The Supreme Court has problems, especially when it comes to ethics. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) has introduced a bill to fix that. Here is how she describes it in an e-mail to her supporters:
Public trust in the Supreme Court has collapsed to historic lows — and it isn’t hard to see why.
A truly radical draft opinion is poised to overturn decades of settled law on abortion rights. Justice Clarence Thomas failed to recuse himself from a case on the attempted coup that his wife participated in. Justices accept lavish international trips and fail to file basic financial disclosure reports.
And it’s not just the top of the judicial branch: ethics scandals have plagued our federal courts for decades. Clerks have accused federal judges of sexual misconduct with little to no recourse. Judges and justices alike sit in cases in which they own individual stock in the parties — and in cases that could directly affect their spouses.
The judicial branch needs real ethics reform, from top to bottom. I’ve got a plan for that: Last week, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal and I introduced the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act.
From banning federal judges from owning individual stocks to overhauling the broken judicial recusal process, my bill would help root out corruption and restore public trust in the federal judiciary. But first, we have to fight side by side — as a grassroots movement — to get this bill through Congress.
Corruption is toxic to our democracy. But just this week, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority opened the floodgates for more corruption across the rest of the federal branches: They ruled that campaigns can blow past limits on raking in donations after elections specifically to pay off the candidate’s personal loans to the campaign.
Justice Elena Kagan ripped the majority a new one in her dissent: “Political contributions that will line a candidate’s own pockets, given after his election to office, pose a special danger of corruption…In striking down the law today, the Court greenlights all the sordid bargains Congress thought right to stop.”
We need to fight back against those types of “sordid bargains” — including in the federal judiciary.
Here are a few big pieces of how our bill would give Americans confidence that their judges are held to the highest ethical standards and are free from conflicts of interest:
- Banning federal judges from owning individual stocks and securities, commercial real estate, trusts, and other investments.
- Strengthening restrictions on judicial gifts and privately funded travel.
- Imposing the existing Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges on the Supreme Court — the only court in the country not currently subject to an ethical code.
- Improving disclosure of judicial speeches and case assignments, while mandating the livestreaming of court proceedings and new judicial workplace surveys.
- Requiring Supreme Court Justices to issue written recusal decisions whenever a litigant requests recusal and forcing the Judicial Conference to issue advisory opinions with their recusal recommendations.
- Closing the loophole that allows judges to escape accountability by retiring from the bench, strengthening disciplinary authority for the Judicial Conference, setting up expedited impeachment procedures for federal judges, and allowing the public to file complaints against Supreme Court Justices — like all other federal judges — through a new Supreme Court Complaints Review Committee.
- Limiting the ability of courts to seal records that contain important information for the protection of public health or safety, often concealed at the urging of massive corporations.
Look: Congresswoman Jayapal and I aren’t new to this issue.
We’ve also put out the most ambitious anti-corruption plan since Watergate — targeting corruption across the federal government.
And we’ve called on Chief Justice John Roberts to clean up the judiciary — including after the revelations about Justice Thomas’s recent failure to recuse himself, and after a report that over 131 federal judges violated federal law and ethics guidelines by overseeing cases involving companies in which they or their family members owned individual stock.
But Chief Justice Roberts has simply failed to act. So we’ve got a plan to do it for him.
Ted, beyond this bill, there’s more we can do to restore faith in an independent judiciary committed to the rule of law. I’ve been pushing to expand the Supreme Court by four or more seats to rebalance this institution that’s been hijacked by right-wing extremists. But let’s make progress by tackling corruption.
There’s real momentum behind the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act — 19 of our colleagues in Congress, and a multitude of national organizations are already on board. But now we need to show that the American people are raising their voices on this.
