US lawmakers hold hearing on Supreme Court ethics concerns

Lawmakers in the United States have taken aim at the ethics of the nation’s highest court, saying Congress must step in to increase oversight in the wake of recent reports that showed some judges failed to report donations and donations. selling real estate that could pose potential conflicts of interest.

US Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, a Democrat, said he called the hearing Tuesday because for years the Supreme Court “refused” to “step in and fix this on its own.”

“It is critical to our democracy that the American people trust that judges cannot be bought or influenced, and that they serve the public interest, not their own personal interest,” he said at the start of the hearing.

Meanwhile, critics accused Durbin of overstepping his bounds, with some suggesting the hearing was prompted by the court’s right-wing movement in recent years. The court is currently dominated by conservatives, six to three.

“We can talk about ethics and that’s great, but we’re also going to talk about today … a concentrated effort from the left to delegitimize this court and pick examples to make a point,” said Lindsey Graham, the ranking Republican. on the committee.

Al Jazeera’s Heidi Zhou-Castro, reporting from Washington, D.C., said the hearing was initiated in response to reports that Judge Clarence Thomas failed to mention luxury travel offered by a Republican political donor, billionaire real estate mogul Harlan Crow .

The justice would also not have reported a real estate purchase that Crow had made from him. Thomas has characterized his lack of disclosure as the result of a simple misunderstanding.

Also at issue is a report by the publication Politico that found conservative judge Neil Gorsuch failed to disclose that a property he partially owned in Colorado had been sold to the president of a major law firm that regularly pleads cases in court.

Zhou-Castro said that, unlike other federal judges, “the U.S. Supreme Court is not bound by any code of ethics.”

“The U.S. Constitution establishes the Supreme Court as an equal branch of government, which means Congress cannot tell it what essentially it should do. And there’s not much Congress can do about that,” she said. “But that certainly doesn’t stop them from trying.”

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, in a letter declining an invitation to testify before the commission, said the Supreme Court voluntarily passed a resolution in 1991 to “follow the substance” of a code of conduct that had been drafted by the Judicial Conference of the United States. States, the policy body for the wider federal judiciary.

Since then, he added, the judges have followed disclosure requirements for gifts and outside income. His letter was signed by all nine judges.

Still, Durbin said in his opening statement that the court’s current policy of self-supervision falls short.

“Last month we learned about a justice that has for years accepted lavish travel and real estate purchases worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from a billionaire with interest in court,” Durbin said. “That justice has not made these gifts public and has not suffered any apparent consequences under the court’s ethical principles.”

“We will not tolerate this from a municipal councilor or an alderman. It doesn’t meet the ethical standards we expect from a public servant in America, and yet the Supreme Court doesn’t even recognize it as a problem,” he said.

Jeremy Fogel, a retired federal judge, testified before the committee and said that in a period of hyperpartisan division, it was important for the Supreme Court to take further steps to restore public confidence. Trust in the Supreme Court has historically been higher than in other US institutions, he stressed.

A September 2022 Gallup poll showed a drop in confidence in the Supreme Court, with only 47 percent of Americans saying they had “a lot” or “fair” confidence in the institution. The rate was the lowest since 1972, representing a 20 percentage point drop from just two years earlier.

“Many Americans already think that the judges decide cases based on their political affiliations and alliances rather than the law,” Fogel said. “Lack of clarity about the ethical obligations of the judges only feeds that perception.”

Meanwhile, Michael Mukasey, who served as attorney general under former President George W. Bush, said the pre-existing guidelines were sufficient for the Supreme Court. He added that attempts by Congress to intervene would cross constitutional boundaries.

“It is actually the structure of our government that the executive, legislative and judiciary remain separate. It is the Supreme Court, not Congress, that has the constitutional prerogative to decide whether to adopt the formal code of conduct governing individual judges,” he said.

In addition, Mukasey suggested that the ethical concerns were rooted in political vendettas against the conservative court.

“If the public wrongly perceives that the integrity of the court has been compromised, the blame lies with those who continue to criticize the court and its judges unfairly,” he said.

“It is impossible to escape the conclusion that the public is being asked to hallucinate wrongdoing in order to undermine the authority of judges who make verdicts with which critics disagree and thus undermine the authority of the verdicts themselves. “