Congress “absolutely” can force Ethics Reform on the U.S. Supreme Court, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said. “It is not going to be easy. The work that we’re doing on ethics in the court ought to be easy. And yet it’s not. It’s partisan also. So I think that the first step is going to be for the judicial conference, the other judges, to put some constraints around the supreme court’s behavior and treat the supreme court the way all other federal judges are treated.”
Supreme Court justices are nominally subject to Federal Ethics Laws, but in practice govern themselves.
Observers have said Judge Thomas clearly broke Ethics Laws. Democrats have called for Thomas to Resign or be Impeached, the former unlikely, the latter a Political Non-Starter.
Whitehouse said: “It means it’s constitutional because the laws that we’re talking about right now are actually laws passed by Congress. The ethics reporting law that is at the heart of the Clarence Thomas ethics reporting scandal is a law passed by Congress.”
Whitehouse continued: “When Justice Thomas failed to recuse himself from the January 6 investigation that turned up his wife’s communications [with Trump officials], he made the case that that was OK because he had no idea that she was involved in insurrection activities.
“That is a question of fact. That’s something that could have, and should have, been determined by a neutral examination. And so the problem with the supreme court is that they’re in a fact-free zone as well as an ethics-free zone.”
Whitehouse has campaigned against so-called “Dark Money” in U.S. Politics. Asked if he trusted the Federal Court system to be Fair and Impartial, he said: “Usually, I think the trial courts are very strong. I think … we’ve seen honest courtrooms make amazing differences with Dominion v Fox, with the parents at Sandy Hook against the creep who was pretending that their children’s murder wasn’t real, and now with the judgment against Donald Trump.”
“So honest courtrooms are really important to cut through to the truth. When you get to the supreme court, if it’s an interest in which the big rightwing billionaires are concerned, [it’s] very hard to count on getting a fair shot.”
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
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