DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Justice Alito says Congress lacks the power to impose ethics code on Supreme Court

Democrats last week pushed Supreme Court ethics legislation through a Senate committee, but the bill’s prospects in the narrowly divided Senate are dim.

WASHINGTON — Justice Samuel Alito says Congress lacks the power to impose a code of ethics on the Supreme Court, making him the first member of the court to take a public stand against proposals in Congress to toughen ethics rules for justices in response to increased scrutiny of their activities beyond the bench.

“I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it. No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period,” Alito said in an interview he gave to the Wall Street Journal opinion pages. An account of the interview, which the paper said took place in New York in early July, was published Friday.

Democrats last week pushed Supreme Court ethics legislation through a Senate committee, though the bill’s prospects in the full Senate are dim.

All federal judges other than the justices already adhere to an ethics code that was developed by the federal judiciary. But the Supreme Court’s unique status — it’s the only federal court created by the Constitution — puts it outside the reach of those standards that apply to other federal jurists.

Democrats first sought to address that after ProPublica reported earlier this year that Justice Clarence Thomas participated in lavish vacations and a real estate deal with a top Republican donor — and after Chief Justice John Roberts declined to testify before the committee about the ethics of the court.

Since then, ProPublica also revealed that Alito had taken a luxury vacation in Alaska with a Republican donor who had business interests before the court. The Associated Press reported in early July that Justice Sonia Sotomayor, aided by her staff, has advanced sales of her books through college visits over the past decade.

The 73-year-old Alito, who joined the court in 2006, has rejected the idea that he should have disclosed the Alaska trip or stepped away from cases involving the donor, hedge fund owner Paul Singer. Alito penned his own Wall Street Journal op-ed, which was published hours before ProPublica posted its story.

Alito said that he is unwilling to leave allegations unanswered, though he acknowledged judges and justices typically don’t respond to their critics.

“And so at a certain point I’ve said to myself, nobody else is going to do this, so I have to defend myself,” he said in the newest column.

While no other justice has spoken so definitively about ethics legislation, Roberts has raised questions about Congress’ authority to oversee the high court.

In his year-end report in 2011, Roberts wrote that the justices comply with legislation that requires annual financial disclosures and limits their outside earned income. “The Court has never addressed whether Congress may impose those requirements on the Supreme Court. The Justices nevertheless comply with those provisions,” Roberts wrote.

The justices have so far resisted adopting an ethics code on their own, although Roberts said in May that there is more the court can do to “adhere to the highest standards” of ethical conduct, without providing specifics.

The column is co-written by James Taranto, the paper’s editorial features editor, and David Rivkin, a Washington lawyer. Rivkin represents Leonard Leo, the onetime leader of the conservative legal group The Federalist Society, in his dealings with Senate Democrats who want details of Leo’s dealings with the justices. Leo helped arrange Alito’s trip to Alaska.

Rivkin, in a letter Tuesday to leading Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the request was politically motivated and violates Leo’s constitutional rights. Rivkin also wrote that a congressionally imposed ethics code for the Supreme Court would falter on constitutional grounds. Separately, Rivkin represents a couple whose tax case will be argued before the court in the fall.

Alito talked with the Taranto and Rivkin for four hours in interviews in April and July, they wrote. They published an account of the earlier interview in April.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/su...xzimTtWA53qAXGcdjC7Mc0Ahe0pf7L5F18O6PjRk

So I'm just curious, despite a persons politics is the SCOTUS beyond being held to a standard of ethics by congress? And please remember, the SCOTUS will not be conservative forever. It will go back and forth like it's always done. So this is to hold the court accountable no matter whether it's a majority of conservatives or liberals. Should it be that since they are the highest court in the land that there should be no checks and balances placed upon them? By being the law of the land should they be above the law?

Yeah throw ethics to the wind. What could possibly go wrong?

I thought nobody was above the law?

So federal judges can have ethic standards, but SCOTUS cannot???

Laughable.

Your tears are delicious.

It not a matter of throwing out ethics. It's a matter of the Congress having no authority to govern the judicial branch.

