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samuel alito
The Self-Serving Supreme Court Is Exonerating Corrupt Officials For Its Own Benefit
The court is letting other government officials off the hook to shelter itself from scrutiny about the justices’ own deep-seated corruption.
Oct 30, 2024
Opinion by opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court has moved toward a judicial framework that insulates justices from growing public concern about their own corruption. In a series of cases, the court has overturned corruption convictions of public officials who received substantial gifts and other things of value in exchange for government favors in decisions that detail the officials’ egregious behavior and yet absolve them of it.
In his law review article “Corruption and the Supreme Court,” Georgetown law professor Josh Chafetz exposes the self-serving nature of these decisions: The court is letting other government officials off the hook to shelter itself from scrutiny about the justices’ own deep-seated corruption.
Professor Chafetz’s disturbing theory is borne out by the evidence. In five cases concerning public corruption heard within the past decade, the Supreme Court issued in each one an opinion that diminished anti-corruption statutes by either framing them as too broad and vague, or by recategorizing corrupt behavior as simple acts natural to government life. As Chafetz stated to The New York Times, which recently wrote an article about his work:
In all five of the decisions, the court’s message has been that “federal law must be interpreted so as not to cover behavior that looks, to any reasonable observer, sketchy as hell...” Taken together, he added, the decisions make a basic point and a more subtle one. The basic one, he said, is that “the justices keep letting crooked politicians off the hook.”
From honest services fraud to quid pro quobribery, in case after case in which the Department of Justice, a U.S. district court, a unanimous jury, and a U.S. court of appeals have found the official’s conduct to be egregious enough to warrant a felony conviction, the Supreme Court has thrown out convictions and shielded government officials from accountability. And as Chafetz explained, it has done this to shield its own misconduct from criticism. The justices responsible for weakening our anti-corruption laws include not just Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, whose records of lavish gifts have recently been exposed, but all justices who in at least some cases voted unanimously to throw out the convictions of corrupt government officials.
The Supreme Court’s forgiving rhetoric on corruption is not new. Its recent opinions emerge from dangerous precedent set in campaign finance law cases, like Citizens United. The Supreme Court has overlooked evidence of undue influence in elections by entities capable of vast political spending, and instead informed the federal and state governments that their only legitimate anti-corruption state interest is in blocking quid pro quo corruption or its appearance. That skyscraper bar, which notoriously is difficult to document, has proven deficient and led to unprecedented levels of campaign spending where the risk of corruption can only be higher. The court’s early refusal to enforce a thorough and meaningful framework of corruption created a slippery slope, unraveling corruption law altogether. And now, the Supreme Court is relieving public officials accused of serious misconduct at all levels.
The Supreme Court’s shocking leniency on matters of corruption does not quell growing concerns about public erosion of trust in government systems, but rather pushes to the public a reimagination of its own corruption as being equally ordinary. It is not. The Supreme Court’s tolerance of public corruption is a self-serving feat to insulate the justices from growing reports about the court’s own corruption. It must end now.
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New Revelations Show Just How Corrupt the Supreme Court Really Is
Call me naïve. At the beginning of this year, I felt confident in asserting that the court was a conservative court, a Federalist Society court, even a Republican court—but not a MAGA court.
Sep 18, 2024
Last spring, Justice Samuel Alito had drafted an opinion dropping federal charges against many of the January 6 insurrectionists who violently stormed the Capitol. The ruling in Fischer v. United States had not yet been released. Then The New York Times published a startling story: Alito himself had flown the flag of insurrection at his home. (He briefly blamed it on his wife: “She is fond of flying flags.”) Days later, it was reported that he had flown such flags at his vacation home as well.
Awkward! Grounds for recusal? Time to rethink the ruling? Nah. Instead, Chief Justice John Roberts quietly took Alito’s embarrassing name off the opinion and slipped his own name onto it instead.
That is just one of the gobsmacking revelations from a story by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak that appeared in The New York Times last weekend. The lurid news of the day quickly overwhelmed it—the gunman arrested outside Donald Trump’s golf course, the continued smear campaign by former President Trump and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) against the Haitian immigrant community in a small city in Ohio, and more.
Throughout American history, overreach by the Supreme Court has provoked a response.
But we must not let these revelations fade from view. They paint a damning and indelible picture of how John Roberts, for all his vaunted “institutionalism” and piety about calling “balls and strikes,” steered the court to shield Trump from accountability for his misdeeds.
Call me naïve. At the beginning of this year, I thought I had few illusions about the court. I had just published a harshly critical book, The Supermajority. But I felt confident in asserting that the court was a conservative court, a Federalist Society court, even a Republican court—but not a MAGA court. It had not yet shown an appetite for excusing Trump from the reach of the law.
So I, along with most legal observers, assumed that the justices would let Trump’s trial proceed. I thought there was a good chance it would be unanimous, that Roberts would work behind the scenes to ensure that the court spoke with one voice on major issues of presidential power and constitutional law. That’s what other chief justices did, most notably Warren Burger in United States v. Nixon, the Watergate tapes case and the closest analogue to the Trump trial ruling.
After all, we all thought, Trump v. United States was legally easy. Indeed, the possibility of criminal charges was the stated reason why Republican senators did not vote to convict him of the January 6 charges in Trump’s second impeachment trial.
Many of us, too, sensed there was a deal afoot—a unanimous ruling that Trump could not be thrown off the ballot by one state under the 14th Amendment and a principled ruling on the criminal trial.
