The U.S. Supreme Court pictured on September 28, 2020. (Al Drago/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — U.S. House Democrats echoed Senate colleagues Tuesday in calling for U.S. Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to recuse themselves from Jan. 6 cases, and for congressional Republicans to support passing an enforceable ethics code for the entire bench.
Reps. Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and vice ranking member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez brought together fellow progressive Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse with experts and advocates for a roundtable discussion on the “ethics crisis” facing the nation’s highest court.
Recent?revelations?of flags sympathetic to the “Stop the Steal” movement flown outside Alito’s home have reignited simmering concerns over justices’ conflicts of interest as they decide politically divisive issues. This year, justices are set to rule on access to the abortion pill and whether former President Donald Trump enjoys immunity from criminal charges alleging 2020 election interference, among other cases.
Raskin and Ocasio-Cortez delivered searing remarks, admonishing decades of court actions beginning with the 5-4 decision in 2000’s?Bush v. Gore?that ultimately decided the presidential victory for George W. Bush. The lawmakers continued on to recent events that Ocasio-Cortez characterized as “corruption that is almost comical.”
“The Supreme Court as it stands today is delegitimizing itself through his conduct,” the New York Democrat continued in her opening statement. “Americans are losing fundamental rights in the process — reproductive health care, civil liberties, voting rights, the right to organize clean air and water because the court has been captured and corrupted by money and extremism.”
Raskin, of Maryland, said the “highest court in the land today has the lowest ethical standards.”
In his opening statement, Raskin characterized the court as “the judicial arm of the Republican Party,” drawing a throughline from Bush’s appointments to the bench of Chief Justice John Roberts and Alito to Trump’s appointments of conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
“Now this right-wing corporate court, carefully designed to destroy Roe v. Wade and marry right-wing religion to untrammeled corporate power, has been demolishing women’s abortion rights and contraceptive rights, civil rights law, voting rights law, civil liberties, environmental law, workers’ rights and consumer rights, enshrining government power over people and corporate power over government,” Raskin said.
Raskin and Ocasio-Cortez’s roundtable came less than a week after progressive House Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Hank Johnson of Georgia?rallied?with activists outside the Supreme Court urging an ethics overhaul.
That same day, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky?posted?to X: “As the Supreme Court term ends, the Left is once again bullying Justices who refuse to take orders from liberal Senators. The Court should take any action it deems appropriate to reprimand unethical conduct by members of its Bar. And Justices should continue to pay this harassment no mind.”
Whitehouse told Democratic members of the Oversight and Accountability Committee that Senate Democrats are shining a “heavy spotlight on the mischief.”
The Rhode Island Democrat has championed an ethics bill titled the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal and Transparency Act, which?advanced?out of committee along party lines in July 2023 but has not received a floor vote.
“We need to keep the pressure on until they join the rest of the government in having a real ethics code with real fact finding and some prospects for comparing the facts that are found to the rules,” Whitehouse said.
The bill was introduced during the fallout from a 2023 ProPublica investigation?revealing?that Justice Clarence Thomas received gifts from and traveled with a major Republican donor.
A recent?analysis?by watchdog group Fix The Court illustrated that over the last 20 years the value of gifts received and likely received by Thomas dwarfs that of his colleagues.
Whitehouse again pressed the court in May after the New York Times?published?that an upside-down U.S. flag hung outside Alito’s Alexandria, Virginia, home just days after former Trump’s supporters breached the Capitol. The Times later revealed another flag carried by Jan. 6 insurrectionists flew outside the justice’s New Jersey beach house.
Along with Sen. Dick Durbin, who chairs the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Whitehouse?requested?a meeting with Roberts to urge Alito to recuse himself from cases related to the Jan. 6 attack. Roberts declined, and Alito?responded?to the senators, declaring he would not recuse himself.
“Thank you Sen. Whitehouse for always flying the flag right side up,” Raskin said.
Kate Shaw, University of Pennsylvania law professor, told the lawmakers that the court is “conducting itself in ways that are fundamentally inconsistent with basic separation-of-powers principles that are a core feature of our democracy.”
“This is crystal clear right now, as it is every June, as the country waits with bated breath to learn whether and how the court will upend huge swaths of American law,” she continued.
“This year questions include whether and how the court could further erode the capacity of agencies to regulate in ways that protect our health and safety and well being,” and major firearms decisions, Shaw said.
The court will also decide whether laws on the books will “be used to hold accountable individuals charged with the attack on the Capitol, including the former president,” Shaw said. “And the court is asserting that it and essentially it alone will decide all of this for all of us.”
Over two dozen opinions are expected from the Supreme Court by the end of June.
Two decisions related to two Jan. 6 cases remain pending — one involving a former police officer who breached the Capitol and is?seeking?to have an obstruction charge dropped. The decision could affect hundreds of Jan. 6 defendant cases, and the 2020 election interference case against Trump, who faces the same obstruction charge.
The court is also?set to decide?whether Trump is immune from four federal criminal counts alleging he schemed to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and knowingly spread false information that whipped his supporters into rioting on Jan. 6.
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