Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are playing procedural games to block the authorization of new subpoenas against two conservative judicial advocates who are friends with Supreme Court justices.
GOP senators exploded in frustration at a routine committee meeting after Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) bypassed requests to debate some of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees further, while later forcing a vote to approve subpoenas for conservative activists Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo. However, the GOP committee members consider the subpoenas null and void at this time due to procedural rules they say Durbin did not follow. Leo, one of the targets of the subpoenas, also slammed the effort as illegitimate.
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“Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats have been destroying the Supreme Court. Now, they are destroying the Senate,” Leo told the Washington Examiner. “I will not cooperate with this unlawful campaign of political retribution.”
The subpoenas against Crow and Leo could be unenforceable because all but one of the 10 Republican committee members walked out of the meeting room before Democrats voted, pushing the vote on the subpoenas to 12:01 p.m., sources told the Washington Examiner.
Because there wasn’t a quorum of lawmakers present in the room and the vote happened outside the scheduled 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. meeting time, GOP lawmakers say Democrats would need to vote again for the subpoenas. Committee rules require two members from the minority and seven from the majority to be physically present for votes and other business to occur.
Democrats on the committee view the subpoena authorization as valid despite the procedural drama.
Before voting on the subpoenas, Republican senators voiced objections to Durbin’s efforts to force a roll-call vote to advance Biden’s judicial nominees. A roll-call vote would have advanced the nominees to the Senate floor without debate among committee members.
“Mr. Chairman, are we going to have an opportunity to speak on the nominations?” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) asked Durbin.
Durbin replied, “I’m sorry, we already had done that at great length” at previous committee meetings. Republican senators met the chairman’s denial with several minutes of outbursts and contempt. The GOP lawmakers said Durbin violated one of the committee’s rules requiring both sides to debate nominees.
WATCH: Sen. John Cornyn blasts Dem Sen. Dick Durbin for refusing to let Republicans speak:
“You just destroyed one of the most important committees in the United States Senate…Congratulations on destroying the United States Senate Judiciary Committee.” pic.twitter.com/hySEshInWH
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) November 30, 2023
“You just destroyed one of the most important committees in the United States Senate,” Cornyn said, adding, “Congratulations on destroying the United States Senate Judiciary Committee.”
The uproar in the committee hearing comes as Democrats seeking to investigate alleged lapses of ethics on the Supreme Court have spent weeks pursuing a vote to subpoena high-profile conservative friends of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, an effort that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said Thursday was an attempted “jihad” on the conservative majority of the Supreme Court.
Democrats are on a “jihad against the Roberts Court,” Graham said, saying the Democrats are attempting to ruin Thomas’s reputation. Durbin and his colleagues say the subpoenas for conservative advocates Leo and Crow are necessary to investigate whether outside parties have influenced Thomas or Alito’s decisions. Leo has been credited for helping to shape the bench by suggesting the names of sitting justices, including the three nominees of former President Donald Trump.
“Where do you get your judges from?” Graham asked Democrats. “We get our judges from conservative people who make recommendations to us. You have liberal groups, I’m sure, recommending names.”
Because Democrats narrowly control the Senate majority, they have an 11-10 voting advantage to advance Biden’s nominees to floor votes, as well as to advance the subpoenas. While the committee has the authority to approve the subpoenas for Crow and Leo on its own, the full Senate would need to vote on any effort to seek court enforcement of them. At least 60 senators would need to agree to seek enforcement of the subpoenas, so the process would be subject to a filibuster.
But Republicans contend Durbin overstepped his authority on Thursday by not allowing Republicans to speak about their opposing points over judicial nominees — and that he violated committee rules.
Democrats’ investigation into the Supreme Court’s ethical conduct was spurred after a report in April by the nonprofit outlet ProPublica detailed Thomas’s repeated and undisclosed travel with Crow, who helped finance years of separate vacations taken by Thomas and his spouse, Ginni Thomas. Interest in subpoenas for Crow and Leo grew after ProPublica reported in July that Justice Samuel Alito was allowed to fly on billionaire Paul Singer’s plane for an Alaskan fishing trip, which was aided in organization by Leo.
In response to the pair of subpoena threats, Republicans proposed 177 amendments to make Democrats broaden their Supreme Court investigation beyond the scope of the two conservative advocates, arguing Democrats were unfairly targeting select names and avoiding subpoenas for friends of justices who were nominated by Democratic presidents.
Durbin did not allow additional amendments on top of the subpoenas for Crow and Leo. And despite extensive media coverage of high court ethics for months, there has been no evidence that influence from outside parties tainted the Supreme Court’s rulings.
The committee’s meeting comes in the wake of the Supreme Court adopting a code of conduct for the first time in history earlier this month.
The justices have long contended that they consult the same code of conduct for lower federal court judges and recuse themselves from cases when there’s a conflict of interest, but the high court adopted the code amid mounting pressure from Democrats and amid rumors they’d been mulling a code for years.
Democrats have largely voiced dissatisfaction with the new code of conduct because it lacks any enforcement mechanism they say is needed to ensure the justices recuse themselves from cases in which there is a conflict of interest.
Some Republicans have argued that an enforceable code could be weaponized against the justices and used as a way to diminish the Roberts court, which Democrats have scrutinized for its conservative majority.
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The Washington Examiner contacted Durbin and Crow for a response.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
