It's Long Past Time to Institute an Ethics Code for the Supreme Court
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
I don't want to leap to any conclusions, but it has come to my attention that the conservative capture of the federal judiciary not only has effectively set us well down the road back to 1871, but also has been a most excellent vehicle for delivering graft to the people on the inside. Over the last month, we've seen how the Supreme Court has become a high-end real estate speculation firm, John Roberts — Operations Manager. We've learned that Jane Roberts, the operation manager's wife, has made a cool $10 million as a kind of legal headhunter. Thanks to the New York Times, we also learned that the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University functioned as a lucrative side hustle for ambitious conservative jurists.
The law school had long stood out for its rightward leanings and ties to conservative benefactors. Its renaming after Justice Scalia in 2016 was the result of a $30 million gift brokered by Leonard Leo, prime architect of a grand project then gathering force to transform the federal judiciary and further the legal imperatives of the right. An ascendant law school at George Mason would be part of that plan. Since the rebranding, the law school has developed an unusually expansive relationship with the justices of the high court — welcoming them as teachers but also as lecturers and special guests at school events. Scalia Law, in turn, has marketed that closeness with the justices as a unique draw to prospective students and donors.
Ah, yes. Leonard Leo, the uncrowned king of dark money and architect of our carefully cultivated conservative majority on the Supreme Court. When it comes to the judiciary, and the universe of legalized influence peddling created by the conservative products of that universe, Leo is Professor Moriarty — the spider at the center of the web, attuned to every quiver of every strand. And, according to Politico, a man making a nice living at it.
Leo first met Barre Seid, the now 91-year-old manufacturing magnate turned donor, through an introduction arranged by Eugene Meyer, the longtime director of the Federalist Society. At the time, Leo was the society’s executive vice president, and he is currently its co-chair. Meyer envisioned Seid as a contributor to the society, according to a person familiar with the introduction. Instead, Leo cultivated Seid as a funder of his own dark money network. The result was a $1.6 billion gift announced last year — which is believed to be the largest political donation ever.
The unusual arrangement in which Leo met his top donor through the prestigious Federalist Society — which describes itself as a nonpartisan educational organization — suggests closer ties between the society and Leo’s activist network than previously known. Leo has used the dark money network to donate millions of dollars to the society and to pay at least $1.54 million to one Federalist Society employee and $775,000 to an entity run by another, according to federal disclosure forms.
A very profitable non-profit, indeed.
Leo’s political activism and his use of donor money to enhance his own wealth have prompted increasing tensions between him and his fellow co-chair, Northwestern University Law Professor Steven Calabresi, and Meyer, who has been executive director or president for more than 30 years, according to three people familiar with the society. But they said Leo’s ties to the conservative donor base fans fears that a rift would leave the society struggling for funds, while members also worry that any breach in the facade of the conservative legal movement would only empower the liberals that all sides disdain.
Leo's power-mongering, fueled by the donor base that he created, apparently has created division within the Federalist Society between Leo's network and the members of the Society who, nominally at least, adhere to the rules of non-profit development. From that angle, the massive $1.6 billion bequest begins to look a little poisonous, and Barre Seid a little like the man who corrupted Hadleyburg.
The society remains highly dependent on Leo’s network. It received $5.6 million in grants in 2020 and $3.5 million in 2021 from The 85 Fund, a rebranded dark money group that Leo has said he plans to use to fund conservative causes nationwide, according to federal disclosures. This makes the Federalist Society the second biggest beneficiary of Leo’s primary dark money vehicle, aside from Donors Trust, another conservative nonprofit.
Calabresi and Meyer did not respond to requests for comment. In a sign of the close professional relationship between the Federalist Society and Leo’s for-profit businesses, a spokesperson at Leo’s new for-profit company, CRC Advisors, sent POLITICO a statement on behalf of Meyer. “Leonard Leo did an outstanding job at the Federalist Society for 20 years and we are enormously grateful for his faithful service,” Meyer said in the emailed statement.
And his dough, too.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has become the Sherlock Holmes to Leo's Moriarty. On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing into the recent revelations and into the need for some sort of ethics code to slow down what looks like a runaway train of privilege and carefully curried favor, especially at the highest level of the federal judiciary. Whitehouse has been chasing this train since the days when the late Justice Antonin Scalia was taking luxury hunting trips paid for by what Whitehouse called, "personal hospitality problems." Whitehouse explained:
It was systematized. Some intermediary would ask the owner of an expensive resort, often a commercial property, to extend to Scalia, a personal invitation to the resort. Even where the owner was someone he'd never met. Scalia treated as personal hospitality because of the personal invitation and failed to disclose the vacations. Gun industry advocates, fossil fuel folks and Republican political figures often tagged along no reasonable reading of the term personal hospitality would cover this.
One gets the feeling that Whitehouse would very much like to get everyone involved in a small room under a swinging light bulb and go to town on them.
I have no evidence that any federal judge outside the Supreme Court ever used the personal invitation trick...Regular judges would be loathe to use that trick because a complaint about it would go into a proper process and would be investigated and measured against the law and the ethics code and a conclusion would be reached and that conclusion could be embarrassing. Only Supreme Court justices refuse to allow their conduct to be investigated or reviewed.
Whitehouse has proposed a bill to remedy this gaping loophole in common sense. The Republicans on the committee bounced from one excuse to another. It was a "smear campaign." It was "the liberal agenda." It was a breath mint. Senator John Cornyn of Texas even ran a clip from the hearings into Clarence Thomas' nomination when the committee was presided over by the current president. Konztitooshunal skolar Mike Lee apparently has decided that any attempt by Congress to make the Nine Wise Souls conform to the ethical standards that apply to every other federal judge is a threat to what he sees as the constitutional order. There was even some squid ink released on the topic of the release of the early draft of the Dobbs opinion. But the one immutable fact is that a formal code of ethics is overdue for the Supreme Court and that the Congress has the constitutional power to create one. If a Supreme Court justice wants a luxury vacation, or if he wants to go shoot doves on some plutocrat's game farm, let him hit the Lotto like everyone else.
You Might Also Like
