“How many billionaire benefactors does one judge need?” asks enraged Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, after revelations that Nazi memorabilia-collecting billionaire Harlan Crow isn’t the only rich conservative supporter funding Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas‘s expensive tastes.
A new story in the New York Times details Thomas’s longtime relationship with the Horatio Alger Society, reporting that its wealthy members “have welcomed [Thomas] at their vacation retreats, arranged V.I.P. access to sporting events and invited him to their lavish parties.”
The Alger connection, like that which Thomas enjoys with Crow, “brought him,” according to the Times, “proximity to a lifestyle of unimaginable material privilege.”
Sen. Whitehouse slams Republicans in the House and Senate for their lack of outrage, writing “does it tell you nothing that Republicans are ignoring all of this, or is that deafening Republican silence powerful proof of just how politicized this Court has become?”
And does it tell you nothing that Republicans are ignoring all of this, or is that deafening Republican silence powerful proof of just how politicized this Court has become?
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) July 11, 2023
Whitehouse isn’t just crowing about Thomas and what he sees as this politicized Court’s ethical compromises. Fellow Democrat and Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, says the Judiciary Committee will “mark up Sen. Whitehouse’s Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency (SCERT) Act” this month, in an attempt to rebalance a checks and balances system in which the SCOTUS is not subject to ethics rules that guide other U.S. courts.
That is why the Senate Judiciary Committee will mark up @SenWhitehouse’s Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency (SCERT) Act on July 20.
— Senator Dick Durbin (@SenatorDurbin) July 10, 2023
Since the Court won’t act, Congress will.
Whitehouse also wants people to read Linda Greenhouse’s account exposing the “long view of what far-right megadonors have achieved by surreptitiously seizing the United States Supreme Court.”
Greenhouse, giving reportorial voice to Whitehouse’s own exasperation at the the Court’s two-decades-long lurch to the right, reports after 18 years of Roberts as Chief Justice, “by the time the sun set on June 30, the term’s final day, every goal on the conservative wish list had been achieved. All of it.”
The items on that list — including abortion law and affirmative action policy — were synonymous with the items on the wish lists of Crow and the Horatio Alger Society members. Whitehouse believes those wealthy influencers were able to essentially buy the decisions they wanted, with the Court failing to adequately police itself against corruption.
The belief that they should not be held accountable or even disclose lavish gifts from wealthy benefactors is an affront to the nation they were chosen to serve.
— Senator Dick Durbin (@SenatorDurbin) July 10, 2023
To hold these nine Justices to the same standard as every other federal judge is not a radical or partisan notion.