A Justice can be impeached under the same standards a President can be impeached.

Obviously, Civics wasn't something you were taught in school, and if so, you didn't pass.

My opinion only, Alito and Thomas both have breached the trust of America. I'm not sure who if anyone has any control over SCOTUS actions. I mean personal actions.

For me, it's a matter of good judgement. Neither of them have shown any. What can be done about it? I have no idea. But it should be explored.

If the only way we can hold a Justice responsible of their ethics is to impeach, well we’ve come to whole new level of cancel culture. And why do you bring up my civic lessons when it’s not taught in school today? IMO it’s the reason a large % of Goper’s are MAGA supporters today.

And they say ignorance is bliss.

That's not what it says.
It says that Congress does not have the authority to impose those standards, and - all politics aside - I would agree with that completely. Any attempt by one branch of the government to control any aspect of the functioning of another branch leads to an usurpation of powers in the other branch and that erodes the separation of powers set forth in the Check and Balances system and would only shift even MORE power to Congress... and that's the absolute LAST thing any of us needs

But do you feel it's OK for Alito and Thomas to accept gifts (let's face it,that's what they were) and they hear cases involving those that gave the gifts?

And that's the thing. See, I pretty much agree with what PPE said. But where do you draw the line at just how much they are allowed to accept gifts/bribes for rich, influential people which they will be hearing cases it directly impacts? And how do you go about regulating that? It's an obvious conflict of interest and they seem to be refusing to police themselves on it. So what can be done?

More or less JMO, but we give SCOTUS sizable salaries. They get great benefits. Life time appointments to the bench.. we deserve impartiality.

You can't tell me they can be impartial when someone is handing them major freebies... Gifts, Private Jet Rides, Vacations etc., improper is written all over that.,

I mean, aren't we supposed to be the same under the law. Rich, Poor, Black, White, male, female...... aren't we all supposed to be treated equally? We are human beings.. How can we be sure we are getting treated equally when the wealthy can buy justices.

No sir, the actions of the justices need to be above reproach. there can be NO QUESTION about their honesty., Because of those actions by Alito and Thomas, we have too damn many questions.

I don't disagree with you and I think my post indicates that. But at the same time there are laws in place that dictate who if anyone has the power to control that. I've read opinions that lean in both directions on whether congress has such power and I'm not qualified to say who is correct in that matter. Because one has to be careful in what they wish for. Once you give congress the power to oversee the SCOTUS it may lead to far reaching consequences that nobody would want. When looking at it objectively we can see just how partisan and divided our political system is and I'm not sure I would want see congress given powers that they may use to push their political agenda no matter which party is in power.

At this point I consider the situation quite a conundrum. I understand the need for this situation to change but have no idea what would be the best way to address it.

Obviously I agree with you on the question of "what to do about it".... What I do know for sure is that everyone else in the public employ has rules to follow. If a senator or Congressperson were to engage in similar activities, we'd fry them up. Hell we did that to the speaker of the house in Ohio. That boy is going to jail. (I know, different circumstances but actions that prove he was untrustworthy)

It's shameful,,, SHAMEFUL, that the members of the highest court in the land don't get that.

Bottom line, if the people are paying them to do a job, then they must be required to do their job without interference from those that wish to have their own personal agenda. I'd go as far as making sure those individuals that tried to "Bribe" officials be put in harms way.

I can see some on here that want to defend the actions of those two justices, But for me, there is NO justification for their actions.. NONE

This leads me to another set of rules.

1. If a seat comes open, there are no rules that can stop the appropriate parties to act on a a presidential recommendation. Mitch McConnell played that it was wrong to seat a judge in an election year. Yet he turned around and did it with under 10 weeks to go before an election... That has to stop.

2. Term Limits.

3. Age limits. Probably for presidents and congress as well.. Complicated but doable.

Too many holes in the system.... Need to be fixed.