Behind the velvet curtain of the court, though, there was no deal. Roberts wrote a memo in February—before the court had even announced that it would hear Trump’s appeal—declaring that the court would give the former president a huge win. “I think it likely that we will view the separation of powers analysis differently” from the appeals court, he wrote. As Kantor and Liptak summarized, “In other words: grant Mr. Trump greater protection from prosecution.”
They detailed myriad other ways that Roberts steered rulings Trump’s way. He froze out Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The ruling was sloppy and immunized vast areas of potential presidential wrongdoing. The Times noted that NYU Law professor Trevor Morrison had discovered that Roberts selectively edited a quote from a key earlier ruling to help Trump.
The resulting ruling tells future presidents that they can break the law, plainly and flagrantly. As long as they conspire with other government officials, it will be effectively immunized. (Order your White House counsel to pay hush money, as Richard Nixon did, not your campaign manager, and you’ll be off the hook.)
The opinion has widely and correctly been scorned as one of the worst in American history—a rip in the constitutional fabric. The Times’ tick-tock makes clear that this was not a baffling anomaly. Rather, it is the biggest, most visible, and perhaps most consequential in a series of actions taken by a corrupted court. It follows Citizens United, Shelby County, and other rulings that systematically undid key democratic protections.
Throughout American history, overreach by the Supreme Court has provoked a response. Dred Scott did in the 1850s—it helped lead to a civil war. Reactionary rulings such as Lochner did in the early 20th century. Trump v. United States should join with the Dobbs abortion rights ruling to spur a similar backlash today.
We’ve argued for an 18-year term limit for Supreme Court justices, because nobody should have too much public power for too long. And we’ve urged a binding code of ethics, which would have forced Justices Alito and Clarence Thomas to step out of these key cases. These reforms are widely popular. Most recently, a Fox News poll this summer found that 78% support term limits.
The court is a broken institution. It’s time to fix it. The latest revelations remind us that otherwise, the fix is in.
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Ocasio-Cortez Unveils Articles of Impeachment Against Alito, Thomas
"Congress has a legal, moral, and democratic obligation to impeach," said the New York Democrat.
Jul 10, 2024
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday introduced articles of impeachment against Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, citing "widely documented financial and personal entanglements" that have sparked a full-blown ethics crisis on the nation's highest judicial body.
"The unchecked corruption crisis on the Supreme Court has now spiraled into a constitutional crisis threatening American democracy writ large," Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said in a statement, arguing that their refusal to recuse from key cases in which they had glaring financial and personal conflicts of interest "constitutes a grave threat to American rule of law, the integrity of our democracy, and one of the clearest cases for which the tool of impeachment was designed."
The impeachment articles against Thomas accuse the justice of "failure to disclose financial income, gifts and reimbursements, property interests, liabilities, and transactions, among other information," as well as refusal to recuse from matters concerning his spouse's legal and financial interest in cases before the court.
The Alito articles accuse the justice of "refusal to recuse from cases in which he had a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party in cases before the court" and "failure to disclose financial income, gifts and reimbursements, property interests, liabilities, and transactions, among other information."
"Justice Thomas and Alito's repeated failure over decades to disclose that they received millions of dollars in gifts from individuals with business before the court is explicitly against the law," said the New York Democrat. "And their refusal to recuse from the specific matters and cases before the court in which their benefactors and spouses are implicated represents nothing less than a constitutional crisis. These failures alone would amount to a deep transgression worthy of standard removal in any lower court, and would disqualify any nominee to the highest court from confirmation in the first place."
Today, I introduced articles of impeachment against Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
Read my full statement: https://t.co/is5EiLXw56 pic.twitter.com/AGGZhuZUm4
— Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@RepAOC) July 10, 2024
Ocasio-Cortez argued that "Congress has a legal, moral, and democratic obligation to impeach," a statement that reflects widespread alarm over the Supreme Court's ruling last week that current and former U.S. presidents are entitled to sweeping immunity for actions that fall within the scope of their official capacities.
Both Thomas and Alito faced—and rejected—calls to recuse from the case, titled Trump v. United States.
Demands for Alito's recusal came in the wake of news that two flags associated with the January 6, 2021 insurrection were flown at his family's properties in Virginia and New Jersey. Alito blamed his wife for the flags and dismissed calls to step away from the case as baseless.
Thomas, for his part, faced calls to recuse due to his wife's role in efforts to overturn President Joe Biden's 2020 election win.
Additionally, Alito and Thomas have been the focus of recent ProPublicareporting detailing the extent to which both justices have accepted vacations and other undisclosed gifts from right-wing billionaires with interests before the court.
In response to the corruption crisis, the Supreme Court late last year unveiled an ethics code with no enforcement mechanisms—further showing to critics that the justices could not be trusted to police themselves.
"Given the court's demonstrated inability to preserve its own legitimate conduct," Ocasio-Cortez said Wednesday, "it is incumbent upon Congress to contain the threat this poses to our democracy and the hundreds of millions of Americans harmed by the crisis of corruption unfurling within the court."
Only one Supreme Court justice has been successfully impeached in U.S. history, and Ocasio-Cortez's articles have no chance of getting through the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
Advocates nevertheless celebrated the impeachment effort as a necessary step toward reining in the high court.
"The framers of our Constitution called on Congress specifically to hold judicial officers, including Supreme Court justices, accountable for high crimes and misdemeanors that compromise the integrity of the court," Courtney Hostetler, legal director at Free Speech For People, said in a statement. "We're proud to have worked with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's office to help draft these articles and further the process of restoring the Supreme Court to a nonpartisan branch of the federal government."
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