Another day, another ethical crisis at the Supreme Court.
When I first read about the upside-down American flag flying over Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s Virginia home in early 2021, I thought, “Wow, that's silly.”
When I later read about the “Appeal to Heaven” pine flag flying at Alito’s beach house in New Jersey, I thought, “Wow, how many election-denying flags are too many for one guy to own and display?” Supreme Court judge?”
Shouldn't the answer be obvious?
A Supreme Court justice should never behave in a manner that could be construed as politically partisan. Alito has claimed that the inverted flag, a distress signal adopted by those denying Donald Trump's 2020 election defeat, was raised by his wife during a political dispute with her neighbors. No matter how vulgar it may seem, it doesn't matter. It is also his house.
“One Supreme Court justice appears to have embraced election denialism,” Alicia Bannon of New York University's Brennan Center for Justice told Reuters. “That's a five-alarm fire.”
One sitting federal judge even weighed in: “Flying those flags was the equivalent of slapping a 'Stop the Steal' bumper sticker on your car,” Massachusetts-based U.S. District Judge Michael Ponsor wrote in a New York essay. York Times rebuking Alito. “You just don't do it.”
You just don't do it.
The U.S. Supreme Court didn't even have an official code of ethics until late last year, unlike the rest of the federal judiciary. Imagine: lifetime mandate and no codified ethical rules.
The idea that judges can be expected to police themselves for conflicts of interest and ethical failures is absurd. No one can judge himself fairly.
And now all the court has is a set of toothless guidelines with no enforcement mechanism.
For those whose reflection is on what happens every time the MAGA world is criticized, it is important to recognize that it was also wrong for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to criticize then-presidential candidate Trump in 2016.
“I can't imagine what this place would be like – I can't imagine what the country would be like – with Donald Trump as our president,” RBG told the New York Times during an interview in her office four months before the election. “For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it might be; “I don’t even want to contemplate that.”
(And it was inappropriate for Justice Sonia Sotomayor to routinely ask her staff to encourage libraries, universities and schools to buy her books before her lectures. She should also have recused herself from a case involving her publisher.)
But when Ginsburg went on a public rampage against Trump, almost no one thought the reality TV billionaire was going to beat Hillary Clinton. Even Triumph I didn't think I would win. Still, it was an inappropriate and reckless statement by a Supreme Court justice who should have known better.
And, days later, he confessed: “Upon reflection, my recent comments in response to questions from the press were reckless and I regret having made them,” he said in a written statement released by the court. “Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office. In the future I will be more cautious.”
Ginsburg's self-flagellation was not good enough for the Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial board, which demanded that she resign or at least recuse herself from cases involving the presidential race and related matters. (She does not.)
But the Journal has made no such demand of Alito. Instead, right-wing media is inundated with articles about how the “left” is smearing the poor.
This is the same defense put forward by supporters of Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wealthy backers have lavished him and his wife, Ginni, with a bonanza of hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel, private school tuition for a relative, an expensive house rolling and who knows what other flattery. The Journal called ProPublica's explosive investigation into Thomas a “false assault on ethics.”
Unlike Ginsburg, Alito did not apologize for flying the flags or, come to think of it, for not disclosing that he accepted a 2008 trip to a luxurious fishing lodge in Alaska from Republican donors, one of whom had an interest in cases before the government. court.
Instead, like his much-criticized colleague Thomas, he has responded petulantly.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard Durbin of Illinois and member Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island last week asked Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to order Alito to refrain from any case related to the 2020 presidential election and the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, which of course includes the question of whether former President Trump has immunity from prosecution.
“The Court's Code of Conduct has failed to remedy or prevent any of these ethical violations, largely because it contains no enforcement mechanism,” they wrote.
Last year, the committee introduced a bill, the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal and Transparency Act, that has not yet been approved by the full Senate and may never come to a vote given that body's antiquated rules. . The bill would require judges to adopt a strict code of ethics and create a process to investigate and address alleged violations.
The court, whose credibility is near an all-time low, should have taken this step without prompting.
I laughed out loud when I read in the Journal that “the people who undermine trust in the Supreme Court are those who act as if Justice Alito was sending secret signals from the flagpole at his beach house.”
You've got to be kidding me, guys. There is nothing secret in it.
