What Congress can do, right now, about Justice Thomas
WAPO Editorial BoardAs reports about the financial dealings
https://www.cigarbid.com...ors/yafEditor/bold.gifof Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, dribble out, the country’s institutions of government appear to be stuck. The Supreme Court issued a statement suggesting the justices would change little about their ethics rules — or the lack thereof. Members of Congress have introduced bills that would force the court to adopt an ethics code, but Republican opposition probably dooms the legislation, at least for now.
Yet federal lawmakers can still respond usefully, using their oversight powers to clarify the record, examine how existing judicial transparency mandates are working and, in the process, show that justices who skirt disclosure will at least suffer public scrutiny.
The accounts keep coming. ProPublica reported that Justice Thomas repeatedly failed to disclose the extent of his financial relationship with Texas billionaire Harlan Crow, who has bought three properties from the justice and his relatives, took him on numerous luxury vacations and even paid for the justice’s grandnephew to attend expensive private schools.
A Post investigation then found that the conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged to pay Ms. Thomas tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work, insisting that no mention of her name appear on any paperwork related to the transactions.
Lawmakers should probe, firstly, what happened in the Crow matter. What else might Justice Thomas have accepted from Mr. Crow? What was the nature of Mr. Crow’s relationship with Justice Thomas, and how did it develop? This could require testimony from Mr. Crow himself, particularly if Justice Thomas fails to revise his disclosure forms.
There’s more. Did the other justices’ disclosure forms — or what Justice Thomas himself had thought was necessary to disclose in the past — suggest that Justice Thomas’s lack of transparency on the Crow windfall was unusual? Are congressionally mandated disclosure requirements — or their application, overseen by the Judicial Conference — stringent enough? On that score, it would be useful — and legitimate — for lawmakers to hear from Judicial Conference representatives about how justices’ disclosures are scrutinized, and what guidance was in place before a recent clarification about the need to report private jet travel.
The (latest) revelations concerning Ms. Thomas are trickier for Congress to investigate because they involve not a justice but a justice’s spouse, who faces no formal expectation to disclose publicly her business dealings. Yet the unattractive flow of secret money Mr. Leo apparently directed raises questions about when justices should be expected to recuse themselves because of their spouses’ financial arrangements — and about whether the existing disclosure rules, which don’t mandate revealing underlying sources of income, are adequate. The Leo-directed payments went to Ms. Thomas’s firm, Liberty Consulting, but only through a polling company owned by Kellyanne Conway that was in turn working for a Leo-affiliated group, the Judicial Education Project.
In both cases, Congress has a legitimate legislative purpose in asking questions. If not immediately, at some point Congress might attempt to impose transparency, recusal and other rules on the court.
That prospect, even if seemingly remote right now, should jolt the court into action. The justices owe the public the sort of transparency and ethical adherence that virtually every other part of the government follows — and that, by the way, lower courts observe, too. They should show they will right their ethical ship before lawmakers try to fix it from the outside.
