Senate Democrats, led by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), announced plans Monday to hold an ethics hearing for the Supreme Court after a report detailed a personal friendship between Justice Clarence Thomas and a billionaire.
Durbin, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, penned a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts. The letter suggested that the Supreme Court conduct its own investigation into Thomas’s decadeslong friendship with billionaire Harlan Crow and the alleged lavish gifts he received from the Republican donor.
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“The Senate Judiciary Committee, which has legislative jurisdiction over Federal courts and judges, has a role to play in ensuring that the nation’s highest court does not have the federal judiciary’s lowest ethical standards,” Durbin wrote in the letter.
“You have a role to play as well, both in investigating how such conduct could take place at the Court under your watch, and in ensuring that such conduct does not happen again. We urge you to immediately open such an investigation and take all needed action to prevent further misconduct,” he added.
Durbin added that the hearing will cover the “need to restore confidence in the Supreme Court’s ethical standards.” The letter was signed by 11 other Democratic senators, and it pushed the Supreme Court to adopt a code of conduct that is used by other federal judges.
The letter comes shortly after Democrats renewed their calls for Thomas’s removal from the country’s highest court. A report released last week by ProPublica claimed that Thomas went on expensive vacations with Crow without disclosing the relationship to the public. The gifts Thomas received include travel on a private jet, travel on a yacht, and free stays in Crow’s vacation homes.
Thomas released a statement on Friday. In it, he confirmed the friendship but claimed the relationship with Crow was personal, not professional.
“As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them,” Thomas said.
“Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable. I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure, and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines,” he added.
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Democrats have also been outraged at the Thomases recently over text messages that Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, sent to former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows. The messages urged him to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Members of Congress were also upset that Clarence Thomas refused to recuse himself from hearing cases related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol because of Ginni Thomas’s texts.
