Groups to Senate Dems: Subpoena Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo Now

More than a dozen progressive advocacy groups on Thursday pressed Sen. Dick Durbin and other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee to urgently subpoena Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo, right-wing figures who have featured prominently in recent reporting on undisclosed gifts to U.S. Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

"We must learn the full scope of these hidden efforts to improperly influence the Supreme Court and the extent of Justices Thomas' and Alito's ethical wrongdoings," Stand Up America, Indivisible, Demand Justice, and 11 other groups said.

"We encourage Chair Durbin and Judiciary Democrats to continue their efforts to subpoena Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo, to shed light on any potential corruption on our nation's highest court, and we encourage the full Senate to pass a binding, enforceable code of ethics for all Supreme Court justices," they added.

"Billionaires, with demonstrated interests in influencing the court, making enormous secret gifts to justices, obviously merits investigation."

The statement comes a week after Durbin (Ill.) abruptly adjourned a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting during which members were expected to vote on subpoenas for Crow and Leo, both of whom have been accused of stonewalling the panel's investigation into Supreme Court corruption.

Durbin blamed "scheduling issues" for the surprise move and vowed to "continue to pursue subpoena authorization for Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo—two individuals who have refused to comply with this committee's oversight requests for months."

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a member of the judiciary panel who is leading a Supreme Court ethics bill, said in a statement after the adjournment that "by putting up 90 amendments, Republicans jammed the gears of the committee."

"In an ordinary time, and with an ordinary Supreme Court, this would have been an uneventful day. Billionaires, with demonstrated interests in influencing the court, making enormous secret gifts to justices, obviously merits investigation," said Whitehouse. "We will still go forward, now that we have seen this strategy, with unified support on the Democratic side for getting to the bottom of what is going on with this pattern of secret billionaire gifts to justices."

Since April, the investigative outlet ProPublica has published several explosive stories detailing the luxury vacations and other gifts that Thomas and Alito have received from right-wing billionaires, including Crow and hedge fund mogul Paul Singer.

Leo, co-chair of the Federalist Society and a key architect of the Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority, attended and helped organize trips detailed in ProPublica's reporting, which sparked a full-blown ethics crisis at the high court and led the judicial body to adopt a code of conduct earlier this week.

Critics blasted the move as a "toothless PR stunt" that will do little to nothing to prevent wrongdoing, a message that the 14 progressive advocacy groups echoed in their joint statement on Thursday.

"The Supreme Court's new 'code of conduct,' which lacks an enforcement mechanism and was described by the court itself as 'not new,' only underscores the need for a thorough investigation and accounting of corruption on the high court," they argued.

An earlier version of this story misstated Leonard Leo's role at the Federalist Society. He is co-chair, not chair.