Days after Democrats proposed legislation to form a new code of conduct specifically for Supreme Court justices, conservative judicial advocates are raising alarms that enacting such legislation could lead to attempts to “subtract” justices from weighing on key cases before the high court.
On Thursday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act
, which includes a primary function of opening a complaint process and creating a review panel to weigh a perceived indiscretion of any member sitting on the 6-3 Republican-appointed majority court.
SUPREME COURT DEADLOCKED ON ENACTING ETHICS CODE OF CONDUCT
Carrie Severino, president of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, responded Monday to Democrats’ recent efforts to impose ethics rules on justices, saying the legislation is “kind of the mirror image” of “court packing,” or the inverse of liberal calls to raise the number of justices sitting on the Supreme Court.
“On the one side, they’re like, well, maybe we can add justices to try to shift the court in a political direction. OK, if that’s not working, let’s try to subtract other justices to try to get the same … political agenda enacted. And either way, it’s intimidation and it’s improper,” Severino told the Washington Examiner.
Severino said Democrats have jumped ship on floating proposals to raise the number of justices on the Supreme Court “because it’s so unpopular.” The ethics calls increased in the months after liberal demands for court packing waned following a report by a committee of judicial experts tapped by President Joe Biden that expressed “profound disagreement” on the issue of court packing in December 2021.
Now, enacting a new standard of rules for justices appears to be where Democrats are focusing their efforts, as Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) reintroduced the Supreme Court Ethics Act on Thursday, which would establish a statutory ethics officer and a process for filing complaints against the justices for violating ethics rules.
The JCN president argued there’s a false narrative that suggests justices do not adhere to ethical guidelines, saying that justices “still do have recusal requirements in and they still do abide by them.” Since the Code of Conduct for United States Judges was introduced in 1973, every justice on the Supreme Court has consulted it for discretionary guidance.
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Severino noted that there is a “slightly higher standard” for justices when making recusal decisions, noting a third party with interests in the outcome of a particular decision “can strategically try to recuse certain justices.”
“So this is not a sort of neutral crowd that we’re talking about here,” Severino added. “And they just want to create mechanisms to try to force and bully the justices into recusals where they aren’t actually required by these long-standing ethics rules, the same rules that govern or lower federal courts and the same rules and the justices actually already follow.”
