The conservative justice indicated support for a code of conduct similar to the one that applies to lower federal court judges.
Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett indicated Monday she would support a code of conduct for the Supreme Court in the wake of recent claims that some justices have fallen short of required ethical standards.
Speaking at the University of Minnesota Law School, Barrett said it would be "a good idea for us do it" and suggested that the justices are broadly in support of a set of principles similar to those that lower court judges are required to follow.
"There is no lack of consensus among the justices. There's unanimity among all nine justices that we should and do hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards possible," she added.
What she is really saying:
"The writing is on the wall that a code of ethics is going to be implemented, so let's try to get something penned down while we still have a conservative majority."
And while there’s a chance Trump will be the next president so he can throw out the remaining liberal judges and bring in basically far-right extremists
You're down voting this guy, but isn't this exactly what they tried to do in Wisconsin? They only backed down because asked impartial retired justices to weigh in, who advised against impeaching a judge just because she disagrees with Republicans.
Donald Trump would not bother asking (or checking to see if he has the authority to do so) he would just do it.
Wisconsinite here. Seconding this.
Trump and his extremist mob will do literally anything they can think of with zero concern for law, consequences, any of that.
Imagine your only drive is to grab as much power as possible at any cost (except to yourself) and you have no conscience, no ethics, no empathy, no sense of responsibility to anyone or anything but you. Because that's the type we're dealing with, here.
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Reminder Amy Coney Barrett swore an oath to God to obey her husband above all other mortals, including herself, her fellow justices, and U.S. law. A set of ethics rules drawn up by SCOTUS would be chump change for her oath.
It's not even that rare.
My buddy married a completely normal woman, but to get married in her family's church part of their ceremony had to include her swearing to God that she'll obey her husband no matter what.
They didn't take it seriously, but lots of her church take it literally. Women are still just property in their sect of Christianity. And the biggest part of marriage is transferring "ownership" from father to husband.
Jeez, I didn’t even make that strict of an oath when I married my fucking Domme! Sometimes people are wrong in an emergency or you have expertise or ethics that you can’t explain to the person due to time or ethical expectations of privacy. As humans we need to maintain a responsibility to disobey anyone in certain circumstances.
Conservative Christians take their lifestyle bdsm too far and need to stop pushing it on others
Yeah, it's not like it was just part of the vows either.
It was it's own like 5 minute thing, and once it was done, then they were allowed to exchange vows to get married.
But she had to swear to obey him first.
Oh hey I thought the cult I grew up in was the only one doing shit like that. Nice to know!
I think that’s worse. Jeez
Lifestyle bdsm? I haven't heard that one before but I like it. I don't consent to being a part of this.
Yeah like they make similar vows to us when they marry, the difference is ours are done with consent, understanding of the real world, alternatives available to us, and no gender based determination of role.
Like when I’m not busy being disturbed by the fact that some guy has so much power over my country because his dumbass sub is a Supreme Court justice, it’s kinda funny how aggressively they never see the similarities.
It's fucked up. The verses are right there in the Bible commanding obedience of wives to husbands, so anyone who leans more literal / fundamentalist is going to follow them.
And then you get religious leaders telling abused women to remain in the marriage and continue being abused, no concept of sexual consent between husband and wife, etc.
This is what happens when your religion is based on antiquated, misogynistic social mores from two thousand years ago.
When women are treated as equals, not only does nothing bad happen (god zapping people from heaven, plagues, locusts, Satan dancing around in glee or whatever the fuck else), but things improve for women and relationships are far better, too.
Anyone who thinks treating women as equals is Wrong™ and spells eternal damnation desperately needs to do some very deep, harsh self-reflection to determine how they have become so twisted.
SCOTUS is only considering this because there's a chance that if they don't, congress will. And if congress sets the rules, they also determine the punishment. The court wouldn't want to permit that sort of check against their power.
It would be truly interesting to see congress write a law governing the behavior of the Supreme Court. If the legislation is written properly, I think it would be permissable, but I wonder if the Supreme Court would just strike it down.
These statements by her and Kavanaugh indicate they think there's a real risk of having ethics laws passed – and/or they hate Thomas. I get the impression that he and Alito are awful coworkers.
Was it Clarence that was watching porn and showing people at work? I can't remember or I may be confusing him with some other asshole Republican
I don't think so. You're probably thinking of the time when Gaetz was showing nude pictures of women he'd slept with on the House floor. They're all so classy, these Republicans, it's hard to remember which flavor of slime each one is.
"There is no lack of consensus among the justices. There's unanimity among all nine justices that we should and do hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards possible," she added.
We have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing or conflicts of interest.
The supreme Court unanimously favors ethics rules that the surpreme court has no intention of following.
we should and do hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards possible. We will not be telling you what those standards are, though you can deduce by counterexample that accepting huge piles of money from people who have business before the court does not violate them.
… in the wake of recent claims that some justices have fallen short of required ethical standards.
The single most indirect, passive, and euphemistic way to say that conservative justices have been caught accepting extravagant gifts from people who have stakes in their rulings, while failing to declare that conflict of interest.
I went to a conservative private university. The different ways they taught us to lie there would surprise you.
She's lying, of course. If she gave a rat's ass about the legitimacy of SCOTUS she wouldn't have accepted nomination in the first place.
Ans if she started to she'd either step down or choke on a bullet.
This is because we cant trust the people we have given supreme power in our society to.
Maybe they shouldn't have the power if they are so unethical. Looking at you Thomas.
But relax, Thomas just wants to drop his pube in your Pepsi. He should be allowed to!
Don't slander a sitting justice like that!
It was Coke.
Oh you're right
What is the story behind this? I haven’t heard of the pubic coke before.