My idea: a constitutional amendment/change to the lifetime tenure clause. 20-year term limit. That is more than enough time to make one's mark upon society.
SCOTUS Justices maybe lived to the ripe old age of 60-65 when the Const/B.O.R was inked. Now, we have Justices living into their 80's and 90's, with 40+ years on the bench. I don't think the founders could have imagined average life expectancy to double when they opted for lifetime bench placements. I'm not even certain there was such a calculation (or awareness thereof) back then.

I understand how challenging it would be to form enough of a bipartisan consensus to enact such an initiative (2/3 majority), but it would certainly be worth the effort to investigate.

Kavanaugh, Barrett, even Brown-Jackson are looking at 40-50 years on the bench. At its heart, this archaic provision is antithetical to common sense in the modern age.


Term limits for all. Term lengths to be determined after much debate and deliberation.


.02

Man I hope Biden wins re-election and a super majority in 2024 since the GOPers are doubling down on their fascist traitorous lump of fat ass lies packaged as a pseudo-man. With a super majority he can fix this mess and put these corrupt radical extremist judges out on their asses or add enough dems to limit the damage they do.

There are a couple of ways to respond, this is one answer.

If you accept the premise that this violates separation of powers between branches, then the next question should be; “How much is too much?” Say I want to give my good buddies Clarance and Sam a gift of a million dollars a year, and there is no law against it, and my personal belief is that SCOTUS judges are woefully underpaid, what is limiting me to a million? 5 million, or 10 million? Just because there is no law against it does not make it right and a lot of laws exist to deter bad behavior. With this line of thinking we have created the monster of unintended consequences, a judge that is accountable to no one, and sold to the highest bidder.

I believe in accountability. Ethics standards exist in all professions that involve the potential for abuse. Mine included. I don’t think it is unreasonable for SCOTUS to have ethics standard, now that it is apparent that they are subject to abuse.

We give Supreme Court judges the ultimate practical reward of a lifetime appointment, but our good buddies appear to be using their position to enrich their lifestyle. Our good buddies boss John who has his own issue with his wife, does not want to deal with it. So Congress has to step into something that should not have to be dealt with, if John had a backbone.

Obviously, the only current recourse is impeachment, we also know that is a practical impossibility in the current partisan world.

The pragmatic thing to do is to legislate ethics, because those responsible are parties to the problem.

I will also say that Alito may be right in the thought that Congress does not have the ability to legislate SCOTUS, but it does not explicitly preclude that either. Untested waters. The Constitution is a framework for government, not the details of subsequent laws and regulations.

+1

I believe that continuity of government is important. Possibly even more so on the court. Constitutional matters should be slow to change, and were designed as such in the framers work.

20 years might not be long enough to provide that continuity. Justices Kagen and Sotomayor seem like fairly new appointees, but they have been on the court 13 or so years.


As it stands, there are no minimum qualifications to be a justice. The President could pick a cello player from Toledo, and if confirmed by the Senate, said cello player is on the court. You don't even need to be a citizen of this country or know anything about the law. Old Cold Dawg could be a Supreme Court Justice.

Thankfully, due to consent, that has never been a real problem.

I would be in favor of setting some minimum qualifications in the sense of age, which would more of less take care of term limits. Maybe you set a minimum age of 50-55 years old. Or possibly experience minimums.

An OCD SCOTUS Judge would be 1000 times improvement over the Yalliban right wingers currently sitting on the court. Imagine five people thinking like Peen running the country from the bench, throwing out precedence they dislike for ChRiStIaN vAlUeS.

Part of the problem is that we don't have centrist judges. Left or Right depending on who is President. 51 votes in the senate is the only requirement. Some days I wish it was 60 to force a compromise, but I realize that there would be no one left on the SCOTUS in today's world of partisan politics.

Centrist? Does that word even still exist in today's vocabulary? I sure wish we saw more of that.

In todays reality, progressives are as close as you will get to true centrist. Well, Centrist from the pre Regan era anyway. The center has been dragged to the right so far over the last 40 years, that nobody would recognize true center if they tried. The Centrist of 2015 (on both sides) were further right than Reagan himself.

