Supreme Court: A toothless new ethics code
The Supreme Court has shown yet again that it “considers itself answerable to no one,” said Jesse Wegman in The New York Times. The court adopted its first-ever ethics code last week in an effort to quiet the “widespread outrage” that followed reports of “repeated and egregious ethical violations” by certain justices, most notably Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. But the document drawn up by the court lacks any enforcement mechanism, and its 15 pages are peppered with weak verbs like “should” and “endeavor to.” That’s a reliable way, as any college student will tell you, “to sound serious without actually doing the work.” Justices, the code advises, “should not allow” family, social, political, or financial relationships “to influence official conduct or judgment.” Sounds good. But there’s nothing in that sentence that would have stopped Alito from taking an undisclosed ride on the private jet of a billionaire GOP donor with business before the court, or Thomas from having a conservative pal forgive a $267,230 loan for a luxury RV.
It was inevitable that liberal critics would attack the court for doing the right thing, said Dan McLaughlin in National Review. Opponents of the conservative majority have long sought to “paint the conservative justices (and only them) as unethical” and not subject to any rules. That smear “was always nonsense.” The new code simply restates and refines existing federal and judicial rules that clearly set out when justices should recuse themselves from cases and what their exact financial and gift disclosure obligations are. “It’s significant that all nine justices signed the document,” said David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey in The Wall Street Journal. That signals unanimous opposition to threats by Senate Democrats to impose a code of conduct on the court—a power the Constitution did not vest in Congress.
To understand why this code is “a joke,” look at its rules on conflict-of-interest recusals, said Ian Millhiser in Vox. Those run about three pages long, but an attached commentary states that “individual Justices, rather than the Court, decide recusal issues.” In other words, the rules set out in the code are worthless, because “each individual justice has the final word on whether they must step aside from a case.” This code was devised only to protect the status quo and to legitimize existing corruption, while preempting actual reform. “It is literally worse than nothing.”