In a sea of crazy
Like being dipped in living waters. That’s what it’s like anymore to hear an actual expert testify on Capitol Hill instead of partisan shills. Imagine hearings without grandstanding and hectoring from Republicans such as those on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “World’s greatest deliberative body,” indeed.
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee spent a hearing Tuesday making the case for legislation that would put the Supreme Court under an ethics code if the justices didn’t do so themselves, but witnesses were split as to whether Congress has the power to do so.
The backers of proposed bills argued that the justices have waited for too long to impose their own ethics code, exemplified by recent reports about undisclosed luxury trips and a real estate transaction Justice Clarence Thomas received from a billionaire GOP donor.
Amanda Frost, a University of Virginia Law School professor, testified that the Constitution is silent about the internal workings of the Supreme Court and instead left it to Congress to establish the court’s size, budget and rules like a quorum.
Frost said that Congress has legislated rules for the court since the 1790s, including the oath of office justices take, and that would include an ethics code.
“To claim Congress lacks that authority is to ignore the Constitution’s text and structure,” Frost said.
I could listen to this opening statement clip from Frost all day on repeat. Sanity. Remember it?
There was, of course, pushback from the GOP:
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said creating an ethics code for the court may create a “cottage industry” of advocates filing ethics complaints in cases strategically, making it “ripe for seeding the field with politicization of the Supreme Court.”
Tillis said he could not imagine the Founding Fathers supporting such a check on the justices.
“That seems to be far afield from anything the Founding Fathers would have considered appropriate,” Tillis said.
Frost, an authority, disagrees.
That 1978’s Ethics in Government Act has spawned no “cottage industry” by litigants intent on picking off justices with whom they disagree was of no matter to Tillis. Nor to other Republicans on the committee.