A common sense act has been introduced in congress, HR 926, asking for basic ethical requirements for the Supreme Court. It sounds like something that ought to be in place.
This bill makes various changes related to the ethical standards, financial disclosure requirements, and recusal requirements that apply to Supreme Court Justices.
Among the changes, the bill requires the Supreme Court to:
adopt a code of conduct for Justices and establish procedures to receive and investigate complaints of judicial misconduct;
adopt rules governing the disclosure of gifts, travel, and income received by the Justices and law clerks that are at least as rigorous as the House and Senate disclosure rules; and
establish procedural rules requiring each party or amicus to disclose any gift, income, or reimbursement provided to Justices.
Additionally, the bill expands the circumstances under which a Justice or judge must be disqualified; and
requires the Supreme Court and the Judicial Conference to establish procedural rules for prohibiting the filing of or striking an amicus brief that would result in the disqualification of a Justice, judge, or magistrate judge.
That’s excellent, and there’s a push to get everyone to call up your state representative to support this bill.
I agree with the bill, BUT…
I have no hope.
The fascists take over the government in January, and they’ll kill this bill. They already have. It was introduced in February of 2023, and it’s gone nowhere. Are we supposed to expect a miracle in the next two months?
I have another problem. If you actually go to the site promoted in that image, the first thing you will see is a plea for donations. It’s all about money. They also ask for your phone number, which I’ll never give out again. I made a donation to the Harris campaign months ago, and they passed my number to other organizations, so I was getting dozens of text messages every goddamned day. They all had a stop code you could send to end the noise, but I discovered that they honored it in name only. The organization I requested to stop would stop, but then they’d pass my number to a different, related organization, and the texts would continue. “Retired Democrats 2024”? “Blue Battleground Project”? “GenBlue PAC”? I didn’t sign up for any of those, and somehow they got my number. I don’t trust Democratic fundraisers.
Maybe we should start by demanding an ethical standard for all political organizations?
I know this is a mixed message. I think putting an ethical standard on the Supreme Court is important, but the Democrats are proving themselves venal and ineffectual.
Funding political campaigns is one of the core problems with politics in the US. It smells like a scam. I donated money to a few campaigns in the past, as well as this year. At some point I stupidly provided my phone number…I think it may have been required or gave the appearance of being required. Now I get floods of emails and text messages. Most of the emails go to the junk folder but the text messages are more intrusive.
Right after the convention I was so flooded I emailed Act Blue to see if I could get them to stop. Nope. Sorry, they don’t control the other campaigns which they gave my info to. I replied that they did that without my permission, that they have responsibility to control my personal information, and that perhaps a lawsuit is in order. No further response…naturally.
By the way, I’m still getting fund raising emails and text messages.
Me, too. I hate it.
My problem is enforcement. What happens when SCOTUS refuses to do it, or produces rules so weak they don’t matter?
If the Congress can’t enforce it except by impeachment, which as we well know now is a political action, not a legal/punitive one, then what’s the point?
And if the people don’t care, which re: Thomas, it seems that’s the case, then what’s the point?
We can talk about how bad the court members are all we want…but the electorate it seems doesn’t care.
Funny, repubs used to talk about “accountability” all the time. What happened?
^
“Accountability for thee, not for me.”, as an example, “who hunts the Hunter….”
Well, the Democrats just lost power, so they are visibly starting to express outrage about bad behavior again. And now, predictably, they’re pushing bills which look good on paper but which they can’t pass in practice or even raise public interest in because they are so obviously doomed.
If they had passed some of this stuff when they had the White House and both houses of Congress, back in 2021 or 2009, they wouldn’t be out of power again. They would have been able to retain their majorities because in the midterm elections the voters who are willing to vote Democratic wouldn’t have said “well, gosh, I voted for Democrats last time and they sat on their hands for 2 years, I guess it’s not worth bothering”, which has happened over and over again in the last 30 years. Democrats used to hold Congress pretty consistently, back before Clinton, and they did it by passing bills which had benefits for the public and then running on their record. They literally used to send out lists of What We Have Done For You; can you even imagine Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton trying that? “I funded cops who beat you up, increased homelessness dramatically, granted a record number of fossil fuel drilling licenses, and participated in an actual we-hung-Nazis-for-this genocide which you didn’t want”? This whole “we’re running on not being Republicans so we don’t actually have to do anything” nonsense has always been a losing tactic, and anybody who has played into it with “Blue No Matter Who” needs to be slapped 20 or 30 times until they shut up and stop being a shill for useless politicians who undermine their own positions. This ridiculous political theater, where the Democrats won’t even talk to the press about the idea of passing something useful when they hold power but suddenly are full of ideas the minute they don’t, that needs to stop.
At some point–probably the 2020 campaign–my late wife made a donation. In October, the Harris campaign was still sending fund raising letters in her name. I sent back increasingly shirty letters asking them to stop, and then started included their donation document with 0 written on it. My wife died in June 2022. You’d think someone would keep an eye on vital statistics records and clean up their mailing lists, but that appears not to happen.
At this point, I’ll have to wait to see what happens when the 2026 campaigns start gearing up.
OMG I actually agree in part with The Vicar. That’s a first.
This is spammer behavior, not reputable-organization behavior.
What is wrong with the Democratic Party these days?
As for passing the SC ethics bill, there’s only a very narrow path for that now: first, get it through the Senate immediately, before the Congress switch-over; second, get it through the House immediately after the switchover (if Dems don’t take the house, it’s over right there) but before inauguration day; and then have Biden sign it into law before inauguration day.
I expect the odds of this actually happening to be approximately zilch, because too many Dems are being paid too much money by too many oligarchs not to reform any political institution whose current corruption benefits said oligarchs.
And in the end, I’m having to conclude that America may be rotten to its core, to the point that “land of opportunity” is coded language for “the land of the con and the home of the marks”. Perhaps Uncle Sam dresses like a carnival barker because that’s exactly what he is? Even its past welcoming stance toward immigrants — “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” — was just the bottomless appetite of the pyramid scheme for adding on yet another layer of “investors” at its base. The real face of America was shown during the gold rush: shootings, claim jumpers, salted mines, and the average guy selling pickaxes getting richer than the average guy actually looking for gold.
Why America? It’s where all the Protestants fled to when persecuted by Catholics. Protestant work ethic = perfect mark. A fertile breeding ground for grifters. The UK got nearly as bad because it also ended up dominated by Protestants. Catholics, for all their faults, seem to have given rise to the more persistently semi-socialist countries, the welfare states of western Europe. Canada got caught in between, with a sizable Catholic contingent in Quebec somewhat counterweighting the Protestant majority. You’ll notice it’s the one non-coastal province to rarely elect many Tories to Parliament, and it sourced much of the so-called “orange wave” that propelled the NDP to official-oppositiondom a decade or so ago.
Abort The Court!