US Supreme Court needs more scrutiny, not less
postandcourier.com
postandcourier.com
Never mind the fact that all the complaints that are made today against the current Court could be made against past justices. The call for scrutiny seems to be about neutering one branch of government and less about any actual problem. Because if people and Congress really cared about corruption they would look to themselves first. Where are the calls for the scrutiny of all the Congressional members that just happened to magically sell off vast amounts of stocks right before the legislation was announced for the covid lockdowns that crashed the market. They didn't want any scrutiny then.
What I never see in any of these articles about justices getting favors or gifts or this and that is any link that influenced the outcome of a case. You'd think that would be readily apparent because the opinions and views of these justices are known they've held them for decades. The rulings they make are very consistent to the point that scholars can predict the outcomes of nearly every case. So if them having friendships with powerful people and receiving gifts were influencing the outcomes of cases we would see inconsistent rulings happening. We don't see that at all.
You can disagree with the ruling to strike down roe v Wade you can disagree with the bruin ruling. You can disagree with the ruling striking down the Tillman act but what you can't do is say that these rulings were inconsistent with the views and the history of the justices who made the rulings.
Without pointing out inconsistencies in the rulings of the justices everything in this article is absolute garbage and useless. It's just someone whining that they didn't like the rulings not that scrutiny or ethics would have changed the ruling. Because the easiest thing to do is to shout down someone you can make no argument against. Because if there's corruption if there's an ethics violations that are influencing rulings that should be easy to point out but where is the evidence?
I don't know what you're talking about. Popular support for limiting congressional stock trading is overwhelming[1]; there was a bipartisan bill announced just last month aimed at capping it[2].
Edit: It's worth noting that a variant of this bill has been introduced many times over the years. It's typically the Democrats who introduce it; only recently has it (apparently) received bipartisan attention.
[1]: https://pro-assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2022/10/251...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/20/1188869588/sen-gillibrand-dis...
You don't need to show evidence of quid pro quo corruption for judicial ethics violations to have occurred.
I'd point you to the ABA Model Code of Judicial Conduct: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibili...
"A judge shall uphold and promote the independence, integrity, and impartiality of the judiciary, and shall avoid impropriety *and the appearance of impropriety.*"
further, rule 3.13(A) states: "A judge shall not accept any gifts, loans, bequests, benefits, or other things of value, if acceptance is prohibited by law *or would appear to a reasonable person* to undermine the judge’s independence, integrity, or impartiality."
How about rule 2.11(A)(3), which states a judge must disqualify themselves from a proceeding where "The judge knows that he or she, individually or as a fiduciary, or the judge’s spouse, domestic partner, parent, or child, or any other member of the judge’s family residing in the judge’s household, has an economic interest in the subject matter in controversy or in a party to the proceeding."
Also, you're pointing out that the rulings are consistent with the views of the judges. This is missing the point because what if you have set A of judges with views X and set B of judges with views Y afterwards and they overturn or gut A's rulings? It's an admission of partisanship and outcome bias, which the supreme Court is not supposed to have. The problem isnt that an individual judge is inconsistent, it's that different sets of judges are inconsistent. It be like if when a company changes it's board they go from car company, to gamedev, to crypto, to defense, etc. How would that be a desirable result?
Ethical guidelines are established not just to prevent bribery and corruption, but also to prevent the appearance of bribery and corruption. Public faith in institutions, especially ones as powerful and far-reaching as SCOTUS, is important and shouldn't be brushed aside.
As to the rest of your point - it's hard to disprove a negative. There have been justices that have 'evolved' or grown throughout their tenure - Roberts is a current example. The kind of social leverage that providing round trip flights on your private jet to view the unveiling of a portrait of yourself[1] can absolutely be applied to ensure adherence to 'predicted' outcomes of opinions. Kavanaugh has been the swing vote on several recent decisions, and the early leaking of the Dobbs draft opinion strongly implies the application of this kind of social pressure to a Justice like Kavanaugh.
You may think this kind of herd-mentality extreme when it comes to such a vaunted position but the absolute requirement that conservative scotus nominees belong to the Federalist Society is just another example of this sad reality.
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-other-bil...
A left-wing radical attempted to assassinate Kavenaugh because of that leaked decision. It seems far more likely that the leak was a form of stochastic terrorism designed to scare the court into upholding the status quo.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett_Kavanaugh_assassinatio...
A strong claim requiring strong evidence. Where's the evidence that any past justice took 38 trips worth millions of dollars from multiple billionaires with business before the court, and then tried to cover them up?
> It's just someone whining that they didn't like the rulings
Attributing motive, and falsely. It's not about the rulings. It's about the impropriety of accepting gifts that any other federal employee including lower-court judges would not be allowed to, and trying to hide the fact that those gifts were received. We can't read minds. We can't prove for certain that the gifts affected rulings, but there are reasons that such rules exist for many other people both in government and elsewhere. Even the worst president in history, whoever you think that is, behaved more ethically.
