his attempt to defend himself against a potent defamation lawsuit:Donald Trump lashed out on social media against the US justice department on Wednesday after it stopped supporting his claim that the presidency shields him from liability against a defamation lawsuit brought by a woman who says he sexually attacked her in the mid-1990s.The former president said in a post on his social media platform that the department’s reversal a day earlier in the lawsuit brought by advice columnist E. Jean Carroll was part of the “political Witch Hunt” he faces while campaigning for the presidency as a Republican.The justice department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Arizona’s Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes is moving forward with an investigation into efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory in the crucial swing state, the Washington Post reports.Mayes’s inquiry is the second known attempt by a state to hold the former president accountable for the effort to disrupt Biden’s win. Fani Willis, a Democratic prosecutor in Fulton county, Georgia, is reportedly close to obtaining indictments in her investigation of Trump’s campaign to overturn Biden’s win in that state. Separately, justice department special counsel Jack Smith is still investigating the former president over the January 6 insurrection, and the broader campaign to prevent Biden from entering the White House.Here’s more from the Post’s report:
      Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) assigned a team of prosecutors to the case in May, and investigators have contacted many of the pro-Trump electors and their lawyers, according to the two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe the probe. Investigators have requested records and other information from local officials who administered the 2020 election, the two people said, and a prosecutor has inquired about evidence collected by the Justice Department and an Atlanta-area prosecutor for similar probes.
      It is unclear if the investigation will broaden into other attempts to undermine President Biden’s victory in the state, including a pressure campaign by Trump and his allies to thwart the will of voters and remain in office.
      Dan Barr, Mayes’s chief deputy, said the investigation is in the “fact-gathering” phase. He declined to say whether subpoenas have been issued and which state statutes the team thinks might have been broken.
      “This is something we’re not going to go into thinking, ‘Maybe we’ll get a conviction,’ or ‘Maybe we have a pretty good chance,’” he said. “This has to be ironclad shut.”
      Joe Biden will meet the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, at the White House next week, his spokeswoman has confirmed.Herzog will be in Washington on 18 and 19 July and will deliver a joint address to Congress.The Israeli president’s US visit comes amid protests in Israel at a government push to advance legislation that would weaken the supreme court’s independence.Israel’s parliament recently voted for a bill that would scrap a “reasonableness” standard that allows the supreme court to overrule government decisions.Biden and Herzog are due to discuss deepening Israel’s regional integration, a more peaceful Middle East and Russia’s relationship with Iran.The White House statement on the visit said:
      President Biden will stress the importance of our shared democratic values, and discuss ways to advance equal measures of freedom, prosperity, and security for Palestinians and Israelis.”
      The Secret Service announced it had closed its investigation of the cocaine discovered at the White House earlier this month without naming any suspects, but Republicans seem to want to keep the matter alive. Several lawmakers, including House speaker Kevin McCarthy, expressed skepticism at the agency’s conclusion, part of a pattern of attacks on federal law enforcement by the GOP’s right wing. Meanwhile, the Democratic leader of the Senate judiciary committee Dick Durbin outlined plans to continue pressing the supreme court to tighten its ethics, after a series of reports found questionable ties between the justices and parties with interests in its decisions.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican, accused Democrats of seeking to retaliate against conservative justices.
      Durbin left open the possibility of his committee investigating liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor after a report emerged of her staff asking institutions to buy her book.
      Far-right Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene was among lawmakers who raised their eyebrows at the Secret Service’s decision to close the investigation into the White House cocaine.
      In the latest indication that this is not the last we have heard about the White House cocaine saga, Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy is calling on the Secret Service to continue searching for whomever left the powder at the executive mansion, Fox News reports:Here’s more from the Guardian’s Jenna Amatulli on the cocaine found at the White House, and apparent failure of the Secret Service to discover who brought it there:The investigation into the bag of cocaine found at the White House has concluded, with no suspects identified.In a statement from the Secret Service, the organization emphasized that it implemented safety closures after discovering the cocaine and that it then “field tested and preliminarily determined” the drug “to not be a hazardous compound”.They said the US Department of Homeland Security’s National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center later analyzed the cocaine for any biothreats and those tests came back negative.On how the item came to be inside the White House, the Secret Service said it conducted a “methodical review of security systems and protocols” that spanned “several days prior to the discovery of the substance”. They “developed an index of several hundred individuals who may have accessed the area where the substance was found” before ultimately concluding there was “insufficient DNA was present for investigative comparisons”. More

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      What ethical controversies are US supreme court justices facing?