If you actually see people such as AOC as a centrist I think we're starting to identify part of the problem here. Given the choice between two evils I would prefer her over a right wing extremist but she's by no means a centrist. Look, we can fight this same battle we have in the past over and over again or we can see that in the majority of most instances we have the same goals and vote for the same people. The choice is yours. Nitpicking the details seems like a futile endeavour to me.

Ummm, no.

Yes, the country has moved to the right, but AOC and Bernie and all those progressives are still way out there.

Oh, isn’t it cute that you think your very conservative views are the true center… Like a puppy chasing it’s tail, people who bought into trickle down can’t shake that super conservative mindset instilled by the right wing back then. Jimmy Carter was almost centrist… in his later years. FDR range is where we need to be.

Lol umm…Neither is running for president.

This is why you can't have anything nice. Because you just blather things without engaging your brain. Just yesterday I posted that a strong economy was built from the bottom up and not from the top down. But obviously you can't stick to reality in your zest just to make up BS. Carry on.

That's not the point.
Completely regardless of how I feel, Congress does not have the authority to act. Period. No matter how I feel, it's moot.

And sadly that's much of what today's opinions in the political realm are based on....

This premise is interesting to me. Please expand upon what you're proposing, if you feel like it. I have a few questions:

1. What benefits would we reap from setting a minimum age limit for SCOTUS candidates?
2. What minimum experience markers would we set for potential candidates?
3. If a candidate meets the minimum age requirements and is confirmed as a SCOTUS member, would they still enjoy lifetime appointments?

I'm willing to explore other options than my own, as I'll be the first to admit that I've never had all the answers on any subject.


Thanks in advance, if you wish to have this conversation.

I don't agree with that. As an example, Chief Justice Roberts is a centrist. He doesn't just line up with what many would call the conservative marching line. He was appointed by GW Bush.

I think people perceive that justices are going to be one way streets on the various issues, when it isn't as set as that. I think all weigh each decision with conviction and try to be impartial and rule on each based on how they perceive the law where interpretation is possible and not the political opinions on the matter. Political leanings might come in to play in cases where the law is murky and or allows for a wider interpretation of the law.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/us/politics/supreme-court-conservatives-liberals.html

Sure, why not. I am up for the count tonight.

1. As stated before, setting a minimum age would have the back end impact. Justices wouldn't be on the court as long. We wouldn't want to take away lifetime appointments. As has been since the formation of our country, allow age to determine that. There are reasons why being able to yank away appointments is a bad idea. It could also pose problems and be considered discriminatory to set limits as defined by the ADEA. Age limits can be set for occupations where age could be a bona fide occupational qualification. Usually public safety jobs such as firefighter or many transportation jobs. I don't think being a judge would qualify. There are also other exemptions to that law but again, I don't know that they would apply.

Right now, there seems to be a move to appoint younger and younger justices in order to have as long an impact as possible. With minimum age requirements one would expect to see gained experience, both on job and in life that just isn't attained without age.

2. As for experience minimums, or other minimums? I would say that being a citizen would be one. I understand why that may not have been required during the formation of the country. We may not have had enough citizens to fill the role. That isn't the case today.

I think today, one should be required to have a law degree, OR be able to pass a bar exam, or watered down version,without having the formal degree. I think it's reasonable to require appointees to have a sound understanding of the law. All justices have staff and clerks who can help with some of the finer points. No justice knows every point of law on the books.

As for experience, that can be attained many different ways. I think arguments would need to be made on a case by case basis.

3. I guess I got ahead of myself and touched on lifetime appointments. That is just one of the cornerstones to keep the judiciary impartial, or at least in effort. I don't think we need to change that.

That is the point of my question. I wanted to know what you Felt.. Do you think it's ok for them to take those gifts? I wanted YOUR OPINION.,.

I’ll answer that. It’s ok with Justices leaning right to take gifts and those leaning left who take gifts need to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. When you throw ethics out the window curuption always follows.

It's fine to think that. And I agree that Roberts is a pretty good example. And no, a SCOTUS doesn't vote 100% in one direction.

