In a rare unanimous decision, a letter published on Tuesday by all nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Leftist-led plan to undermine the high court’s independence and affirmed that they would not submit to Congressional oversight on ethics concerns.
This from westernjournal.com.
The letter was agreed to and signed by both the liberal and conservative justices, a move which WTVD described as a “rare step.”
That letter was then sent by the court to Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, a communist/globalist and also the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who had demanded that the court subject itself to appearing before Congress to testify about how the court maintains its ethics.
The court reaffirmed its commitment to voluntarily conform to a code of ethics, but refused to adopt any sort of new code of conduct enforceable by congress in the wake of new left-driven scrutiny of Justice Clarence Thomas.
The letter clearly shows that even its liberal members are not going to permit the democrat communist/globalist party to undermine their autonomy and submit to rule by the U.S. Senate despite the constant attacks.
In the letter, entitled “Statement on Ethics Principles and Practices,” the members of the Supreme Court said:
The justices … consult a wide variety of authorities to address specific ethical issues.
The justices collectively continued:
This statement aims to provide new clarity to the bar and to the public on how justices address certain recurring issues, and also seeks to dispel some common misconceptions.
The justices also argued that strict rules governing when a justice must be recused and removed from a case is a dangerous precedent to set.
They said:
If the full Court or any subset of the Court were to review the recusal decisions of individual justices, it would create an undesirable situation in which the Court could affect the outcome of a case by selecting who among its members may participate.
The justices also warned that such rules would:
[E]ncourage strategic behavior by lawyers who may seek to prompt recusals in future cases by using the rules to weed out justices they imagine might be leaning against their positions.
The Leftist oversight plan is a clear case
of an unconstitutional power grab.
The U.S. Constitution holds that the court is an autonomous and equal branch of government and if the court had agreed to Senate oversight, they’d be handing away their sovereign power to another branch of government.
The Senate’s attempt to usurp the court’s powers came on the heels of reports that Justice Clarence Thomas had accepted gifts and vacations from a friend, who also happens to be a deep-pocketed GOP political donor.
The Left called the long-standing relationship Thomas has with GOP mega-donor Harlan Crow an ethics violation and an extensive report by liberal news outlet ProPublica claimed that Thomas did not disclose the gifts and trips on his financial disclosure reports.
For his part, Thomas released a statement saying that he handled the trips properly.
Justice Thomas said in his statement:
As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them.
The statement continued:
Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable. I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure, and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines.
Even ABC News noted that the charges against Thomas seem to be empty.
According to the network, Sarah Isgur, an ABC News legal contributor and former Justice Department attorney, said:
There’s no actual evidence of corruption in the outcome of any case or even the appearance of corruption in any case. It’s just that something like this could lead to the appearance of corruption.
Further, the report spurred leftists including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is plagued by ethics violations of her own, to call for Thomas’s impeachment. And it also gave Senate Leftists what they thought was a way to weaken the Supreme Court.
Despite the handwringing of [communists/globalists], court watchers and legal experts from across the spectrum called allegations that Thomas violated ethics a “laughably stupid” accusation. It turns out that trips on private planes and yachts were not required to be added to federal financial disclosures until March of this year. So, Thomas didn’t violate any financial filing instructions.
ProPublica’s goal, of course, was to have Thomas removed from the court to take away a powerful and conservative voice from the Supreme Court. But other members of the court have also been accused of ethics violations.
Insider reported:
Chief Justice John Roberts’ wife, Jane, was also recently attacked for earning $10.3 million in commissions from elite law firms.
In addition, the left’s beloved Ruth Bader Ginsburg was forced to amend her financial disclosures to reflect gifts and earnings at least half a dozen times going back to the late 1990s. And even Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson have at times amended reports to include undisclosed items.
And leftist groups have been all over the thinly veiled attack published by ProPublica.
Gabe Roth, executive director of the leftist Fix the Court, which is a leading advocate of weakening the court and packing it with leftists, said:
Without a formal code of conduct, without a way to receive ethics complaints and without a way to investigate them, the Supreme Court has set itself apart from all other federal institutions.
