Elie Mystal explains why the newly announced Republican Supreme Court "code of ethics" isn't more than a self-serving press release:
In surprising news, the Supreme Court announced Monday that for the first time in history, all nine justices have adopted an ethics code. But there’s no reason to celebrate just yet or herald the end of public corruption on the Supreme Court. Their self-adopted ethics rules have holes big enough to sail a super yacht through.
The first and most obvious problem with the court’s self-imposed ethics code is that there is no enforcement mechanism. It’s still up to the individual justices to decide if they have violated their own ethics rules. There’s no third-party adjudication of an ethics violation, there isn’t even meaningful peer review among the other justices of a potential violation. Put simply, it’s up to Clarence Thomas to decide whether Clarence Thomas violated Clarence Thomas’s rules.
To quote Captain Barbosa from the Pirates of the Caribbean, the code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules. Which means, effectively, that there has been no change. In fact, in a terse, one paragraph cover letter accompanying the supposed ethics code, the Supreme Court says as much. The justices wrote: “For the most part these rules and principles are not new: The Court has long had the equivalent of common law ethics rules… The absence of a Code, however, has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules. To dispel this misunderstanding, we are issuing this Code, which largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct.”
A misunderstanding? The justices want people to believe that we were simply confused, like wee babes in the woods, about the existence of ethical strictures that they hold themselves accountable to even as they take free stuff from interested parties. The justices are essentially saying that they’ve adopted this code so that people like me cannot say, “The Supreme Court is the only court in the country that operates without ethics rules.” Beyond that, it’s business as usual for them as they go about their graft and corruption...
It's going to take a far more engaged and aggressive Congress than exists now to write rules that effectively rein in the ethics- free zone a.k.a. the Republican Supreme Court. Something like Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse's "Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency (SCERT) Act". In the meantime, a largely toothless, business- as- usual approach such as the one outlined in the "code of ethics" isn't going to keep any of the entitled, corrupt Justices (you know who they are) from interpreting their code as they please as they continue to take favors from interested parties. And that's no "misunderstanding."
(Graphic: the two justices the "code" was written around/ via MSNBC)
