The Supreme Court may be beginning its summer recess, but the furor over the justices’ ethical lapses is still gathering steam. We now know that both Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have gone on lavish vacations with court litigants without disclosing the trips or recusing themselves from their benefactors’ cases. Thomas has also accepted extravagant gifts. Congress should pass new ethics rules for the justices before they reconvene on the first Monday of October.
Though the developing reform effort appears fairly modest — Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin said last week he’s focused on “a code of ethics, increased disclosure requirements and clear rules dictating when justices must recuse themselves from cases” — the action to date is single-party. Proposals to require greater disclosure of the justices’ free trips or to create an inspector general for the judiciary to oversee ethics inquiries once had bipartisan support, but Republicans appear to have backed out.
What might be worse: Some court-watchers are insisting Thomas and Alito did nothing wrong in accepting their largesse. That’s a preposterous position considering the legal standard for bias, as summarized three decades ago by Justice John Paul Stevens: “The relevant inquiry […] is not whether or not the judge was actually biased but whether he or she appeared biased.” Put it another way, as the Code of Conduct for US Judges does: “An appearance of impropriety occurs when reasonable minds, with knowledge of all the relevant circumstances […], would conclude that the judge’s honesty, integrity, impartiality, temperament or fitness to serve as a judge is impaired.”