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      All-expenses-paid trips, book promotions and property selling.Some of the US supreme court’s conservative judges are mired in ethical controversies that have prompted members of Congress to call for not only testimony from Chief Justice John Roberts, but also for formal accountability, for what they say is democracy’s sake.Senate Democrats this week have called for a vote on a bill to establish a code of conduct for the supreme court justices similar to those that other government agencies must follow. The bill, unlikely to pass in a divided Congress, would demand the court create a code within 180 days and establish rules on recusals related to potential conflicts of interest and disclosure of gifts and travel.The ethical concerns involving court justices have continued to mount. Most recently, the Guardian reported that lawyers who have conducted business before the US supreme court have paid an aide to Clarence Thomas money via Venmo.Here’s a rundown of the ethical controversies supreme court justices have been involved in.Real estate transactionsClarence Thomas’s friend Harlan Crow, the Texas Republican billionaire mega-donor, bought three properties that the conservative justice and his family owned, including Thomas’s childhood home in Savannah, Georgia, where Thomas’s mother still lives. Crow made significant renovations, cleared blight and let Thomas’s mother live there rent-free. The cost was more than $100,000 but was not disclosed. Crow has said the purchase was made to eventually turn the home into a museum for Thomas.Justice Neil Gorsuch sold a 40-acre property he co-owned in rural Colorado after he became a justice, Politico reported. Brian Duffy, the chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, which has had more than 20 cases before the supreme court, bought the property in 2017. Gorsuch disclosed the sale and reportedly made between $250,000 and $500,000, but he left blank the buyer’s identity.School supportCrow paid thousands of dollars in private school tuition for two boarding schools that Thomas’s great-nephew attended, ProPublica reported. The transaction was not disclosed.An investigation by the Associated Press revealed how colleges and universities attract supreme court justices to campuses as a way to generate donations for institutions, raising ethical concerns around a court that, unlike other government agencies, does not have a formal code of conduct. The visits have resulted in all-expenses-paid teaching opportunities and book sales. Government aides from other branches such as Congress and the presidency are barred from using government resources for personal gain.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMoney to partnersThe Republican activist Leonard Leo paid Thomas’s wife, Ginni, $25,000 for polling services in January 2012, telling the Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway to make “no mention of Ginni”, the Washington Post reported. It’s unclear whether that is a direct ethical concern for Clarence Thomas but it may constitute a conflict of interest.Ginni, who also attended the January 6 attack at the Capitol, reportedly exchanged text messages with the then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, encouraging him to support then president Donald Trump’s false election fraud claims aimed at subverting the results of his 2020 electoral defeat. The Judicial Education Project, a law firm tied to Leo, filed a brief to the supreme court in the landmark case that eventually gutted the Voting Rights Act not long after the payment was made.Roberts’ wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, ran a legal recruiting firm that raised ethical concerns since she made millions of dollars in commissions from placing lawyers at firms, some of which appeared before the court. The New York Times obtained a letter from a former colleague of Roberts to the US justice department and Congress inquiring about the connection.Luxury tripsFor more than two decades, Thomas accepted millions of dollars’ worth of luxury trips on private planes and “superyachts”, and vacations from his friend Crow without reporting them on financial disclosure forms, ProPublica reported. Crow has said that he did not attempt to influence Thomas politically or legally nor did he discuss pending supreme court cases. Thomas said he was told he was not required to disclose the trips. Notably, a company linked to Crow was involved in at least one case before the US supreme court, Bloomberg reported. Thomas did not recuse himself from the case.Justice Samuel Alito reportedly took a private jet to an all-expenses-covered fishing trip to Alaska, paid for by the hedge fund billionaire and conservative mega-donor Paul Singer. NPR reports that Singer has been involved in 10 appeals to the supreme court. In an unprecedented move, Alito defended himself in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, declaring he did not have to recuse himself and followed what he “understood to be standard practice”. More

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      Iowa Republicans pass six-week abortion ban

