Supreme Court ethics remain at center stage after hard-right rulings | Much of the public sees the Supreme Court as political, not impartial, even as the court’s defenders say its critics simply oppose the conservative majority
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/06/supreme-court-ethics-public-trust/
36 comments
Remember when Garland was supposed to be the nominee and republicans blocked it? This court has been political for a long ass time. Ethics are out the window, it’s a fucking sham court. Dems need to start playing dirty, I’m sick and tired of their approach when the other team doesn’t play fair.
Some of the more important points from this fairly wide ranging article:
>The justices issued blockbuster rulings that pushed the law sharply to the right, while outside the court some justices were buffeted by new ethics allegations that stoked questions from critics about their impartiality.
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>The dynamics may not seem related, but legal experts say they have mutually reinforced doubts among a large swath of the country over whether the nation’s highest court can be a neutral interpreter of the law.
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>“They’ve got a potential legitimacy problem,” said Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor and expert on judicial ethics. “The traditional notion that we will accept the results of the court whether we agree with it or not … is decreasingly the case. A lot of the ethics problems the court confronts fuel the perception that it is an organization more political than legal.”
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>The court’s defenders, most of them conservative, dismiss such concern as griping from liberals who disagree with the decisions of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority. But an Associated Press-NORC poll released at the end of June crystallized the issue: Nearly 4 in 10 respondents said they have hardly any confidence in the court, and 7 in 10 said they believe the justices’ decisions are motivated by ideology, not fairness and impartiality.
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>Kermit Roosevelt, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who clerked decades ago for then-Justice David H. Souter, said the decisions will probably increase the public perception that the justices are partisan, especially as lower courts start to make rulings that reflect new limits on agency power and on prosecuting alleged wrongdoing by former president Donald Trump.
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>“When we start seeing the consequences of some of these recent decisions like overruling Chevron and presidential immunity, I think its reputation will go down even further,” said Roosevelt, using the nickname for the decision on the federal regulatory state.
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>Several experts said the court needs to fully embrace an ethics overhaul to help reassure the public.
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>The Supreme Court released a long-awaited code of conduct early in the term, hoping to put to rest controversies such as the revelation last year that Thomas and Alito took unreported trips funded by wealthy benefactors. Thomas also faced calls to recuse himself from election-related cases because his wife had moved to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
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>Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on June 25 introduced a bill to cap gifts to justices at $50, the same limit in place for Congress. They also shot a letter off to Roberts demanding he answer questions about what he is doing to address the ethics concerns. More recently, Ocasio-Cortez floated a plan to impeach justices, and House Democrats floated a constitutional amendment to overturn the court’s presidential immunity decision.
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>Gabe Roth, the executive director of the court oversight group Fix the Court, said he sees the scrutiny directed at the court as a positive step.
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>“I’ve long believed that Supreme Court justices should be treated like politicians when it comes to assessing their moral character and potential entanglements,” Roth said. “We have moved to that place, and I think that’s positive given how powerful the justices are.”
It’s long past due that the Supreme Court were at least bound by the same ethical considerations as all other public officials. And this ultimately is just one of many reforms that needs to happen with government bodies more broadly: The inability for elected representatives to debate and pass laws along with a presidency that is looking more like a monarchy indicates that there are some serious challenges with the systems as they exist.
The immunity decision has nothing to do with left/right. It’s just a bad decision, motivated by their favored party being a convicted felon.
“say its critics simply oppose the conservative majority” Uh… I would say at this point they are one in the same. It seems the few conservatives with principles got pushed out and to even be a conservative in the Trump era means you have to be on board with MAGA graft and corruption. So yeah I would say yes critics DO oppose the conservative majority but not simply because they are conservative but because they are in effect waging a war against their political opponents and doing so by steamrolling otherwise important concepts like precedence.
I mean, you don’t even have to point to the conservative justices’ rulings or lack of ethics to decide that SCOTUS is political.
Once McConnell started torching norms, blocking Garland and confirming Barrett, there was no way to conclude that the composition of the court was decided by political gamesmanship.
And all decisions that flowed from that court were tainted.
Which ethics? Let’s not pretend they’re good. Trumpers will do anything for Trump.
