Leonard Leo has a message for Democrats looking for to train oversight of the Supreme Court docket: pound dust. In a defiant letter Tuesday to Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, an legal professional for the conservative authorized activist rejected the panel’s request for details about his items to Supreme Court docket justices, claiming that their investigation is “politically charged,” violates Leo’s rights, and “lacks a sound legislative objective.”
“We consider that your inquiry exceeds the bounds positioned by the Structure on the Committee’s investigative authority,” Leo legal professional David B. Rivkin wrote to the senators, who had demanded info from the co-chair of the Federalist Society board after ProPublica reported on a 2008 fishing journey he organized for conservative justice Samuel Alito. “It appears clear that this focused inquiry,” Rivkin continued, “is motivated primarily, if not fully, by a dislike for Mr. Leo’s expressive actions.”
Durbin and Whitehouse, two main voices demanding Supreme Court docket reform, initially requested info from Leo earlier this month about his items to Supreme Court docket justices. Their request got here as they thought-about laws to “strengthen the moral guidelines and requirements that apply to the Justices of the Supreme Court docket”—a reference to Whitehouse’s Supreme Court docket Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act, which the Judiciary Committee took up final week. However Rivkin, writing on Leo’s behalf, claimed that “any try by Congress to enact ethics requirements for the Supreme Court docket would falter on constitutional objections,” and the committee subsequently had no legislative cause to research Leo.
“Congress can not conduct an investigation in reference to laws that it can not constitutionally enact,” Rivkin wrote.
That argument—that mainly any test on the Supreme Court docket’s energy is unconstitutional—echoes one put forth by Chief Justice John Roberts, when he rebuffed Durbin’s invitation to testify earlier than the Judiciary Committee this previous spring on the premise that such an look may increase “separation of powers considerations” and violate “judicial independence.”
However in fact, considerations across the courtroom’s “independence” are on the very coronary heart of Durbin’s investigation and Whitehouse’s laws: Revelations about undisclosed items, journeys, and transactions between justices and the rich and well-connected have raised critical considerations in regards to the integrity of the courtroom, and have helped tank public confidence within the establishment. These transgressions embrace, however will not be unique to, the profitable friendship between Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow; and the luxurious fishing journey Alito took with Paul Singer, a conservative billionaire whose hedge fund later had circumstances earlier than the Supreme Court docket. That 2008 journey—which Alito didn’t report on his annual disclosure kinds—was reportedly organized by Leo, who additionally has deep ties to Thomas and his spouse, Ginni, a conservative activist.
Leo’s lawyer argued Tuesday that Democrats had been enjoying politics in specializing in the scandals involving conservative justices, whereas ignoring cases of attainable impropriety by liberal justices, together with the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “The Committee has targeted its inquiries on people who’ve relationships with Justices appointed by Republican Presidents,” Rivkin wrote. “Reported cases of Democrat-appointed Justices accepting private hospitality or different gadgets of worth from non-public people have been ignored.”
However, as Durbin has identified, he started his push for a Supreme Court docket code of ethics greater than ten years in the past, when Barack Obama was in workplace. “I wasn’t motivated by any resolution by this courtroom—they weren’t even in existence,” Durbin informed me in Might. “We’re definitely not zeroing in and saying, Should you repair the Thomas drawback, the Court docket’s in good condition,” he continued. “We expect all of the justices ought to be held to the identical customary, no less than of the opposite courts in the US.”
That doesn’t look like it ought to be controversial. However Republicans, together with those that have beforehand recommended a necessity for better transparency, have resisted the push for accountability—as has the courtroom itself, regardless of its professed heartburn over its legitimacy disaster. The message as a substitute—from Roberts, his colleagues and the billionaires of their orbit to the GOP—has been that there’s nothing to see right here. Simply belief us, they appear to be saying to the general public—whilst they offer them each cause to not.