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      Iowa’s state legislature voted on Tuesday night to ban most abortions after around six weeks of pregnancy, a time before most people know they are pregnant.Republican lawmakers, which hold a majority in both the Iowa house and senate, passed the anti-abortion bill after the governor, Kim Reynolds, called a special session to seek a vote on the ban.The bill passed with exclusively Republican support in a rare, one-day legislative burst lasting more than 14 hours.The legislation will take immediate effect after the governor signs it on Friday and will prohibit abortions after the first sign of cardiac activity – usually around six weeks, with some exceptions for cases of rape or incest. It will allow for abortions up until 20 weeks of pregnancy only under certain conditions of medical emergency. Abortions in the state were previously allowed up to 20 weeks.“The Iowa supreme court questioned whether this legislature would pass the same law they did in 2018, and today they have a clear answer,” Reynolds said in a statement. “The voices of Iowans and their democratically elected representatives cannot be ignored any longer, and justice for the unborn should not be delayed.”The legislation is the latest in a raft of anti-abortion laws passed in states across the country since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last year, ending the nationwide constitutional right to abortion. A number of states, including a swath of the southern US, have passed full bans on abortion without exceptions for cases of rape or incest.Preparations were already under way to quickly file legal challenges in court and get the measure blocked, once Reynolds signs it into law.A similar six-week ban that the legislature passed in 2018 was blocked by the state’s supreme court one year later. Since that decision, however, Roe has been overturned and a more conservative court ruled that abortion is no longer a constitutionally protected right in Iowa. The court was split 3-3 last month on whether to remove the block on the 2018 law, a deadlock which resulted in Reynolds seeking to pass new legislation in a special session this week.“The ACLU of Iowa, Planned Parenthood and the Emma Goldman Clinic remain committed to protecting the reproductive rights of Iowans to control their bodies and their lives, their health and their safety – including filing a lawsuit to block this reckless, cruel law,” the ACLU of Iowa’s executive director, Mark Stringer, said in a statement.In the meantime, Planned Parenthood North Central States has said it will refer patients out of state if they’re scheduled for abortions in the next few weeks. The organization, the largest abortion provider in the state, will continue to provide care to patients who present before cardiac activity is detected.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs state lawmakers debated the bill, crowds of protesters gathered in the capitol rotunda in support of reproductive rights and chanted “vote them out” at Republican legislators. A Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa survey from last year showed that around 61% of Iowans were generally in favor of abortion access, a number that tracks with nationwide beliefs about the right to abortion.During a public hearing on Tuesday before the vote, lawmakers heard from advocates both for and against the bill who gave brief statements in the chambers. A range of medical professionals and reproductive rights activists urged the legislature to reconsider the bill, warning that it would cause immense societal harm, reduce bodily autonomy and prevent physicians from caring for patients.“You would be forcing a woman to a lifelong obligation which affects her education, career, family and community,” Amy Bingaman, an obstetrician and gynecologist, told lawmakers.Advocates of the bill, many from Christian organizations and hardline anti-abortion activist groups, thanked lawmakers during the hearing and touted the bill as a victory for their movement.The Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      Chief justice John Roberts urged to testify on ethics scandals for ‘good of democracy’

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      The US chief justice should testify before Congress about ethics scandals besetting his supreme court “for the good of democracy”, a leading Californian progressive said.The justices are “so cloistered, they’re so out of touch”, the congressman Ro Khanna told MSNBC on Sunday. “They don’t have a sense of what life is like, so my plea to him would be for the good of democracy come testify. What are you afraid of?”The Democratic-controlled Senate judiciary committee has requested that Roberts testify about reports regarding relations between justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch and rightwing donors or, in Gorsuch’s case, the chief of a prominent law firm involved in a property purchase.Thomas’s extensive gifts from the billionaire donor Harlan Crow have been exhaustively reported by ProPublica, which also reported an Alaska fishing trip Alito took with the billionaire Paul Singer.The justices failed to disclose such links. All deny wrongdoing. Singer, Crow and the law firm executive also deny wrongdoing and say they and the justices did not discuss politics or business before the court.Supreme court justices are nominally subject to the same ethics rules as other federal judges but in practice govern themselves.Questions have also been raised about the career of Roberts’ wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, who, according to the New York Times, “has made millions recruiting lawyers to prominent law firms, some of which have business before the court”.In April, turning down the invitation to testify before the Senate judiciary committee, John Roberts cited concerns about the separation of powers.Amid progressive