WASHINGTON – Top Senate Democrats announced Monday that a key committee will vote on legislation to establish a code of conduct for the Supreme Court, toughen financial disclosure rules and strengthen recusal requirements for judges.
The Supreme Court Ethics, Challenge and Transparency Act (SCERT), led by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, DR.I., and Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill. , will receive a vote in committee on Thursday, July 20. they announced in a joint statement.
“Whether you agree or disagree with the most recent landmark Supreme Court decisions, we hope we can all agree on one thing: These nine justices have extraordinary powers under our Constitution,” Whitehouse and Durbin said. “The belief that they should not be held accountable or even reveal lavish gifts from wealthy benefactors is an affront to the nation they were chosen to serve. Holding these nine judges to the same standard as every other federal judge is not a radical or partisan notion.”
“Since the Court will not act, Congress will,” they said.
The bill would give the court 180 days to adopt and publish a code of conduct, allowing the public to submit ethics complaints that would be reviewed by a panel of randomly selected lower court judges. It would establish new rules for the disclosure of gifts and travel. And it would impose disqualification rules related to gifts, income and other potential conflicts.
The legislation is subject to a filibuster on the full Senate, which requires 60 votes to advance. It’s unclear if Democrats, who control 51 votes, will win any Republican support. Republican senators have largely dismissed recent ethics questions directed at justices, saying they trust the court to write its own internal rules.
in a opinion piece For the Washington Post Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., defended the court against what he called “growing attacks from the left” and rejected the new rules.
“Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are trying to tell an egalitarian branch of government how to run their internal operations, ostensibly to clean up their ‘ethics,’” he wrote.
The vote will come amid waning confidence in the Supreme Court, which is reshaping American law with a 6-3 majority of Republican appointees that makes it the most ideologically conservative court in nearly a century. Lawmakers have also raised questions about ethics and conflict of interest, citing recent reports of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito accepting gifts and luxury trips from self-interested billionaires before the court.
A NBC News poll last month found that only 31% of registered American voters have a positive view of the Supreme Court, while 40% have a negative view. In October 2018, by contrast, 50% had a positive opinion while 21% had a negative opinion.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, DN.Y., defended the proposal on the floor Monday.
“What we are seeing on the Supreme Court is sickening hypocrisy, as some justices feel free to accept lavish gifts and vacations from billionaire friends,” Schumer said. -millionaires from the mill. They are MAGA ideological extremists who fund far-right MAGA causes and then bring those cases before the very judges they sponsored. Congress has clear authority to oversee the federal judiciary, and that includes making sure the highest court in the land meets equally high ethical standards.”
In recent months, Durbin has tried to pressure Chief Justice John Roberts to go it alone and toughen ethics rules from within, to no avail.
After ProPublica first reported without disclosing gifts accepted by ThomasDurbin wrote Roberts in April inviting him to testify before the Judiciary Committee on “limited” matters involving “the ethical rules governing Supreme Court justices and possible reforms to those rules.” roberts refusedciting the rarity of such testimony and the separation of powers between branches of government.
Amid a trio of controversial 6-3 rulings to close out the term, Roberts called it “disturbing” to see a tendency among some of the liberal justices “to criticize decisions they disagree with because they go beyond paper of the judiciary”. ”
“We have used the traditional tools of judicial decision-making to do so,” he wrote in a decision nullify Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. “Reasonable minds may disagree with our analysis; in fact, at least three are. We don’t mistake this clearly sincere disagreement for belittling. It is important that the public is not fooled either. Any such misperception would be detrimental to this institution and our country.”
