This month, we’ve seen how the Supreme Court can rise to great heights, but end up falling deep into the political thicket. As we mark the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that abolished school segregation, a national goal still unmet, an angry partisan judge It was a reminder that his role in the court’s status as a political institution is evaporating.
His unanimous 1954 desegregation decision made Chief Justice Earl Warren the most influential justice of the 20th century. President Dwight Eisenhower, who appointed him, would not have agreed. He thought the former California governor was a reliable conservative. Instead, Warren’s liberal vanguard, Eisenhower said, “was the stupidest mistake I ever made.”
Sometimes it goes the other way: John F. Kennedy considered his old friend Byron “Whizzer” White to be a moderate to liberal, but he became a conservative dissenter on many liberal issues, including Roe v. Wade, Miranda Justice, and gay rights.
Violation of judicial ethics
To assuage Southern criticism, Franklin D. Roosevelt chose Senator Hugo Black, a conservative from Alabama. Unbeknownst to Roosevelt at the time, Black, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, would turn out to be a First Amendment absolutist, a strong supporter of civil rights, and an opponent of racial discrimination.
Meanwhile, Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush appointed two of the most ethically questionable, partisan, and compromised justices, and they did much to bring widespread contempt on the court. A flag should be flown upside down in front of the court as a sign of the pain caused by Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.
Instead, the flag will be flown upside down in front of Alito’s home as a symbol of the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” protests protesting Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election. It was done. The flag was flown for several days from Jan. 6 until Joe Biden’s inauguration, but news and photos have only recently surfaced.
Alito blamed his wife, claiming he was out of town when she put up the flag because he was angry about anti-Trump signs in his neighborhood. That’s no excuse.
The New York Times, which reported the news, said, “Judges and legal scholars say the exhibit violates judicial ethics, including the Supreme Court’s own guidelines that stress the need to maintain political independence.” ” he pointed out.
To make matters worse, Justice Alito has not condemned or disavowed the case while sitting on important decisions regarding the 2020 election, insurrection, and presidential immunity, which could negatively impact the outcome of one of the cases if he does not recuse himself.
Thomas, Alito’s morally compromised colleague, shares the problem of conflicts of interest stemming from the rebellion as well as his affinity for the generous billionaire who gives gifts.
Wife-blaming is another common trait shared by disgraced Democratic senators and disgraced former presidents.
New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez is on trial on bribery and corruption charges in a federal courthouse a few blocks from the state courthouse hearing Donald Trump’s hush-money case. Menendez, who was arrested with pockets stuffed with gold bars and cash that he allegedly used to benefit foreign governments, blamed his wife, who will stand trial separately. .
Trump claims his payments to porn actresses were to avoid embarrassing his wife with an affair and had nothing to do with his campaign.
The election case wasn’t the only time Alito’s failure to recuse himself raised ethical questions. According to The New York Times, Alito was invited on a luxury fishing trip by a conservative billionaire. A few months later, when the billionaire brought a major tax case before the court, Alito refused a request to recuse himself.
Michael C. Dorff, a law professor at Cornell University and a former clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy, said both justices are “very involved not only in the Republican and conservative movements, but also in the Stop the Steal movement.” said. Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus said Alito is “predictably the most partisan” vote on the court.
Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a longtime conservative political activist and wife of Justice Thomas, was directly involved in efforts to overturn the election, including reaching out to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and urging him to support President Trump’s charges of election fraud. She also contacted Arizona lawmakers to urge them to overturn Biden’s win.
It fuels distrust that Virginia Thomas, who has worked with right-wing groups that have brought cases to the Supreme Court, says the couple won’t discuss their cases until their opinions are public.
Justice Alito wrote the Dobbs decision denying the constitutional right to abortion. Justice Thomas added that he wanted to go further to “right the wrongs” of past decisions that legalized the rights to contraception, same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage.
At 75, Thomas is the court’s oldest member, having been appointed by Bush Sr. in 1991. He has a billionaire backer in Republican megadonor Harlan Crow. ProPublica published a detailed investigation into the court’s ethics scandals, particularly the Thomas Crow affair, which spanned more than two decades. There were multiple cruises on Crow’s superyacht, trips on private jets, socializing with Crow’s friends at private resorts, the purchase of Thomas’ mother’s house for Thomas to live in, and other gifts.
These morally bankrupt and corrupt judges are also at risk due to their ties to the Stop the Steal movement. If they had any decency left, they would recuse themselves from lawsuits related to the 2020 election.
These are the most important political issues since Bush v. Gore in 2000. They are not issues of ideology, they are issues of sincerity.
The court needs a serious ethics code, not the toothless joke Chief Justice John Roberts concocted last fall, which the Brennan Center for Justice called weak, self-policing and “designed to fail.”
Mr. Roberts need look no further than the norms that courts already apply to employees and other judicial authorities.
The Roberts Supreme Court has suffered a major blow, and history shows that not only Justices Alito and Thomas, but also the Chief Justice himself, tolerated corruption among their colleagues and set high standards to protect the integrity of the Supreme Court. He will be judged for not enforcing the law. And Congress and the President must share responsibility for failing to demand, and where necessary, impose, higher standards.
This is especially important in this election year: we will be voting not only for the president’s policies, but also for lifetime appointees to the federal courts who will hold power long after the current and next presidents leave power.
At stake is nothing less than how much confidence the American people have in the Supreme Court before it sinks further into the quagmire of its own making.
The author is a Washington-based journalist, consultant, lobbyist, and former legislative director for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