anger over decisions on abortion, affirmative action, student debt relief and anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, calls for reform to a court controlled 6-3 by conservatives after Donald Trump appointed three justices in four years have grown ever louder.Public trust in the court is at all-time lows.Speaking to the former Biden White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Khanna told MSNBC: “The court is moving us backwards and young people in particular are outraged that the court is taking away the relief of student loans. They’re moving to a time where colleges used to be just for the wealthy and largely white, so I do think this can energise young people, in particular working-class voters.”Calls for structural reform seem to have as little chance of success as calls for Thomas to resign or be impeached – calls perhaps likely to increase after the publication by the Times on Sunday of an investigation of the justice’s membership of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, “a cluster of extraordinarily wealthy, largely conservative members who lionised him and all that he had achieved”.Republicans control the House and trail Democrats by two seats in the Senate, all but ensuring a block on any such move. Furthermore, Joe Biden is against major reform, such as changing the size of the court or imposing term limits.Khanna said: “Voters know that the court is just out of touch with their lives, that the court is taking away their rights, taking away women’s rights to control their own body, taking away students’ relief in terms of the student loans. The president forgave the loans. The supreme court took that money away.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“[Voters] see these justices, they see all the ethical conflicts, and they’re saying, ‘Enough with it. Let’s have a clean slate and term limits.’“I’ve said everything should be on the table, but … it’s not an easy thing to do. Often people see that it is polarising or partisan. I guess term limits is an easier first step … and a judicial code of conduct of ethics.”The Senate judiciary chair, Dick Durbin, has promised a vote on ethics reform. Any measure would be highly unlikely to pass the Republican House.Khanna said: “Even Republicans in Congress, if we go out and have someone buy us lunch, the vast majority of us would have to disclose it and have all these ethics rules. I’m just flabbergasted that the supreme court doesn’t have any of those. The limits are so low for members of Congress, anybody who works in the federal government, and this is just a different set of rules.”Khanna did not support an attempt to force the chief justice to testify, via a subpoena, a move called for by another prominent House progressive, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.“I would support hearings,” he said. “I think that the chief justice should testify.“Look, I’ve met the chief justice. I met him a couple of years ago and he said he cared about the legitimacy of the court. The legitimacy of democracy. Well, if he cares about the legitimacy of democracy, he should come testify.” More

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      ‘Democracy is at risk’: inside the fight for supreme court reform

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      The supreme court has concluded another term that upended Americans’ lives.Last week, the court’s conservative supermajority ruled against race-conscious decisions in college admissions, overturning decades of precedent supporting affirmative action. A day later, the six conservative justices both struck down Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan and sided with a Colorado-based business owner who wanted to refuse service to same-sex couples.As the conservative justices’ decisions attracted criticism, their behavior away from the bench also sparked alarm. Reports emerged that conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito had accepted previously undisclosed gifts and trips from wealthy stakeholders whose business interests at times clashed with cases before the supreme court.The outcry unleashed over the justices’ ethics scandals, combined with the widespread disapproval of their opinions, has intensified calls to reform the supreme court. And although court reform efforts have previously been denounced as radical overreach, more Americans are warming to the idea in the face of a six-three conservative supermajority issuing decisions viewed as largely out of step with the country’s principles and priorities.“Democracy is at risk,” Congressman Hank Johnson, a Democrat in Georgia, said. “We must save this supreme court from itself, and that’s why it’s so important that we do court reform now.”Confidence in supreme court plummetsThe combination of contentious rulings and dubious ethical behavior has culminated in plummeting ratings in that other all-powerful court: the court of public opinion.Gallup has yet to release its latest poll in the wake of the slew of recent ethics scandals and aggressive decisions released in the final days of the 2022-23 term. But the historic trend of its surveys gives a clear picture. In 2001, under Chief Justice William Rehnquist, 62% of Americans approved of the way the supreme court handled its job, according to Gallup; by last September that had fallen to just 40%.Such a profound dip in popularity has ushered in a proportionate rise in demands for reform, ranging from calls for ethical guardrails for the justices to proposals for a radical makeover of the court’s structure and size. One Economist/YouGov poll taken in April found that 69% of Americans support an ethics code for supreme court justices. Another AP-NORC poll taken last year showed 67% of Americans back term limits for the justices, and a Marquette Law school survey released last September found that 51% of Americans agree with calls to expand the court.Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a non-partisan group which advocates for reform, said that a growing perception that the conservative justices are acting more as politicians than as judges was driving the calls for change.“I’ve been beating this drum for almost 10 years, and it is definitely getting louder. The series of recent events have left no doubt today that the supreme court is a political body, and it is only rational to want the justices to have to follow the same ethical rules that politicians follow.”As things currently stand, the nine supreme court justices are the only judges in the country – including both state and federal – who are not bound by any formal ethics code. The justices remain essentially unbeholden to any higher power.In April, the current chief justice, John Roberts, refused to appear before the Senate judiciary committee to discuss the ProPublica revelations about Thomas’s luxury holidays courtesy of the billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow. Roberts insisted that he and his fellow justices “consult a wide variety of authorities to address specific ethical issues” – without addressing the main problem with that argument: that such consultations are entirely voluntary and self-policing.Ethics groups like Fix the Court have despaired of Roberts taking a lead on ethics reform, and are now pleading with Congress to force the issue. Roth said the current malaise was so profound it had gone beyond merely extending the existing code of ethics that, since 1973, has applied to all other federal judges.Now, he said, it had to be enforceable, with “a mechanism for reprimand when there are violations”. “There needs to be a more strict rubric telling justices what they can and cannot do when it comes to flying around on billionaires’ planes or staying in their luxury resorts,” he added.Requiring the justices to abide by clear ethical boundaries might clean up some of the grubbier optics but it would not get to the substantive problem that progressive critics have levelled at the court – its ultra-conservative rulings. “Right now we have nine kings, who can set policy for eternity – their rulings cannot be undone in constitutional cases by the president or Congress,” said Caroline Fredrickson, a law professor at Georgetown University.Like Roth, Fredrickson has observed a sea-change in attitudes towards reforming the nation’s most powerful court. “Five years ago, this was a discussion more for academics than for activists. I don’t think that’s true any more – we’ve had a series of decisions that have finally brought the American public to recognize that the court is out of control.”Fredrickson was one of a bipartisan group of 36 legal and other scholars who Joe Biden invited in April 2021 to form a presidential commission on supreme court reform. One of the key proposals that the commissioners analysed was the idea of expanding the court from its current nine members in order to rebalance the court in tune with the will of most Americans.The commission’s final report points out that Congress has made changes to the size of the court since as early as 1801. The current nine has been set since 1869, but there is no reason that Congress could not change that number through simple statute.Commissioners were divided on the subject of expansion. Some argued that adding seats was essential to make the court relevant again and prevent the erosion of democracy, while others feared it would undermine the supreme court’s independence and legitimacy.Fredrickson comes firmly down on the side of expansion. “The only realistic option for protecting our democracy is to expand the number of justices, which would allow the appointment of justices with a firmer grasp of the need to be properly deferential to the elected branches,” she said.Aligned to the question of how many justices sit on the court is the issue of their longevity in the position. The US constitution says that federal judges should hold their office “during good behavior” – a phrase that has been interpreted as meaning for their lifetimes.A new report from the Brennan Center spells out how life tenure has led to increasingly long terms, and with it an increasingly undemocratic court. For the first 180 years of US history, the average service for supreme court justices was 15 years; today that has risen to 26 years and the current crop could serve on average 35 years.With long terms has come a democratically skewed judicial panel. Since the presidency of George HW Bush, Republicans have won four out of nine presidential elections – only two prevailing in the popular vote – yet they have appointed six out of today’s nine justices.The Brennan Center recommends a new interpretation of “during good behavior”. Justices continue to serve for life, but after 18 years of actively judging cases they step back into a more supporting role – a “senior” status that has been applied to lower court judges for more than 100 years.Under Brennan’s formula, that would be coupled with regular appointments to the bench made every two years, so that each president would have two appointments per four-year term. That could instantly put an end to the ugly hyper-partisan infighting and obstructionism that saw the Republican Senate block Merrick Garland’s appointment by Barack Obama in 2016.