Are New Ethics Rules Needed as Gorsuch, Roberts & Thomas Face Questions over Finances?

We Begin Today's Show looking at the growing corruption Scandal on the Supreme Court on Tuesday the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Supreme Court ethics reform following recent Revelations about conservative Justice Clarence Thomas Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts Senate Judiciary chair Dick Durbin had invited Roberts to testify but the Chief Justice declined the invitation Democratic lawmakers have intensified their push to pass a supreme court ethics bill after propublica revealed Clarence Thomas had failed to report frequent luxury trips paid for by the Republican billionaire Harlan Crowe for more than two decades Thomas frequently joined Crow aboard his private yacht Jet and at his private Estates Thomas also failed to disclose that he had sold property to Crow including a home where Thomas's mother now lives rent free meanwhile Politico has revealed Justice Neil Gorsuch sold 40 acres of property just days after his Senate confirmation to the head of one of the nation's largest law firms which has since had 22 cases before The Supreme Court and Business Insider reports the wife of Chief Justice John Roberts has been paid over 10 million dollars as a job recruiter for placing lawyers at elite law firms including some that have had cases before the court there are also questions about the finances of Clarence Thomas's wife the right-wing activist Ginny Thomas Senate Judiciary chair Dick Durbin opened Tuesday's hearing by talking about Justice Thomas last month we learned about a Justice who for years has accepted lavish trips and real estate purchases worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from a billionaire with interest before the court that Justice failed to disclose these gifts and has faced no apparent consequences under the Court's ethics principles that Justice claims that lengthy cruises aboard a luxury yard are personal hospitality and are exempt under current ethical standards from even being reported the fact that a Texas billionaire paid more than a hundred thousand dollars for Justice's mother's home also seems to be an acceptable example because the Justice insists that he lost money in the transaction how low can the court go joining us in Arlington Virginia is Ian milhiser senior correspondent at Vox author of the book the agenda how a republican Supreme Court is reshaping America Ian welcome back to democracy Now why don't we just go through one scandal after another and the fact that the Chief Justice who is also being looked at for his wife's 10 million dollars that she made of head hunting for law firms many of them that have argued before The Supreme Court go through each of them and the fact that chief justice Roberts refused to testify sure so you know the biggest Scandal here I mean the one that really should crystallize the mind is what's going on with Clarence Thomas you know this guy has accepted tens of thousands of dollars by now hundreds of thousands of dollars of gifts from a politically connected Republican donor for more than two decades we have known about this for a long time in the earliest reporting I found about Thomas accepting gifts from Harlan Crowe was a 2004 report in the LA Times about him accepting a 19 000 Bible so this is not acceptable no employee of the federal government that I'm aware of is allowed to accept these kinds of gifts if Thomas was in the house if he was in the Senate if he was in the the White House he was anywhere else in government this would not be allowed um he was a lower court judge this would not be allowed and frankly he should resign for this the other scandals I think show that the court is being very dumb by not having an Ethics code so if you look at what happened with Neil Gorsuch Gorsuch sold a plot of land he sold the plot of land to someone who is a lawyer that runs a law firm that practices in front of the Supreme Court if the court had an Ethics code there's a way to do that transaction in a way that's above board you'd want an outside regulator or someone to look at the transaction make sure it was at arm's length make sure it was fair market value make sure that the buyer didn't know who the seller was the seller didn't know who the buyer was you know there are ways that you could set up an Ethics code so that Justice can go about their business but because they don't have an Ethics code you don't know whether they're doing things in an above board way you don't know you know they have no way to defend themselves when they get caught doing something like this and suddenly you know the Roberts and Gorsuch incidents I think are much less serious than what happened with Clarence Thomas but every Scandal starts to look agreed like what you have with with Justice Thomas and explain also with Chief Justice himself and how obviously he's personally profiting because Jane Roberts is his wife but the significance of this 10 million dollars actually more than that yeah so Jane Roberts works as a legal recruiter she works as apparently a very high level legal recruiter who helps um firms that want to hire a lawyer find you know good lawyers you know probably very specialized lawyers that that they can hire and she's made a lot of money doing this you know more than 10 million dollars over the last several years again this is why the court needs an Ethics code I I mean you can imagine a situation where you know if you had a law firm that was hiring a mergers and Acquisitions partner law firms do this work all the time where you know there's one thing going on in one part of the firm that could create a conflict of interest relating to another part of the firm and so you wall that off if the Supreme Court had an Ethics code they could put in rules in place to make sure that the justices spouses can have their careers but they are walled off in ways that do not impact the justices themselves but the court doesn't have an ethics code so again first of all we have no way of knowing what's going on here second of all you know there don't there aren't any formal checks in place to make sure that Jane Roberts's work isn't influencing what John Roberts does and third you know because Roberts can't point to any kind of code that he has followed there is no way for him to defend himself when something like this arises and then back to um Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginny um how is it possible that he doesn't recuse himself on for example an Insurrection ruling when she's so been deeply implicated everything from text messages with Trump's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows pushing states to overturn their elections yeah I mean the thing with Clarence Thomas he just doesn't think the rules apply to him I mean that that's been true if you look at his rulings you you know he doesn't believe in following precedent he's perfectly fine with sweeping aside 80 years of law if he likes the way that