But let's look at the facts as they have been presented to us. Roe vs wade stood as precedent for 50 years. trump made it clear he would only appoint justices that would overturn roe vs wade..........

Trump: I’ll appoint Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade abortion case

https://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/19/tru...o-overturn-roe-v-wade-abortion-case.html

He set in place a court by appointing justices to overturn a certain law. To serve his bases agenda. And that's 100% what happened. Let's face it, that is a manipulation of the court to serve your political agenda. We can twist that or pretend that's not what happened but that's not the reality.

Kagan enters fray over Congress’ power to police Supreme Court

PORTLAND, Ore. — Justice Elena Kagan on Thursday jumped into the heated debate over ethics at the Supreme Court, arguing that Congress has broad powers to regulate the nation’s highest tribunal despite the recent claim from one of her conservative colleagues that such a step would violate the Constitution’s separation of powers.

Kagan’s comments, at a judicial conference in Portland, came just days after the Senate Judiciary Committee responded to recent ethics controversies around justices’ luxury travel by advancing a bill requiring the court to establish an ethics code and setting up a mechanism that would enforce it.

“It just can’t be that the court is the only institution that somehow is not subject to checks and balances from anybody else. We’re not imperial,” Kagan told the audience of judges and lawyers attending the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference. “Can Congress do various things to regulate the Supreme Court? I think the answer is: yes.”

Kagan insisted she was not responding directly to Justice Samuel Alito’s blunt statements in an interview last month that Congress would be violating the Constitution’s separation of powers if lawmakers sought to impose ethics and recusal policies on the high court.

“Congress did not create the Supreme Court,” Alito told The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”

While Alito’s statement sounded unqualified, Kagan said she was unsure precisely what question he was asked. She also suggested his remark could not have been as broad as it seemed because the Constitution specifically provides for Congress to dictate the sorts of cases the Supreme Court can and cannot hear.

“Of course, Congress can regulate various aspects of what the Supreme Court does,” said Kagan, who joined the court in 2010 after being nominated by President Barack Obama. “Congress funds the Supreme Court. Congress historically has made changes to the court’s structure and composition. Congress has made changes to the court’s appellate jurisdiction.”

Kagan quickly added that this did not mean Congress could take steps to dictate the outcome of specific cases.

“Can Congress do anything it wants? Well, no,” she said. “There are limits here, no doubts.”

Kagan also offered what could be viewed as a rebuke of Alito, saying she was reluctant to spell out her views further because the court could someday have a case in which it is asked to assess those limits. She also said she didn’t want to “jawbone it” while Congress is considering legislation, although the bill that cleared committee on a party-line vote last month seems to have no chance of clearing the full Senate or being taken up by the Republican-led House.

However, Kagan also said it would be her preference to see the Supreme Court act to defuse the current controversies by taking its own action to address ethics concerns. And she became the first justice to publicly confirm widely held suspicion that the members of the court don’t see eye to eye on the issue — disagreement that has limited an attempt by Chief Justice John Roberts to act on the subject.

“It’s not a secret for me to say that we have been discussing this issue, and it won’t be a surprise to know that the nine of us have a diversity about this and most things. We’re nine freethinking individuals,” she said.

“Regardless of what Congress does, the court can do stuff, you know?” Kagan said. “We could decide to adopt a code of conduct of our own that either follows or decides in certain instances not to follow the standard codes of conduct … that would remove this question of what Congress can do. … I hope that we will make some progress in this area.”

During her remarks on Thursday in an onstage conversation with a bankruptcy judge and attorney involved in organizing the conference, Kagan took a more conciliatory tone toward her conservative colleagues than she did last year in a flurry of public appearances that seemed to evince serious frustration with her role on the court. Those remarks followed the bitter disagreement over the court’s decision last June, by a 5-4 vote, to overturn the federal constitutional right to abortion that had been recognized for nearly half a century.