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut many progressive activists argue term limits alone will not provide an immediate remedy to their concerns. They accuse Republicans of having “stolen” the court by refusing to consider Garland’s nomination and then fast-tracking the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett days before Biden won the 2020 election. One academic study concluded that, barring congressional intervention, the supreme court may not see a liberal majority until 2065.“Even if you passed a term limits bill with a code of ethics, it wouldn’t do much to put a dent into what is right now a Republican supermajority,” said Brian Fallon, executive director of the progressive group Demand Justice. “If you want to restore balance to the court, if you believe that the Republicans arrived at this six-three supermajority through illicit means, then court expansion becomes necessary to achieve balance anytime soon.”Political momentum builds for court reformAs Americans continue to reel from the court’s decision last year to overturn Roe v Wade, terminating federal protections for abortion access, the reproductive rights groups NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood have both come out in favor of court expansion.“We’ve known for a long time that reproductive rights and freedom are completely intertwined with the supreme court,” Naral’s president, Mini Timmaraju, nsaid. “We’ve become really clear-eyed that it’s not responsible for us to be an organization that promotes and advocates for advancement of reproductive freedom without engaging seriously in discussions around the court.”Naral was one of dozens of groups to sign on to the “Just Majority” project, which held events across the country this spring to advocate for court reform. The campaign included a diverse array of leaders from across the progressive movement, including racial justice organizations such as Color of Change and gun safety groups like Newtown Action Alliance.“We have to start coming to terms with just how much of a democracy we still don’t have,” said Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change. “We have an unelected, unaccountable, corrupt body of people that stand in the way of democracy, stand in the way of justice and stand in the way of the will of the people.”To advance their court reform efforts, groups like Demand Justice followed the playbook of activists who lobbied against the Senate filibuster. By convincing more progressive groups to sign on to the campaign, court reform advocates have been able to persuade more Democratic lawmakers as well.Russ Feingold, a former Democratic senator of Wisconsin who served on the judiciary committee, counts himself among the converted. Feingold, now the president of the American Constitution Society, said he was uncomfortable with the idea of term limits or court expansion as recently as a couple of years ago.He said: “People who have been much more cautious about this in the past have come to the conclusion that, if you simply allow this kind of a situation to continue for the next 20 years or so, with justices who are very ideological, very political and also in some cases unethical, then you are allowing a whole generation or more to be locked away from having a legitimate impact on the law.”Some of Feingold’s former congressional colleagues have adopted the same mindset. In the House, Johnson has introduced a suite of bills aimed at overhauling the court through adopting a robust code of ethics, establishing term limits and adding four justices to the bench. One of Johnson’s progressive colleagues, congressman Ro Khanna of California, reintroduced his own term limit proposal last week in response to the dismantling of Biden’s student debt relief program.Asked about the possibility of expanding the court, Khanna told the Guardian: “I think everything has to be on the table, but I think the supreme court term limits is the most likely and where we should focus our energy.”But Johnson, like Fallon, takes an “all of the above” approach to reforming the court. “We need to do both,” Johnson said. “We need to unpack this court, and we need to expand this court because that will help us right now.”Even as more Democratic lawmakers have endorsed court reform, the leader of their party has remained notably quiet. During the 2020 campaign, Biden shied away from backing court expansion, and progressive activists viewed his formation of the commission to study reform proposals as a “punt”.Still, even a longtime institutionalist like Biden has had his faith in the court tested. After the conservative majority issued its decision ending affirmative action, Biden described the current court as “not normal”. He later told MSNBC that this court has “done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court in recent history”.Fallon believes the president will be “the last domino to fall” in backing court reform. But Fallon predicted Biden’s endorsement of court reform will become “inevitable” in response to growing public outrage“You can’t hide your head in the sand,” Feingold said. “When the court’s been stolen, when it’s been politicized, when it has the worst ethics reputation it’s had in memory, then unusual measures have to be taken – not to recapture the court for the other side of the political agenda, but to restore the legitimacy of the court.” More