The Supreme Court has had a “conservative” majority since 1969. People aren’t complaining about a conservative court – they’re complaining about an extremist collection of overtly political rulings that fairly arbitrarily overturned precedents set by, surprise, *other conservative majority courts*.
Of course we oppose the conservative majority because conservative majority represents a minority of Americans.
What we have here is judicial aparthied!
How could anybody look at the system of how justices are appointed and NOT expect them to be political rather than impartial “calling balls and strikes” or whatever?
Because the US has plurality winner voting for single seat elections, there is a deeply entrenched and outrageously dysfunctional two party system, which has grown worse with the rise of social media and 24 hour partisan media networks.
We saw with Garland that when the threshold was still 60 seats, it’s too easy for the opposing party to just refuse to participate. We are at the point where if the threshold was still 60, it’s hard to imagine any justices getting appointed at all.
But with 50, that means that there are many situations where the president and his party in the senate will make appointments essentially unilaterally. And there is never any need for compromise, because both parties are always one good election from having enough control to make unilateral appointments.
Furthermore, the dysfunctional nature of the fillibuster within the modern two party system means it’s virtually impossible to advance much in the way of agenda through congress. So executive orders and judges “legislating from the bench” is the only way to enact an agenda.
So what we basically have here is two parties playing tug of war to wrestle over who gets more chances to make unilateral (or near unilateral) appointments. **No reasonable human being can possibly think that is in any way a recipe for an apolitical independent unbiased judiciary.**
(And to be clear, I’m not trying to “both-sides” it. The republicans are much much worse than the democrats. However, the current situation is a predictable outcome of the game theory of the system).
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For bonus points, because there are only nine justices and they don’t leave the bench at predictable regular times, a great deal of luck goes into who gets more appointments. This is further politicized by the fact that justices can choose to strategically time their retirements based on who controls the presidency and the senate.
Double bonus points because the fact that only the Senate (and not the House) are relevant here, that destroys the original compromise between lower population and higher population states, which hands Republicans a major advantage in this department. I forget the exact math, but Comey Barret was nominated by a president who lost the popular vote by several million, and confirmed by senators who represent even more millions fewer people than those who voted no.
The court was packed by Exxon Mobil through a front group- the heritage Foundation. They have been carefully selected to oppose environmental law, fair taxation of wealth, and voting rights for women, minorities, and the working poor. All of this to avoid dealing with the climate crisis. They don’t give a damn about justice or human rights. They exist to enrich the already wealthy.
No, the real criticism is that justices are not adhering to fundamental judicial ethics and avoiding the appearance of bias, taking lavish gifts from people with business before the court, having their spouses solicit business and donations from people and law firms with cases before the court, ignoring decades of precedent to make partisan rulings, and twisting the plain words of the Constitution to legislate from the bench. Criticisms of the current Supreme Court are warranted.
SCOTUS is illegitimate. It can change its mind at any time, it can rule in favor of fake plaintiffs, it can rule in flagrant opposition to the Constitution; and fuelling all of this is their ability to take bribes openly because they are accountable to no one.
They are functioning instead as an unelected substitute for a dysfunctional congress, presently on the payroll of a foreign adversary and a handful of billionaires. A *minority* party of that congress brought us here by illegally blocking judicial appointments.
They’re acrively carrying out a coup.
SCOTUS managed to destroy the country’s trust and respect for them in record time
Poor SCOTUS members!
They are getting picked on, just because they:
1) Ruled that Trump can run an insurrection, take bribes, assassinate opponents, rob the treasury.
Yes they said all presidents, but it’s rather obvious who they will allow when they told Biden he doesn’t even have the power to reduce federal student loan debt.
2) Ruled against 50 years of precedent on abortion and opened the door for 30,000 women to be forced to carry and raise their rapists baby, just in Texas, just so far.
3) Ruled against 40 years of precedent in how Federal Agencies are managed, gutting the powers of the EPA, FBI, and making all service to us citizens capricious, weak, and easily challenged.
And they still have lifetime jobs to exert power over us all.