In her first public comments since the court wrapped up its work this term just over a month ago, Kagan repeated some of her prior criticism, suggesting that her conservative colleagues were sometimes carrying out their policy preferences. She cited, in particular, rulings from this term reining in the federal government’s power to regulate wetlands and rejecting President Joe Biden’s plan for student debt relief.

Kagan said it’s important for the court “to act like a court … mostly it means acting with restraint and acting with a sense that you are not the king of the world and you do not get to make policy judgments for the American people.”

Kagan also stressed on Thursday that she believes it’s important for the court to achieve consensus when possible.

“I do believe very strongly in working strenuously to achieve consensus,” she said. “I would rather decide less and have greater consensus than decide more with division. … I like to search for what might be thought of as principled compromises. Some compromises you can’t make, but some compromises you can.”

On balance, Kagan’s latest remarks seemed to lack the edge of her comments last summer and fall, when she often sounded profoundly disillusioned with the court.

“Some years are better than other years,” Kagan said last year as she looked back over the term in which the court ruled on abortion. “Time will tell whether this is a court that can get back … to finding common ground.”

In her speeches last year, she even skewered some of the banal anecdotes justices often tell about their interactions, suggesting that they may mislead by masking tensions on the court.

“I don’t see why anybody should care that I can talk to some of my colleagues about baseball, unless that becomes a way for a better, more collaborative relationship about our cases and work,” Kagan said last October.

Kagan’s public statements that the court’s legitimacy was being fairly questioned prompted Roberts to offer an unusual brush-back pitch.

“Simply because people disagree with an opinion is not a basis for questioning the legitimacy of the court,” the chief justice said last summer, without naming Kagan or other critics.

In the court’s most recent term, the court’s conservative supermajority did not always vote in lockstep in the contentious and politically controversial cases. Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberals in a key redistricting case from Alabama, turning aside efforts to undercut legal requirements to create or maintain districts where minority voters have a strong chance of electing candidates of their choice.

And a third conservative on the court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined Roberts, Kavanaugh and the liberals to fend off an expansive claim that the Constitution gives state legislatures sweeping authority over election laws, practices and disputes, with little role for state courts or even governors.

During an appearance at a legal conference in Minnesota last month, Kavanaugh cited those decisions as evidence that the court is not divided into inflexible, warring camps.

“We have lived up, in my estimation, to deciding cases based on law, not based on partisan affiliation or partisanship,” Kavanaugh said. “We work … as a team of nine.”

Despite those compromises and instances of moderation, the overall rightward shift of the court remained unmistakable. Three of the highest-profile cases of the term — decided on the last day decisions were released — all came down along the court’s 6-3 ideological divide.

The string of stinging defeats for the court’s liberal wing came in cases rejecting the use of race in college admissions, overturning Biden’s $400 billion student debt relief plan, and upholding the rights of business owners to deny some kinds of services to LGBTQ people.

At the outset of the nearly hourlong conversation on Thursday, Kagan discussed one particularly contentious case from the current term that found her in an unusually barbed disagreement with a fellow liberal justice and the court’s only other Obama appointee, Sonia Sotomayor.

Kagan, a proud New Yorker, didn’t mince words in her dissent or in discussing it at the conference — although she seemed to find humor in the furor created by her disagreement with Sotomayor in the case involving Andy Warhol’s adaptation of an iconic photograph of the musician Prince.

“We just kind of went at each other hammer and tongs. We had some choice words for each other,” Kagan said, drawing laughter from the audience. Kagan said that while she often agrees with Sotomayor, “I think Justice Sotomayor gets stuff wrong on other occasions and this is one of them.”

“If you think that Justice Kagan and Justice Sotomayor are identical judges, with identical methodologies, reaching identical outcomes on the basis of identical approaches to law, I have to say you haven’t been paying careful attention,” Kagan said. “Judges are different.”

After positively citing Roberts’ work on the ethics issue, Kagan also again paid tribute to the chief. He was the only other justice to join her in dissent in the Warhol case, and he assigned her to write what both expected would be a classic Kagan opinion.