it was done in 1918 better he doesn't think the rules applied him he doesn't think the ethics rules apply to him and and the court has said fairly consistently that it's it's up to each Justice to decide when they want to recuse um you know the court has said that because they say they don't want the other eight justices to remove other justices from cases and that could change change the outcomes but again the alternative is that you have Clarence Thomas ruling on all these cases where he or his family presents a fairly clear conflict of interest and nothing can be done about it because the only way to discipline a Justice is through impeachment and that requires 67 votes in the Senate that requires 16 Republican Senators to vote to remove Clarence Thomas from office and you know that's just not happening Republicans have rallied behind Thomas I want to go to Republican senator Ted Cruz of Texas defending Clarence Thomas's actions well if that's the standard going and traveling and being paid for by others then guess what just about every Supreme Court justice has done so and done so in much greater numbers Justice Thomas was appointed in 1991 in the time since then he's taken 109 reported trips five International trips Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed in 1993 two years later in the time she was on the court she took 157 trips including 28 International trips Mr Payne yes or no do you think Ruth Bader Ginsburg was corrupt no nor do I that clip ended with Ted Cruz questioning Kendrick Payne of the campaign Legal Center who testified at Tuesday's hearing talk about the significance of this and then I mean what kind of Ethics code you think should be put in place for the Supreme Court aren't federal judges now extremely angry around the country they have much stricter rules yeah well to respond directly to Ted Cruz the standard is not that you can't get reimbursed when you travel somewhere you know if a university wants to bring Justice Ginsburg or Justice Thomas for that matter to give a talk at that University they're allowed to pay for the justices flight and hotel room that's you know that's just a reimbursement so the Justice isn't left to pay for a trip when they're doing a favor for another institution that's fine what happened with Clarence Thomas isn't that he is going to a university giving a speech and getting his plane ticket paid for what happened with Clarence Thomas is that he went on a lavish vacation to Indonesia where he was supplied on the private plane of a billionaire you know of a very politically connected billionaire and then he took his vacation on the billionaires super yacht and you know if Ted Cruz can't tell the difference between being reimbursed for a work trip and having a lavish vacation paid for by this billionaire I I mean I I don't even know how we can have a conversation with someone who who who who doesn't understand the distinction between those two things and finally as I mentioned federal judges what kind of restrictions they have to abide by I also wanted to ask you uh speaking of the appointment of Judges about the growing cause for Senator Dianne Feinstein the chair of the Judiciary Committee to resign representative Alexandria ocasio-cortez recently said quote her refusal to either retire or show up is causing great harm to the Judiciary precisely where Reproductive Rights are getting stripped that failure means now in this precious window Dems can only pass GOP approved nominees talk about what's going on I mean we're not just talking about shingles here right yeah I mean Dianne Feinstein is probably in the final years here probably even the final years possibly possibly in the final weeks or months of her life she is ill and her illness seems to prevent her from doing her job and the concern is that first of all because she's on the Judiciary Committee her vote is needed to vote nominees out of the Judiciary Committee there is a process I believe to discharge a nominee who does not get a Judiciary Committee vote but it's very time consuming it also means that on the floor you know with that 51st Senator there Democrats need either Kirsten Cinema or Joe manchin to vote for something if they want to pass a bill if they want to confirm a nominee without Dianne Feinstein they need both Cinema and Mansion so they have they have to appease these two rather conservative members of this caucus who have idiosyncratic views you know Cinema tends to disagree with the Democratic caucus in different ways than mansion and so it's not always easy to Wrangle both of them um so it's you know it's a serious problem that there's this seat that is essentially vacant right now it's the California you see it's the most populous state in the uh in the union and it only has half as many senators as it should right now you know I mean I think that the calls for Dianne Feinstein to resign are well founded at this point you know she's had a tremendous career but the most important thing isn't that Dianne Feinstein gets to die knowing that she died a senator the most important thing is that the people of California have representation um finally what rules should be put in place in for the Supreme Court so the rules would have to be really some of the rules would have to be really copy I mean some of them would be very simple I think a simple rule you know you do something like what the House of Representatives does which says that if you accept a gift of more than 250 dollars first of all it would need to come from a personal friend or something like that and second of all some sort of body needs to review it to make sure that you the gift isn't in some way corrupting and then you're gonna have to have you know where it gets complex is you have to have serious conversations about okay what if the justice has a spouse with their own career how do we make sure that the that the justices work is Walled off from their spouse so that one doesn't influence the other you have to ask questions like okay if there's something like this land transaction with Neil Gorsuch how do you make sure that an outside body reviews it to make sure that the transaction is at arm's length that the transactions at fair market value and that the Justice was in some way enriched by the whatever the transaction was so you know it's going to have multiple pieces to it but again the biggest crisis right now is that you have a Justice accepting all of these lavish gifts from a billionaire and whatever the rules say that can't possibly be allowed well I want to thank you Ian millheiser for joining us senior correspondent at box author of the book the agenda how a republican Supreme Court is reshaping America and a correction it's not Dianne Feinstein who's chair of the Judiciary Committee it is Dick Durbin

Channel: Democracy Now!

Views: 183,652

Keywords: Democracy Now, Amy Goodman, News, Politics, democracynow, Independent Media, Breaking News, World News

Id: nwkDiYpvddY

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2023