Quite the sympathetic victims! /s
You can’t overturn 50 years of precedent with Roe, 40 with Chevron, claim to be “originalists” and go on to determine that an item designed purely to increase the rapidity of rifle fire doesn’t violate federal law when the plain text of the statue clearly encompasses said item, determine that bribes aren’t bribes as long as they’re paid at the conclusion of an action/event, and openly muse about overturning other longstanding precedents that are victories for equality (namely Brown v Board and Obergefell) now that you’re in the majority and expect people to trust the institution. I mean shit, at least two of the “justices” are openly active politically, either supporting or trying to actively advance the failed coup attempt on January 6th. Given that these jag offs just made the president all but a king in name for his time in office, maybe it’s time to reshape the Court.
It’s impossible not to see the majority as partisan. Like state supreme courts, the moment they got stacked by heritage foundation justices, they ignored decades of precedent to overturn rulings on established law via incredibly weak justification. Now they’ve turned the nation’s highest court into something that citizens simply don’t trust, and the next time Democrats get the opportunity, they will correct the balance of the court and do the same thing in opposition, an institution is permanently damaged thanks to conservative dark money think-tanks. The latest rulings are in no way reflected in where the majority of the nation is on these issues, and if they persist, they will fully deligitimize themselves as a body. Without the trust of the nation that they are fairly interpreting the Constitution, they’re just a bunch of old people in black bathrobes and no one will listen, and Congress and the Executive will eventually just ignore them, sensing that they have lost the population’s consent and there’s no political penalty for just bypassing their rulings.
Who, outside of partisan conservatives, are defending the court?
They are picking and choosing cases to make ruling to explicitly overturn decades old precedent. Of course they are a bunch of hacks.
If America survives Trump’s second term, the Dem nominee in ‘28 had damn sure better run on a “gut the SCOTUS and start anew” platform.
Conservative? More like regressive.
Except their rulings are *very* unpopular. There’s no conservative majority in the united states. Most Americans want safe access to abortion. Most support marriage equality. Certainly most believe that we don’t have a king. This court is corrupt, illegitimate, and their rulings serve to undermine the constitution, not protect it.
Yes, they are simply a conservative majority, who take orders for opinions from billionaires like they work at McDonalds and fly upside-down flags to protest their Orange God being treated like a criminal.
like they give a fuck
> even as the court’s defenders say its critics simply oppose the conservative majority
The can’t both **have a conservative majority** and also **be impartial**.
So the conservatives that are benefiting from these outlandish judgements are just saying it’s an optics problem. This has been the M.O. for a long time. They buy influence to use over everyone else then pretend that we’re all just being mean but wanting a fair and impartial court.
I mean obviously we oppose the conservative majority because those are the fuckers overturning precedence based on their political opinion and acting like activist judges….
critics (the actual majority in this country) are pissed off at the unelected douchebags wiping their ass with societal norms, anything resembling ethics, and making a mockery of our justice system all in the name of upholding opinions barely 15% of the country believes in? You don’t fuckin say
No, we oppose the illegitimate means through which that conservative majority came to be.
I, like many, don’t like the conservative majority but that’s not the issue. The issue is clear cut judicial bias, in appearance and in its rulings.
no, we oppose conservative corruption
It’s not political! It’s that we don’t agree with the *CONSERVATIVE* majority.
So often it seems people are ignorant of their own words. How can you say there is a conservative majority without recognizing you’ve just described their politics?
It’s been a political body my whole life, the exception being having a single justice who was sometimes not strictly making judgments founded on political ideology, sometimes.
The majority of Americans oppose the political establishment of the minority.
Follow the original intention of the court and expand it to thirteen.
The Court needs an expansion, term limits, binding ethical conduct, and absolutely no right to privacy.
You want to serve on the Court then you also sacrifice. No other income and no gratuities, speaking fees, whatever. You work for the people and no one else.
I think it’s gotten to a point where we have to ask: who watches the watchmen?
How does our government correct for when the highest court in the land is so blatantly corrupt and is making rulings that are blatantly corrupt?
No the 6 fascists are absolutely political and evil, they have no intention of upholding, ethics, law, reality. They are there to help usher in a fascist dictatorship.
As a Canadian, it blows my mind that American judges publicly announce political affiliation and run for election under a political party. Seems like bias and partiality are a natural result of that approach. It conjures and image of the blind justice statues with one eye peeking left or right.