By Scott Montgomery - 04 July 2023
HEALTH AND SOCIAL POLICY
It’s being called an “ethics crisis.” A new euphemism enters the lexicon of prestige media coverage of high U.S. officials. As we all now known, the “C” word is not used in America.
Let’s review a few of the undisputed facts anyway. These have emerged in 2023 by the publication ProPublica. The latest is the discovery that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito accepted an all-expense paid vacation to a luxury fishing lodge in Alaska, paid for by a hedge-fund billionaire, Paul Singer. During the next six years, this same hedge fund repeatedly came before the court in various cases, including one in 2014 where the fund claimed damages against the Argentine government. The Court ruled in its favor, which resulted in $2.4 billion paid to Singer’s firm. Justice Alito did not recuse himself from the case. After the story broke, he wrote a Wall Street Journal commentary accusing ProPublica of falsification, misrepresentation, and bias. The facts, he wrote, “would not cause a reasonable and unbiased person to doubt my ability to decide the matters in question impartially.”
Only a few months earlier, ProPublica had published similar revelations about another Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas. In this case (so to speak), following ethics protocol, Thomas first declared in 2004 gifts he had received from a major Republican donor, Harlan Crow, including a Bible once owned by Frederick Douglass. This was reported by the Los Angeles Times in that same year.
Over the next two decades, Thomas and his wife, Ginni, were treated by billionaire Crow to luxury trips, private resorts, and cruises on a “superyacht.” Crow bought the house where Thomas’ mother was living and upgraded it, and he also paid the tuition for a private school attended by Thomas’ grandnephew, whom he considered “as a son.” None of these gifts and benefits were ever reported. In the meantime, Justice Thomas cast a key vote in the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision that allowed nearly unlimited donations to political parties and campaigns, thus aiding Crow’s own goal to bolster Republican coffers.
There are two, fairly simple, take-aways from this information. First, the U.S. institution of government that is least accountable to any other entity, especially the people, is corrupt. The word rings. Such is not a condition into which American officials are supposed to subside, at least beyond certain peccadillos (an affair, a promised bill for donations, an attempt to overturn an election and incite an insurrection, etc.).
Yet, were the events described associated with an emerging or developing country—say, in Africa or Latin America—the “C” word would come out of the holster as smoothly, predictably, and unquestionably as if by reflex. Such high-level malfeasance happens all over the world—indeed, it is invoked as a fairly routine way to divide advanced from non-advanced nations. Here’s a nice, recent example from a trusted think tank (Council on Foreign Relations):
Latin America’s judiciaries are engulfed in corruption scandals. In Colombia a former Supreme Court member was arrested on charges of corruption and bribery. In Peru multiple judges stand accused of trading favorable rulings and shortened sentences for money and perks…Mexico created a new national anti-corruption system, explicitly outlawing bribes, embezzlement, and the failure to disclose conflicts of interest, and creating a dedicated prosecutor to go after perpetrators.
Mexico, in fact, may have a good idea here. U.S. Supreme Court justices answer only to each other. The Constitution does include a provision allowing them to be impeached and removed by Congress, but this has never happened. The only attempt came in 1804, when President Thomas Jefferson enlisted his supporters in Congress to impeach Justice Samuel Chase for allowing partisanship to dictate his decisions on the bench. Whether the irony of the attempt intervened isn’t entirely clear, but Chase was not convicted. No one involved in that ancient affair, however, could have imagined a court whose majority included Catholic extremists. Be that as it may, the unwillingness to view a Supreme Court Justice as anything other than beyond serious reproach has become an institution of its own. Those who decree the law of the land must be allowed to inhabit the clouds.
The second take-away point is different. It is easy to forget, in the search for simple evils, that corruption requires a minimum involvement of two parties. In the case of Supreme Justices Thomas and Alito, the other parties were both billionaires. These men understand very well the power of their wealth, how easily it can exceed, seduce, the authority of officials. It doesn’t sound likely that either justice put up much resistance to accepting gifts from obvious partisans.
Yet the billionaires also know how to pretend innocence. That a key Republican donor like Harlan Crow would befriend a conservative Supreme Court Justice, who then claims only “friendship” is involved when he and his family are slushed with luxurious generosity, including money itself, seems nothing less than an insult to common intelligence. Thomas clearly understood the problem, as he kept silent about it and rarely talked to the press. Alito evidently thought no problem existed.
All four men have since acted as if the appearance of impropriety is either trivial or irrelevant. Republicans won’t care, and Democrats don’t matter. They seem to have perceived the situation correctly. After their cozy relationship was revealed in April and calls from the Dems went out for “ethics reform,” the Court, in a rare response, signed a Statement on Ethics Principles and Practices, which was sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee and merely repeated the status quo. Translation: “Trust us. Nothing’s wrong, and none of your business.”
For now, the dust seems still in the air. The matter has left the pages of the prestige media, and the Court has continued to undo practices and promises to aid equality, the poorer members of society, and students with penalizing debt. Yet Senator Dick Durbin, Chair of the Judiciary Committee wants a new bill on behalf of transparency. He’s not quite satisfied, it appears, that members of the Court are happy to accept extravagant gifts while rejecting help to debt-burdened students. For the time being, however, corrupt members of the Celestial 9 can remain snug in “judicial independence” and an ethics-free lifestyle.
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