In 2011, when ethical questions were already swirling around Thomas’s friendship with Crow-and the Justice’s failure to disclose income that his wife, Virginia, had been paid by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and by Hillsdale College, a Christian institution-Chief Justice John Roberts pointedly claimed that when Congress set up the Judicial Conference, a century ago, it was for “the courts it had created,” and so it “does not supervise the Supreme Court.”Ĭongress, however, has enacted ethics laws for federal officials, including the Justices. The argument that Justices aren’t bound by the Code of Conduct derives from the idea that the lower federal courts were created by Congress, while the Supreme Court was mandated by the Constitution. That’s what Justice Thomas has faced following revelations of items he has not disclosed over the years, including luxury vacations, real-estate transactions, and private-school tuition for a grandnephew of whom he had custody, all funded by his friend Harlan Crow, a billionaire donor to the Republican Party. But they undertook to annually disclose, for example, nongovernmental income, investments, and gifts, although no real consequences could be imposed for their disobedience-aside from public shaming. Their decision to abide by this Code of Conduct was voluntary, because it expressly binds federal judges who are not members of the Supreme Court. In 1991, the year Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court, the Justices agreed to follow the ethics rules that the Judicial Conference-the policymaking agency in the judicial branch-had laid out, beginning in 1973.
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