I guess my first reaction to this is just to be depressed that we seem to need
something like this:
A group of congressional Democrats is set to introduce legislation Thursday that would apply stricter ethical standards to the Supreme Court, amid concerns that justices have been engaging in questionable behavior.
The proposed Supreme Court Ethics Act of 2013 would subject the justices to the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, a set of standards that currently applies to all other federal judges. Those rules would have forced the justices to recuse themselves from certain cases or explicitly prohibited some high-profile activities that have attracted scrutiny and demand for reform in the past few years.
You would think—and this is me dreaming here, I know that in the real world, fluffy flying unicorns do
not vomit money and candy all over the nice townspeople, no matter how many residents of the charming village write their earnest letters to the unicorn dispatching center of East Lollipop—that anyone that we proposed to elevate to the highest court in the land, the nine people that get final say-so over every last law and regulation and sub-sub-interpretation of alternate phrasings of paragraph two because John Effing Adams, would be screened for these things in advance. The first law of placing people in lifetime positions of tenure is to not ensconce assholes in the role; this would also be the step considered most optional by the historic collection of fellow assholes that nominate these people, and so
assholes ahoy, mateys. We're not in unicorn-land anymore, fellow townspeople, we're in the middle of the ocean and every last boat that goes by is a pirate ship pooping out other pirate ships. Or something. I forget where I'm going with this.
In any event, the seemingly fanciful premise used to be that if Supreme Court Justices had personal involvement with or stake in a case, they would of course take it upon themselves to take an official Shut Up pill for the duration of that case, thus maintaining the integrity of the institution they are supposed to be shepherding and making them look Not Corrupt. This hasn't always worked, but it has mostly lately been rendered a complete sham by, in particular, Justices Antonin "I am the Constitution" Scalia and Clarence "I Haven't Spoken To My Wife or Anyone Else for Ten Years so No Problem Here" Thomas, whose attendance at Koch fundraisers and a variety of other explicitly conservative moneychanging efforts has been raising eyebrows for years now, and which have coincided a little too closely to official Supreme Court opinions from the two that have verily humped the people who were paying for their wine.
More on the Supreme Court Ethics Act below the fold.
There's also Thomas' wife, Ginni Thomas, who regularly engages in activism-slash-lobbying on a host of things that Thomas might coincidentally find the court dealing with; we should be sympathetic to the notion that a husband and wife are two separate people with two separate opinions on things, mind you, but when your sole job in life is to have professional opinions on things, you have to be especially careful that your household is not bringing in checks based directly on how those opinions might go. Opinions fine; paid opinions less fine. Going to a nice dinner party, fine; going to a nice dinner party to raise money for the individual crapstain who you just last month or just next month did/will be making even more rich or powerful based on your written law-of-the-land opinion declaring it should be thus: less fine.
So do we need this legislation? Honestly, I don't know. I think that the very thought that we probably need this legislation is itself a larger condemnation of the current Supreme Court than either the president calling them out in a State of the Union speech or the humiliation they roundly did to themselves with that little episode of hand-waving they called Bush v. Gore. We also should probably expect that the Roberts Supreme Court would simply declare that ethical restraints on themselves is of course unconstitutional, because there's nothing in the Constitution that says Supreme Court justices can't be corrupt as all get-out if they feel like it, so there.
They can be impeached, of course, but nobody's been talking about that because really, in a world where fundraising for ideological causes directly benefiting the guys you're directly benefiting by doing your job a certain way and having them directly benefit you in return with a nice, pleasant weekend getaway is considered old hat, you really have to be something special to be considered legitimately crooked. Oddly, as it turns out, the higher up the political food chain you go the more unethical you can be without getting in trouble for it. A local city councilman might find himself in jail for the same sort of favors that a congressman might absent-mindedly do during any given week, a president can decide to crush a man's son's testicles for sport if his favorite lawyer drafts up a paper saying so, and a Supreme Court justice can pretty much laugh at all the little townspeople and their cute little pleas for magical Please Don't Screw Us unicorns. You say I'm breaking some sort of law, sonny? Hand me that book, you little twit, and I'll tell you what the law is.