Trump, Clarence Thomas, the Jan. 6 committee and a Supreme Court crisis
Trump, Clarence Thomas and the Jan. 6 committee highlight a Supreme Court justice ethics crisis. If John Eastman and Giuliani have a code, so should judges.
As the Roe decision ricochets through America, further eroding the idea that we live under the rule of law and not raw politics, we must also ask a more fundamental question: Can the U.S. Supreme Court do anything to pull back from the brink of a full-on slide into pure partisanship? Already reeling from the leaked Roe draft opinion earlier this spring, public confidence in the court, with the release of the final decision, has dropped to all-time lows, undermining the legitimacy of a core institutional pillar of American democracy — now itself under siege.
Already reeling from the leaked Roe draft opinion earlier this spring, public confidence in the court, with the release of the final decision, has dropped to all-time lows.
That this siege has been led by lawyers who have sworn to uphold the rule of law — John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Cleta Mitchell, among others — is a stunning development. Many of these lawyers are currently under investigation by bar associations, which hold the power both to confer professional licenses and to take them away in cases where it finds the fundamental rules of lawyer ethics — which would prohibit the making of false statements, assisting in crime or fraud and not exercising independent judgment — have been violated. Based on facts in the public record, the case for sanctioning the Trump lawyers is strong.
But what about Supreme Court justices? Remarkably, justices are not bound by these same rules of legal ethics. In fact, they are not bound by any ethical rules — a fact that places them at odds not only with practicing lawyers but with virtually all other judges in the United States, including other federal judges, who are governed by the Code of Conduct for United States Judges.
Yet that code exempts Supreme Court justices from its coverage. The rationale is that judges in lower federal courts are established by Congress. In contrast, U.S. Supreme Court justices derive their authority directly from Article III of the Constitution, which provides that they may serve as long as they demonstrate “good behavior” and may only be removed by impeachment.
Rating: 5