Lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee traded accusations on Tuesday as they debated whether to impose new ethical requirements on the U.S. Supreme Court.
The debate centered around whether the court should be required to provide more detailed financial disclosures or implement stricter guidelines for when a justice must recuse themselves from hearing a case.
The Senate hearing comes as Democratic lawmakers have called for Justice Clarence Thomas to be investigated—or even impeached—following a report detailing gifts and paid vacations he accepted over the years from a wealthy personal friend, Harlan Crow. It’s not clear that Crow was directly connected to any cases that came before the court, and
Thomas has denied any wrongdoing.“We are here today because the Supreme Court is playing out of bounds of the ethics rules for federal judges,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)
said at the start of the hearing on Tuesday.
Whitehouse, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s panel on federal courts, raised accusations that the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia went on numerous hunting trips. While Scalia listed these trips as occasions encompassing “personal hospitality,” Whitehouse claimed that “gun industry advocates, fossil fuel folks, and Republican political figures often tagged along.”
Whitehouse then noted Justice Thomas’s interactions with Harlan Crow, and accused Thomas of failing to recuse himself from election-related cases while his wife, Virginia Thomas, supported Republican challenges to the 2020 election results—behavior which Whitehouse termed “insurrection activities.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas)
pushed back against the Democrats on the committee on Tuesday, alleging that they have been working with their allies in the news media in a broad campaign to “delegitimize the Supreme Court of the United States because they are angry that there are a majority of constitutionalists on the court” and, in a more specific campaign, to attack Justice Thomas “because he is a conservative African American.”
Cruz also noted instances of liberal justices on the Supreme Court taking gifts and paid vacations without disclosing them. As one example, Cruz stated that the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took 157 vacation trips during her time on the Supreme Court, including 28 international trips. Cruz said that retired liberal Justice Stephen Breyer took 233 trips, including repeated trips paid for by the billionaire Pritzker family, which has
deep ties to the Democratic Party.
“The New York Times has not had an expose about Stephen Breyer,” Cruz told
NTD News after the hearing on Tuesday. “The New York Times has not had an expose about Sonia Sotomayor. The New York Times has not had an expose over Ruth Bader Ginsburg—because they agree with them. This is a political descent into the gutter.”
Responding to Republican criticisms that Tuesday’s hearing was about delegitimizing the Supreme Court over its perceived conservative leaning in recent rulings, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) said the real issue is about whether or not the court should adopt a code of ethics.
“Shouldn’t the Supreme Court have a code of ethics? That’s it, that’s the issue,” Hirono told
NTD News on Tuesday. “And regardless of what motives or anything else that the Republicans keep throwing up, the issue remains—shouldn’t there be transparency regarding ethics?”
Hawley Says SCOTUS Funding At Stake
During Tuesday’s hearing, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) accused Democrats of threatening to withhold security for Supreme Court justices if they did not accept Democrats’ demands for revised ethics rules.
In a letter (
pdf) sent in early April, 15 Democratic senators—including Whitehouse, Hirono, and other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee—suggested using Congress’ appropriations power as a means of compelling the Supreme Court to adopt stricter ethics rules.
“In the absence of [the Supreme Court’s willingness to accept new ethics rules], Congress has broad authority to compel the Supreme Court to institute these reforms, which would join other requirements already legislatively mandated,” the April 2 letter reads. “And Congress’s appropriations power is one tool for achieving these changes.”
The Democrats’ letter states that federal courts have advised Congress that it can withhold funds during disputes with a “recalcitrant executive branch” that won’t comply with Congressional demands.
“Nothing in the Constitution mandates that the judiciary be treated any differently when Congress is faced with judicial recalcitrance,” the letter from the 15 Democrats states.
Hawley noted that the 15 Democratic senators issued this statement at a time when the Supreme Court has faced violent threats, including an alleged assassination attempt. In June of last year, a California man was arrested near Justice Kavanaugh’s home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, after he
notified police that he intended to harm or kill Kavanaugh. The man, 26-year-old Nicholas John Roske, was arrested shortly thereafter. Police found a pistol, ammunition, a speed loader, a chest rig, a belly band holster, a black face mask, burglary tools, and other items in his possession at the time of his arrest.
Hawley rebuked Democrats for suggesting denying funding to the Supreme Court over their demands for new ethics rules.
“11 Democrats, including most members of this committee, have signed a letter ... calling for the Justices’s security appropriations—the money to keep them safe, the security around their houses, the security of the Supreme Court—to have that withdrawn unless they do what the Democrats want,” Hawley told
NTD News. “If that isn’t an assault on the independence of the judiciary, I don’t know what is.”