One of the things that came up during Anita Hill's testimony about how Thomas would harass her. He would ask if someone put a pubic hair on his can of soda.
I don't really understand how ethics rules would really help fix the inherent problems within the Supreme Court. How would they even be implemented, and what body overseas their application?
Do the judges themselves decide when they break the ethics rules? Does the court decide the punishment? Unless there's some mechanism of action in place to actually remove or punish a sitting Supreme Court justice, how will it be any different than what we have now? If there is some change to the separations of power, how will politicians utilize it to game the system?
I honestly think this is just a way to appease the general public while not changing anything about the behaviour of the courts. Oh okay, I broke an ethics rule, I guess impeach me or something… oh yeah, 3/4 of Senate and the house are completely ethically bankrupt and would never remove a sitting justice on their own side!
That’s what kills me about this whole thing too. No one is talking about this. Rules without enforcement are just suggestions. Any meaningful enforcement mechanism will either have an impossibly high threshold or be inevitable be weaponized.
An “ethics code” is a deflection from the real issue. Thomas must be impeached and removed. Any talk about an ethics code is distracting from the fact that the mechanisms we do have are not being used.
Yeap, the best I can think of is a violation of the ethics rules lowering the needed votes for an impeachment from supermajority to majority. But that would inevitably lead to more political investigations and maneuvering in Congress.
It's all kind of hopeless unless we have people in Congress that care more about the people than their political parties, and if we had that this wouldn't be a problem in the first place.
Changing the impeachment processes would require a Constitutional amendment.
Also, yeah, that would be an absolute mess. Would you really want a Republican House and Senate to be able to bulldoze the Court? Which would require the Dems to do it in return, and mean that functionally, the SCOTUS will always either match the partisan composition the House, Senate, and Presidency or otherwise be vacant.
Let's also keep in mind that the ethics committee in the House and Senate are seen as one of the most pointless, least powerful appointments in their respective bodies. They have zero enforcement power.
The only way we'll see real accountability is if we restore checks and balances with each branch able to remove members from other branches.
But that's not happening anytime soon.
You know what also would be a good idea?
Not letting a serial sexual abuser on the Supreme Court.
Maybe she should unilaterally adopt some ethics rules then. Publish them, shame other judges to do likewise
And step down in the process, it would be the most ethical thing for her to do
Note to self- return to this thread and make a joke about the "honor system," but work in the words "your honor."
So. Wanna bet Bret had one PBR Tallboy too many (so like, half a can?) and started harassing her?
I can’t imagine a situation in which she isn’t sexually harassed by her two alleged rapist coworkers. I think there’s only two, I know there’s at least 2
Read as: "I want to help write the ethics rules so they only apply to the people I want them to."
Christian Nationalist says what?
The only way to save the court is to dissolve it, arrest Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Alito and Thomas today, have an independent investigator rip into the other 5 and arrest them if they so much as accepted a free drink from anyone with business before the court and use the powers extant in the constitution for congress to pass a code of ethics that is publicly known and that all justices are legally bound to uphold on pain of disbarment and prison.
arrest them
I don't know how to tell you this, but it seems like based on what is known publicly they have committed no crimes. Have they committed things that should be crimes? Oh, for sure.
Also, we might as well wish for personal unicorns for all citizens than an actual constitutional amendment. Anything less is subject to judicial review (a made up power the supreme court gave itself?) so even if a law got passed, it would be subject to the people it's supposed to regulate allowing it.
they have committed no crimes
That's what a trial is for
You need crimes to have a trial? Theoretically cops are supposed to have reasonable, articulable suspicion of specific crime before even detaining someone. You might be looking for something like congressional review, but most of the things that have been reported on Thomas for example, aren't chargeable under current law. If our politics wasn't so incredibly fucked right now, theoretically they would impeach, but that's just about the only mechanism for dealing with justices. Even then, that's edit:
continentcontingent mostly on logical inference of this line in the constitution:The judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behaviour
which assumes that "bad behavior" means they can be removed, which translates in modern society as "if there is political will crime is legal." See also: Donald Trump, who very obviously should have been removed several times over, is basically exactly what the framers had in mind when designing mechanisms around impeachment/removal/emoluments, etc. for bad actors, but republicans just didn't feel like it? And much like Trump, even if congress did investigate and find say, normie crimes like embezzlement or insider trading or something, we face the possibility that you end up with a Justice in prison still ruling in much the same way the Republican front-runner for president is very obviously a raping, treasonous, insurrectionist. Like, that's why those bad-actor clauses are there, but again, that requires a congress that can function (lol Republicans can't even get a house speaker) and actually have the will to do so. As it is, I'm guessing half of the country is probably just like they were with Trump evading taxes and thinks that Thomas taking advantage means he's "smart" and he's actively advancing a bunch of the fucked up shit they want, just like the rest of the corrupt, illegitimate court.
I'm sure our gov will get right on that…
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Speaking at the University of Minnesota Law School, Barrett said it would be "a good idea for us do it" and suggested that the justices are broadly in support of a set of principles similar to those that lower court judges are required to follow.
Barrett, who did not address the ethics issue at a public event in August, said the justices already follow existing rules such as the requirement that federal judges file financial disclosure reports every year.
She declined to comment on why the court has not yet adopted a code despite pressure from members of Congress and ethics experts.
The court has been under scrutiny for alleged ethics lapses after a ProPublica article in April detailed Justice Clarence Thomas’ acceptance of trips from Harlan Crow, a Republican donor, which he had not disclosed in his annual financial disclosure reports.
Thomas defended his actions, saying the gifts from Crow constituted “personal hospitality,” meaning he did not have to disclose them under the judicial disclosure rules at the time.
The justices issued a statement in April saying they “reaffirm and restate” their commitment to ethics principles, an announcement that failed to quell criticism.
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