“Both he knew and I knew that he was giving me a gift,” she said.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/...s-power-to-police-supreme-court-00109770

Congress Has the Authority to Regulate Supreme Court Ethics – and the Duty

From oaths to retirement to impeachment, Congress already regulates the high court, and it’s time for stronger safeguards against corruption.

In the wake of a series of ethics scandals involving Supreme Court justices, the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider a bill Thursday that would safeguard against corruption on the high court. With public opinion of the Court at historic lows, reform is urgently needed to restore faith in its impartiality.

Some opponents claim that reforms would be somehow unconstitutional. While Congress must respect the separation of powers and decisional independence of the justices, it has long exercised its constitutional power to regulate ethics in the Supreme Court. Congress must now take further action to rein in abuse of power in the high court. Our constitutional system of checks and balances requires it.

The list of recent unethical conduct by Supreme Court justices and members of their families is long. It includes repeated failures by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to disclose lavish gifts from billionaires with ties to right-wing legal organizations, failures by nearly all of the justices to recuse themselves from cases in which they had financial connections to the litigants, and justices’ spouses benefiting financially from law firms and nonprofit groups with business before the Court.

This brazenly unethical conduct, and the justices’ years-long refusal to take voluntary steps to prevent further abuses, points to significant shortcomings in the longstanding statutory framework Congress has created to regulate Supreme Court ethics.

On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act, which would require the Supreme Court to adopt a binding code of conduct and develop a process for enforcement. It would also require the Court to adopt rules requiring disclosure for gifts, travel, and income that are at least as rigorous as analogous House and Senate Rules. And it would strengthen recusal rules by, among other things, requiring a written explanation of recusal decisions and creating a mechanism for review of recusal requests.

As the history of congressional regulation of Supreme Court ethics makes clear, it is squarely within Congress’s constitutional power to ensure the integrity of a coequal branch by holding Supreme Court justices to high ethical standards. Since the founding, Congress has played a central role in regulating the ethical conduct of the justices, first by requiring them to take an oath written by Congress. Congress also sets the terms by which federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, retire and how they are compensated.

Since 1948, Congress has required the justices to recuse themselves from cases in certain circumstances, including in any proceeding in which their impartiality might reasonably be questioned. At the same time, the law does not provide a clear mechanism to challenge a justice’s failure to recuse, leaving a great deal of discretion in the hands of justices with conflicts of interest. As for disclosure, Congress has required the justices to disclose their financial holdings and regulated other sources of income since 1978, with increased transparency requirements around securities transactions enacted on a bipartisan basis just last year. But the justices currently embroiled in scandals involving the failure to disclose information about gifts maintain that the law does not require such disclosure.

Congress’s mandate to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution [its enumerated] Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States” implicitly grants Congress the authority to enact a wide range of legislation to facilitate the exercise of judicial power. This includes ethics legislation, which safeguards the legitimacy of the Court by protecting the quality of its decision-making. Moreover, Congress has the ultimate power to impeach and remove justices for bad behavior, which justifies regulation to ensure good behavior.

To be sure, it would be an abuse of congressional power to encroach upon judicial independence in deciding cases, for instance by retaliating against the justices for unpopular decisions. Further, Congress has enacted ethics laws that apply to another coequal branch of government, the executive branch. These guardrails against corruption and abuse of power in coequal branches of government comport with the principle of checks and balances fundamental to our constitutional system.

Building on existing laws, it would be a modest step for Congress to increase disclosure requirements, strengthen the recusal process, and require Supreme Court justices to adhere to a binding code of conduct. Such reforms are not merely within Congress’s constitutional power to enact, they are essential to safeguarding the rule of law.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-w...y-regulate-supreme-court-ethics-and-duty

It seems as though this issue may not be as open and shut as Alito would like for us to believe.

Regardless of what was said, Roe was a faulty ruling from the beginning.

Not to debate the right or wrong as it pertains to abortion, but rather to apply community standards to the law. It should have always been a local issue, local as in state issue, not a federal issue, and that is where we are at today. Some states allow abortion, some don't.

The community standards of California are different than the community standards of Utah.