The US Supreme Court has been “hostage and corrupted by money and extremism,” creating a “crisis of legitimacy” that threatens the stability of American democracy, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has warned.
During a roundtable on Capitol Hill, the New York Democrat accused the court of “delegitimizing itself through its behavior.”
In the two years since the court overturned Roe v Wade, striking down the constitutional right to abortion, a decision that sparked fierce political backlash from voters across the ideological spectrum, the court has been rocked by ethics scandals involving two of the most conservative judges of the bench involved were: Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
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“The highest court in the land today has the lowest ethical standards,” said Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland and the ranking member of the House of Representatives oversight hearing, who convened the hearing along with Ocasio-Cortez.
Together, they tried to “connect the dots” between what they described as a web of dark money and the events that led to a conservative supermajority strengthened by Donald Trump. Only Democrats were present.
“Dark money is the rot in our democracy right now,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, a senator and longtime crusader against secret spending in politics and a supporter of Supreme Court reform, who testified.
Last week, Thomas officially announced that he had booked luxury vacations to Indonesia and a retreat in California, paid for by conservative billionaire Harlan Crow. The Republican megadonor also paid private school tuition for Thomas’s second cousin, ProPublica reported as part of a series of revelations about the Supreme Court justices who won a Pulitzer Prize for public service.
ProPublica also reported that Alito was flying on a private jet and vacationing with a billionaire who had court cases. The conservative justice was already under scrutiny following a New York Times report that his wife flew an upside-down American flag outside his Virginia home days after the attack on the US Capitol by extremist Trump supporters, as well as an appeal to heaven flag associated with Christian nationalism flying outside a beach house in New Jersey.
In response to the flag incidents, Democrats in Congress have called on Alito to recuse himself from cases involving Trump and the January 6 defendants.
He refused.
Democrats have also introduced numerous bills, such as a proposal to create an independent ethics office and an internal investigative counsel within the Supreme Court. Other ideas include limiting justices’ terms to eighteen years instead of lifetime appointments, and expanding seats on the court. But reforms are unlikely to happen without Republicans, who have worked for decades to build the court’s conservative majority.
Thomas has also rejected calls to withdraw from cases involving Trump because his wife, Ginni, a well-known conservative activist, supported the former president’s false claims of election fraud and helped lead the campaign to overturn the results of to overturn the 2020 elections.
The continued surveillance prompted the court to adopt its first code of ethics last year, but it lacks any form of enforcement. Public confidence in the court has fallen to a near-historic low.
Ocasio-Cortez questioned why judges are not subject to the same ethical standards as the branches of government. For example, she said, members of Congress are prohibited from accepting gifts worth more than $50.
“Americans are losing basic rights, reproductive health care, civil liberties, voting rights, the right to clean air and water, because the court has been captured and corrupted by money and extremism,” she said.
Without a binding code of conduct, Raskin said, there was nothing to govern the justices.
“If you can decide the presidential election with five or four votes in Bush versus Gore, if you can take, stack and pick up not just Congress but the Supreme Court itself, by denying the other side even a hearing, why can you? then don’t do it? a friend of the court – some amicus curiae – flies you to Bali for a holiday, or pays your relative’s private school fees, buys you a recreational vehicle or sends you on a luxury all-expenses-paid holiday, why the hell not? ”
