The US chief justice should testify before Congress about ethics scandals besetting his supreme court “for the good of democracy”, a leading Californian progressive said.
The justices are “so cloistered, they’re so out of touch”, the congressman Ro Khanna told MSNBC on Sunday. “They don’t have a sense of what life is like, so my plea to him would be for the good of democracy come testify. What are you afraid of?”
The Democratic-controlled Senate judiciary committee has requested that Roberts testify about reports regarding relations between justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch and rightwing donors or, in Gorsuch’s case, the chief of a prominent law firm involved in a property purchase.
Thomas’s extensive gifts from the billionaire donor Harlan Crow have been exhaustively reported by ProPublica, which also reported an Alaska fishing trip Alito took with the billionaire Paul Singer.
The justices failed to disclose such links. All deny wrongdoing. Singer, Crow and the law firm executive also deny wrongdoing and say they and the justices did not discuss politics or business before the court.
Supreme court justices are nominally subject to the same ethics rules as other federal judges but in practice govern themselves.
Questions have also been raised about the career of Roberts’ wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, who, according to the New York Times, “has made millions recruiting lawyers to prominent law firms, some of which have business before the court”.
In April, turning down the invitation to testify before the Senate judiciary committee, John Roberts cited concerns about the separation of powers.
Amid progressive anger over decisions on abortion, affirmative action, student debt relief and anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, calls for reform to a court controlled 6-3 by conservatives after Donald Trump appointed three justices in four years have grown ever louder.
Public trust in the court is at all-time lows.
Speaking to the former Biden White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Khanna told MSNBC: “The court is moving us backwards and young people in particular are outraged that the court is taking away the relief of student loans. They’re moving to a time where colleges used to be just for the wealthy and largely white, so I do think this can energise young people, in particular working-class voters.”
Calls for structural reform seem to have as little chance of success as calls for Thomas to resign or be impeached – calls perhaps likely to increase after the publication by the Times on Sunday of an investigation of the justice’s membership of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, “a cluster of extraordinarily wealthy, largely conservative members who lionised him and all that he had achieved”.
Republicans control the House and trail Democrats by two seats in the Senate, all but ensuring a block on any such move. Furthermore, Joe Biden is against major reform, such as changing the size of the court or imposing term limits.
Khanna said: “Voters know that the court is just out of touch with their lives, that the court is taking away their rights, taking away women’s rights to control their own body, taking away students’ relief in terms of the student loans. The president forgave the loans. The supreme court took that money away.
“[Voters] see these justices, they see all the ethical conflicts, and they’re saying, ‘Enough with it. Let’s have a clean slate and term limits.’
“I’ve said everything should be on the table, but … it’s not an easy thing to do. Often people see that it is polarising or partisan. I guess term limits is an easier first step … and a judicial code of conduct of ethics.”
The Senate judiciary chair, Dick Durbin, has promised a vote on ethics reform. Any measure would be highly unlikely to pass the Republican House.
Khanna said: “Even Republicans in Congress, if we go out and have someone buy us lunch, the vast majority of us would have to disclose it and have all these ethics rules. I’m just flabbergasted that the supreme court doesn’t have any of those. The limits are so low for members of Congress, anybody who works in the federal government, and this is just a different set of rules.”
Khanna did not support an attempt to force the chief justice to testify, via a subpoena, a move called for by another prominent House progressive, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
“I would support hearings,” he said. “I think that the chief justice should testify.
“Look, I’ve met the chief justice. I met him a couple of years ago and he said he cared about the legitimacy of the court. The legitimacy of democracy. Well, if he cares about the legitimacy of democracy, he should come testify.”
