There is ritual in the Supreme Court’s shows of camaraderie. “The Justices seem to hope that waving their unlikely friendships around like bundles of sage will rid the Court of its partisan ‘stench,’ ” LizaBatkin writes.
, conspiring to keep President Joe Biden out of office. But, at a convention last spring, Sotomayor took a different tone than she had in the Dobbs arguments. She encouraged the audience to believe in the judiciary and singled out Justice Thomas as someone who “cares deeply about the Court as an institution.” The two of them shared a common understanding about “people and kindness,” she said, which was why she could be “friends with him” despite their “difference of opinions in cases.
There is ritual in these shows of camaraderie. The Justices seem to hope that waving their unlikely friendships around like bundles of sage will rid the Court of its partisan “stench.” If Sotomayor thinks Thomas is upright and principled, rather than a right-wing ideologue, maybe we should, too. If Ginsburg stayed close with Scalia even after he witheringly dissented from her majority opinion, in United States v.
But too much has been made of the Justices’ friendships—just as Justice Thomas wants us to make too little of his with Crow. Collegiality does not take the place of oversight. There is essentially no mechanism to enforce even the relatively limited ethics rules that the Justices must follow, and which Thomas now appears to have broken. Under the fiction of judicial friendship, as long as the Justices have faith in one another, so must we all have faith in them.
If Thomas’s failure to disclose his lavish trips with Crow was only ambiguously unethical, newer revelations are more clear-cut. According tolast Thursday by ProPublica, one of Crow’s companies bought three properties from Justice Thomas and his family in 2014. Thomas’s mother still lives in one. Despite rules that require federal officials to disclose most real-estate sales that are worth more than a thousand dollars, the Justice reportedly did not divulge the deal.
Shortly after ProPublica’s first story, Senator Dick Durbin said the Judiciary Committee, which he chairs, would act. A few days later, he sent a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts, announcing that the committee would hold a hearing. It urged the Chief Justice to do his own part by opening an investigation and taking “all needed action to prevent further misconduct.” What form that action could take is hard to imagine.
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