Should federal judges be term limited?
8th May 2023 · 0 Comments
The observations of Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, Catholic historian, politician, and writer, answer whether U.S. Supreme Court justices should investigate possible ethics violations within their ranks.
In an 1887 letter to Anglican Archbishop Mandell Creighton, who objected to the tendency to be unnecessarily critical of the church’s authority figures, Lord Anton wrote:
“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King, unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they do no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power…power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
More than a century later, Anton’s corruption theory applies to those with power. Nowhere is this more evident than in the rulings of Republican-appointed judges and supreme court justices doing the bidding of donors and GOP leaders.
Recent rulings from the lower federal court benches to the U.S. Supreme Court make a clear case for term limits of federally appointed judges. First, there should be no lifetime appointments for any public official, appointed or not. Yet, those federal judges are appointed for life, giving them excessive power and opening the door to corruption without accountability.
Secondly, the overthrow of Roe v. Wade by the Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court and the ban on medical abortion pills by a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas are two additional reasons why term limits must be considered.
Thirdly, several investigations into U.S. Supreme Court justices’ dubious and suspect acquisitions of money scream corruption and the need for ethics reform and term limits.
ProPublica’s “Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire,” investigation is the tip of the iceberg for accountability among judges with lifetime appointments. Then there’s Politico’s report on how Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch sought a buyer for a 40-acre tract of property he co-owned in rural Granby, Colorado, for two years before he was tapped by Trump to fill the stolen U.S. Supreme Court seat from President Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland.
Nine days after he was confirmed by the Senate for a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, the then-Circuit Court Judge Gorsuch and his partners sold the property to the chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, one of the nation’s most prominent law firms with a robust practice before the High Court.
Then there’s Chief Justice John Roberts. The Daily Beast’s report, “Chief Justice John Roberts’ Wife Made Millions From Top Law Firms: Whistleblower…’ IT WAS WRONG,’ exposed the dealings of Roberts’ wife, Jane Roberts, made $10 million in commissions as a law firm recruiter.
Kendal Price, who filed the whistleblower complaint and once worked alongside Jane Roberts, told Insider that at least one of the firms that Jane Roberts received a commission from reportedly later had a case before Chief Justice Roberts.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had been asked in an April 10th letter from Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin to investigate ProPublica reports that Justice Clarence Thomas accepted and failed to disclose 20 years’ worth of lavish gifts and luxury travel from prominent Republican donor Harlan Crow.
The April 10th letter urged the Chief Justice to take swift action to address reported conduct by Justices that is inconsistent with the ethical standards the American people expect of public servants.
To add insult to injury, as far back as 2012, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats wrote Chief Justice Roberts urging that the Court adopt a resolution binding the Justices to the same Code of Conduct that binds all other federal judges, but Roberts refused. This 2012 letter was sent amidst earlier public reports of Justice Thomas’s acceptance of favors from Mr. Crow, conduct that escalated after the Court declined to act.
“If the Court does not resolve this issue on its own, the Committee will consider legislation to resolve it,” Durbin wrote.
Rather than answer the letter, Chief Justice Roberts forwarded the letter to the Judicial Conference of the United States, which manages ethics complaints and financial disclosures for lower federal courts.
Roberts was invited to voluntarily testify about ethical conflicts by Thomas and the Court’s methods for handling ethics concerns, but he declined.
In a letter refusing the invitation, Chief Roberts pointed to the rarity of Supreme Court justices testifying before Congress and said, in essence, that there are no ethics rules the Court is obliged to follow.
Roberts’ assertion that the body of ethical rules and practices and the Code of Conduct that governs lower federal courts through the Judicial Conference of the United States are of “significant importance to the Justices” is meaningless because the U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t apply them.
The Chief Justice’s lame excuse for justices not recusing themselves from rulings that pose a conflict of interest, like Thomas refusing to recuse himself from cases involving January 6 when his wife, Ginni Thomas, testified to the January 6 committee that she regrets sending texts to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows pushing him to attack the 2020 election, sounds like the Chief Justice thinks the U.S. Supreme Court is above the law.
Any other public officials trying to pull off what the Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court are doing would have been brought up on charges and/or impeached.
Senator Durbin responded to Roberts’ refusal to appear in an April 27 letter. “It is noteworthy that no Justice will speak to the American people after numerous revelations have called the Court’s ethical standards into question, even though sitting Justices have testified before Senate or House Committees on at least 92 occasions since 1960.”
On May 2, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the need for the U.S. Supreme Court to write its own code of ethics. As expected, Republicans on the Committee, like Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., viewed the hearing as an attack on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican Supermajority while ignoring the need for ethics reform.
Chief Justice Roberts believes the U.S. Supreme Court is above the law and refuses to be held accountable by Congress or themselves.
The Chief Justice’s refusal to enact a code of ethics is like the police policing themselves and like the fox watching the hen house.
Given the penchant and the precedent set recently by Republicans in Congress, Trump’s White House, and now U.S. Supreme Court Republicans to refuse to honor subpoenas and appear before Congress, drastic measures must be taken.
All politicians appointed and elected should be term-limited, and lifetime appointments banned.
Of course, cynics say that will never happen. What ought to be is not reality. True. But at the point when the U.S. government and state government become totally fascist, maybe then the public will be ‘woke’ enough to demand an exact change.
This article originally published in the May 8, 2023 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
