Durbin to move forward on Supreme Court ethics reform
Durbin to move forward on Supreme Court ethics reform
After Chief Justice Roberts failed to put into effect tighter standards for a court that’s lost the public’s confidence, the number-two Senate Democrat says he has seen enough.
FIRST THINGS FIRST
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) announced on Thursday afternoon that the Senate Judiciary Committee he chairs will mark up Supreme Court ethics reform legislation this month, a move progressive activists and lawmakers have been pining for in recent months.
“The highest court in the land should not have the lowest ethical standards,” Durbin, who also serves as the number-two Senate Democrat, said in a statement. “Since the Chief Justice [John Roberts] has refused to act, the Judiciary Committee must.”
Durbin said the timing of the vote will be announced early next week. Democrats have a one-seat majority on Senate Judiciary, so the legislation should clear the committee with complete attendance before facing a more ominous fate in the full Senate.
Aron Solomon, chief legal analyst at Esquire Digital, literally texted your Supercreator Daily author “LOL” when asked for a reaction to the news.
“The Senate planning to mark up ethics legislation to check an un-checkable court is laughable,” he said. “It’s going to be an exercise in both futility and comedy.”
Durbin’s announcement comes after a series of bombshell investigative reports from ProPublica in recent months raised ethical questions about a third of the court’s conservative supermajority.
Last month, the nonprofit news organization revealed a previously undisclosed trip Justice Samuel Alito took with billionaire businessman Paul Singer to a luxury fishing resort in Alaska. Legal experts said Alito should have refused himself in cases involving Singer; Alito defiantly defended his behavior in a bizarre preemptive op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
In April, ProPublica published several articles on Justice Clarence Thomas, who accepted nearly annual luxury trips from Harlan Crow, a wealthy Dallas-based real estate investor and prominent Republican donor. The trips included flights on Crow’s private jet, cruises on the billionaire’s yacht, and stays at his private resort and private club. Thomas also sold a house and two empty lots in Savannah, Georgia to Crow but did not report the sale at the time. (Crow’s company also paid for extensive renovations of the house. Thomas’s mother lives in it.) Crow also paid for private school tuition for Thomas’s grandnephew but the justice did not report the gifts on his disclosure forms.
Durbin invited Chief Justice Roberts to testify before the Judiciary committee in May. Roberts declined in a letter with the ethics statement he said all current members of the Supreme Court subscribe to. The same month, Durbin held a hearing on the need for reform and to explore proposals to hold the justices to the same ethical standards as every other federal judge or high-ranking official in the federal government. And in a separate letter to Roberts in April, Durbin and Judiciary Democrats urged the chief justice to take immediate action to address the ProPublica reports on Justice Thomas. The letter was referred to the Judicial Conference and forwarded to the Judicial Conference Committee on Financial Disclosure.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told reporters before the recess that the reported behavior of Justices Thomas and Alito is both problematic and undermines the confidence in the Supreme Court to fairly administer justice.
The numbers back up Jeffries’ claim: After the Supreme Court ruled to repeal Roe v. Wade last year, public confidence dropped to an all-time low since the General Social Survey began recording this data in 1973.
It’s hard to believe those numbers will trend back up anytime soon after controversial decisions to ban affirmative action in higher education and overturn President Biden’s student debt relief plan last week.
“The only people who apparently believe they are above the law are members of the United States Supreme Court,” Jeffries said. “That’s wrong.”
But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), whose legacy will be a federal judiciary shaped in his image, last month expressed a laissez-faire attitude about the situation.
“The Supreme Court, in my view, can’t be dictated to by Congress,” McConnell told reporters at the time. “I think the Chief Justice will address these issues. Congress should stay out of it because we don’t, I think, have the jurisdiction to tell the Supreme Court how to handle the issue.”
McConnell declined to comment on if he believed there were the required nine or 10 votes in his conference to pass any legislation that made it out of committee to the Senate floor but reaffirmed his confidence in Roberts to look out for the court and its reputation.
Durbin, for his part, has been on an 11-year mission to nudge Roberts into adopting ethics reform on the chief justice’s own terms. However, Esquire Digital’s Solomon doesn’t ultimately see this latest chapter ending any more fruitful than the previous ones.
“It’s a public relations issue of the court’s own creation. Imagine another modern-era Supreme Court perceived as an out-of-control political arm, rather than a responsible, independent judiciary,” he said. “We can’t, really. It’s the court’s mess and they need to clean it.”
And although a majority of Americans polled last year said they either strongly or somewhat favored increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court, a reform endorsed by leading progressive lawmakers and advocacy groups but currently lacks the votes in Congress, Solomon begs to differ.
“Expanding the court is a hideous solution,” he said. “People need to vote.”
👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! Welcome to Supercreator Daily, your essential guide to the politicians, power brokers, and policies shaping the American creator experience. It’s Friday, July 7, 2023. Former President Jimmy Carter and First Lady Rosalynn Carter are celebrating their 77th wedding anniversary today. (77 on 7/7, how adorbs.)
TODAY IN POLITICS
All times Eastern
10 a.m. President Biden will receive his daily intelligence briefing.
3:30 p.m. The president will speak about lowering health care costs and eliminating junk fees.
6 p.m. President Biden will leave the White House to travel to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, arriving at 7:35 p.m.
Vice President Harris is in Washington, DC and has no public events on her schedule.
The House and Senate are out.
THEY DID THAT
Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) announced she and Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to ban the sale of cluster munitions. The announcement comes after published reports that the Biden administration is expected to arm Ukraine with the controversial weapons, which pose high risks to civilians, who can be killed or injured during an attack or afterward from the explosives, and are prohibited in more than 100 countries.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) secured almost $7 billion to construct a new Hudson River Tunnel between New York and New Jersey and rehabilitate the 110-rail tunnel that carries 200,000 daily passenger trips along the Northeast Corridor. The investment is the largest federal transportation grant in US history and is expected to improve rail mobility from Washington, DC to Boston and beyond.
Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), Jack Reed (D-R.I.), and Tina Smith (D-Minn.) sent a letter to Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra urging the agency to take action to protect consumers from scams and fraud caused by artificial intelligence and machine learning in consumer financial products.
Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mt.) announced his reelection campaign raised $5 million in the second quarter, the largest amount the three-term senator has collected during an off-year. Tester is one of several vulnerable Democratic incumbents in states that former President Donald Trump won in 2020 who are expected to face tough elections as Senate Democrats fight to hold their one-seat majority.
Sarah McBride, the Delaware state senator running to replace Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) in the House, announced her campaign raised over $400,000 in the second quarter. If McBride wins the seat, she would be the first transgender woman elected to Congress. Blunt Rochester is the current frontrunner to succeed Tom Carper in the Senate.
Voters of Tomorrow announced former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will give the keynote speech at their summit in Washington, DC on July 27-29. Pelosi will speak about how Gen Z leaders from across the nation can participate in and carry on her legacy of transforming forward-looking values into enduring legislation.
WNBA stars Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier announced they are founding a new professional women’s basketball league to take place during the off-season and provide players with an alternative to competing overseas. Brittney Griner had been playing in Russia during the WNBA offseason when she was arrested on smuggling charges in February 2021 and wrongfully detained for 10 months before being released in a prison swap last December.
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