Revelations that Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife accepted lavish trips around the world from a billionaire GOP donor over two decades are prompting calls for new ethics rules for the Supreme Court’s nine jurists — who enjoy both immense power and life tenure.
A ProPublica report Thursday said that Thomas and his wife traveled through Indonesia aboard Harlan Crow’s 162-foot yacht, vacationed almost every summer at his luxurious New York resort and flew on his private plane around the world on trips worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Judicial ethics experts disagree on whether Thomas violated the law by not revealing the hospitality on his annual financial disclosures. A federal statute governs gifts to judges, but its wording is open to interpretation and the justices have questioned whether it can constitutionally be applied to them. Unlike lower court judges, the Supreme Court isn’t formally bound by any code of conduct.
“This is why the Supreme Court needs a code of conduct,” said Steven Lubet, a judicial-ethics expert at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law. “They’re just operating in a standards-free zone.”
The court has faced a string of ethics scandals and controversies over the past year. The one that reverberated the most was the May leak of the court’s draft opinion overturning the constitutional right to abortion, for which the court has yet to identify the culprit. A New York Times report in November said a network of anti-abortion activists used a charity tied to the court to cultivate relationships with the justices and try to influence them.
Thomas, the 74-year-old anchor of the court’s conservative wing, has been at the center of much of the criticism. His wife, right-wing activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, lobbied former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to work to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Although that push helped lay the groundwork for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Thomas later declined to recuse himself from a case involving the release of White House records concerning Jan. 6.
Thomas did disclose a 2015 gift from Crow — a bronze bust of abolitionist Frederick Douglass valued at $6,484 — but his reports don’t mention the vacations and other travel on Crow’s plane. The filings include more routine items, such as income for teaching at several law schools and reimbursement for travel and lodging expenses when Thomas…
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