It's actually very easy to have evidence if gifts affected rulings. Are the rulings that they made inconsistent with their past rulings? Would that be absolute proof, no but it would be strong evidence. We don't see that not with past justices who have done the same thing and not with the current justices. Instead we see them rule incredibly consistently.
I understand that there is a very vocal half of the country that doesn't like the conservative balance of the supreme Court currently. There was a vocal half of the country that didn't like the liberal balance of the supreme Court in the past. The problem is this veiled call for scrutiny as an excuse to neuter the powers of the supreme Court by Congress is something completely new.
I can only assume you read the prior post asking for strong evidence. Did you not bother because you couldn’t find any and thought outlandish statements were somehow more sufficient the second time you made them? Do you have any evidence at all, or is this just blind partisan desire to pretend that everybody’s equally bad always so nothing matters?
> The problem is this veiled call for scrutiny as an excuse to neuter the powers of the supreme Court by Congress is something completely new.
Neuter their powers by… requiring accountability and some vague semblance of ethics from the least ethical justice to sit on the court in the last few decades? God forbid.
38 trips to luxury resorts, worth millions of dollars? No. You have no evidence of that. And she disclosed the trips that she did take. She didn't hide them or lie about them. They didn't remain secret until someone interviewed the pilots and hotel employees etc. who saw her coming and going. You're making a false equivalence.
> Are the rulings that they made inconsistent with their past rulings?
Many of the recent rulings have indeed been inconsistent with the majority's stated judicial philosophies, such as originalism, textualism, or respect for precedent. As you say that's not airtight evidence, but it's far more suggestive than anything we saw in the last few courts. Roberts is running a clown show.
> The problem is this veiled call for scrutiny as an excuse
Again you make this claim about others' motives with no evidence. Is the idea of people genuinely caring about judicial integrity so alien to you? Is that the "conservative" (actually very radical) agenda you come here to fulminate about?
That others are corrupt though is not germane to whether or not Thomas and other members of the court are corrupt. By the way, there have been lots of calls for scrutiny of Congressmen who sold stocks at opportune times.
FWIW, the scrutiny first came about because Justice Thomas's wife was involved in an insurrection against the government.
The entire point of ethics rules is because things can influence outcome. Those rules get made because there is evidence that at least for some people things influenced outcomes. You have a grand total of nine people at any given time that are in the same court for a long long time. In my entire life I have never seen any evidence that for supreme Court justices things influenced their ruling. The history of the justices predicts their current rulings and does it amazingly well.
That is the counter evidence to say that these gifts are a problem to them. If they're not having an influence on their ruling they're not a problem. It may be something that we don't like because we might feel personally that it would influence us. But I find it hysterical that the people making the claims are the most influenced by gifts to change their votes.
No they haven't. That's why it's breaking news when they get discovered.
> In my entire life I have never seen any evidence that for supreme Court justices things influenced their ruling.
How would you possibly know what this looks like when, as you concede, there never have been meaningful investigations into the justices?
> The history of the justices predicts their current rulings and does it amazingly well.
No better than the history of their acceptance of lavish gifts from ideologically motivated rich people.
There is constantly investigations into the justices. Literally every opinion that they publish is scrutinized. If a traditionally liberal Justice all of a sudden ruled in an extremely conservative manner that would like people's hair on fire. So the investigations are constant and the fact that the justices rule extremely consistently is strong evidence that whatever gifts they're given do not influence them to rule opposite of their constitutional understanding.
What you do see in other areas such as Congress is that money buys votes. That is a well demonstrated fact. It is so common and so well demonstrated people ignore it at this point. You cannot find any evidence that the supreme Court justices are ruling inconsistent with their past stated constitutional understandings and inconsistent with their past rulings. That's why in all of these hit pieces there is never anything brought up about corruption and buying of justices. If there was even a shred of evidence that Clarence Thomas vote on the supreme Court could be bought it would be front and center on every page. Instead we get nonsense hit pieces of one of the most corrupt political bodies Congress pointing fingers at one of the most consistent government bodies.
Because you can disagree with how the justices rule on issues but the supreme Court justices are exceedingly consistent in how they rule. That is direct evidence that either votes have been bought for many decades and prior to when they were nominated to the supreme Court or that these gifts don't influence. I don't think there's a tin foil hat big enough to think that people are able to predict potential supreme Court justices decades before they even made a name for themselves and started buying them off on mass hoping they'll make the supreme Court.
Yes, we can, and so could you if you were actually curious about the matter. You're actually demonstrating the exact same kind of "motivated reasoning" that afflicts the court.
Kavanaugh and Alito have both changed their position on stare decisis, going from "settled law" to "egregiously wrong" when it suited them in Dobbs. Kavanaugh changed his attitude on the rights of religious minorities.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/03/patrick-henry-mu...
Alito flip-flopped on textualism when it came to the EPA.
https://newrepublic.com/article/173028/samuel-alito-kavanaug...
Gorsuch abandoned originalism when it came to the rights of LGBTQ+ folks.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/will-the-real-justice-g...
There are many many more examples, for anyone not inclined to cherry-pick and turn a blind eye. Stop demanding ever more proof from other people, just because you haven't even bothered to study the reality yourself. Prove your own points or stop making these sweeping claims that are, frankly, tantamount to lies.
BTW, before you add strawman to the list of your crimes against curious discussion, nobody is saying that justices can't change their minds. They can and should, as circumstances or understanding change. Even long-standing precedents have been set aside this way, and correctly so. However, the recent changes in attitude seem suspiciously sudden and arbitrary, and go to the heart of each justice's claimed judicial philosophy (often the one that got them through confirmation). As Kagan said in her dissent on Dobbs, nothing has changed about the case or issue itself; all that has changed is the composition of the court, and that's a poor basis for such a momentous decision.
Again, we can't read minds. Maybe there have been several once-in-a-lifetime changes of heart all at once. OTOH, even if we consider such an incredibly unlikely coincidence, the court's recent decisions are far more consistent with a particular partisan agenda than with any recognizable judicial philosophy - even a flawed one. That's what sets them apart from any other court at least during my lifetime.
My biggest problem with the Clarence Thomas news isn’t that he (or any other justice) is being swayed with gifts. It’s that Thomas has publicly stated he leads a simple life where he doesn’t do any of the things he’s done.
He’s lying.
If he’s lying about this little thing, he’s lying about everything. This means he cannot be trusted with a lifetime appointment to the highest court.
I'm not here to agree or disagree with your overall point, but I find it really hard to see how you can confidently state this when, in the very beginning of your first comment, you agree that this scrutiny has only "come now". How can you be so sure that it hasn't happened when you haven't really looked at it?
I think you just haven't actually read anything about the Clarence Thomas information in the past 3 months? There are specific Harlan Crow interests that have been amici briefs in cases on which he has judged. That's pretty cut and dry as this go.
But it looks to me based on this statement that the standard of proof for you is going to be "Please show me the check with the memo line that says 'I gave this check for your vote on the Supreme Court'" And anything short of that isn't going to cut it for you. That's not the way corruption works. It's not a one-off. You go back to the corrupted well, and you start to justify it to yourself as not corrupt, because "he's just my friend, and we have an understanding and see eye-to-eye."
Pretending that Harlan Crow doesn't have more influence on the court than you or I do because of his payments to Thomas is willful blindness to corruption.
Also, there have been equally questionable things about liberal justices. I don't care, I want more transparency from all of them, absolutely. But the don't pretend this is a liberal conservative thing when there's a clear case of corruption on the table. All of the justices voted against stricter scrutiny, and that's suspicious to me.
By definition, virtually nothing post-WWI can be regarded as illiberal in any strict sense in the Western world. Can you please describe what you mean exactly rather than using silly rhetoric?
> The dobs decision was full of historical inaccuracies to justify the decision.
Okay. And? If you read the decision, it wasn't based on historical epistemology in the way you're trying to portray. Please stop promulgating misinformation.
The polarization of the reporting is astounding.
Other justices doing legal but questionable things receive zero attention.
Tired of the gaslighting and bullying from one side of the aisle. King tired. Sofa king tired.
Sucks to be a justice but I don't think there are any acceptable gifts.
The real place where we see gifts influence outcomes is in Congress. We see that consistently. We see members of Congress argue staunchly for one point and then a few weeks later the vote comes and they will vote completely opposite and you will look at their financing and all of a sudden they got a bump from somewhere. You will see fiercely libertarian people like Rand Paul all of a sudden be anti libertarian. Congress acts wildly inconsistent from one bill to the next. The people can hold them accountable every two or six years. No one does because the people don't care it seems.
All of a sudden though Congress wants to neuter a third branch of government because it gets in the way of their agenda. Where is the money coming from to influence this because there is no evidence supreme Court justices have been influenced and are ruling inconsistent from their. But there is mountains of evidence that Congress is heavily influenced by money.
I’m curious as to what you mean when you say liberal agenda.
If you need to get reelected every few years, you need some help. It would be easy to compromise.
If you don't need to get reelected ever for the rest of your life, why would you compromise?
Thomas Jefferson, who had solid majorities, tried and failed to remove the obnoxious Federalist Samuel Chase.
How about "This pissing in the wind is a subtle way to change a weather pattern you dislike?"
and the attacks have been fueled by vast sums of money https://www.propublica.org/article/leonard-leo-scotus-electi...