Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who has been at the center of a number of ethics controversies at the court recently, told the Wall Street Journal lawmakers need to give up on the idea of imposing new rules on the justices.
“No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period,” he
told a pair of interviewers for the business paper’s Opinion section
in a piece that appeared Friday.
Alito, who authored the opinion in the Dobbs case that overturned Roe v. Wade, has been unusually active for a sitting federal judge in fending off claims of impropriety.
He went so far as getting the Journal to publish an op-ed he wrote defending himself against claims in a ProPublica story he had
failed to disclose a gifted luxury trip
and private jet travel —
before ProPublica had even published the story
.
In the interview published Friday, Alito said ordinarily, “the organized bar” of lawyers would defend the court against its critics. But he said that hasn’t been happening, “And, so at a certain point I’ve said to myself, nobody else is going to do this, so I have to defend myself.”
There’s been a lot to defend lately, as Alito and fellow conservative Justice Clarence Thomas have been accused of failing to properly report gifts on federal disclosure forms. Thomas, in particular, was
reported by ProPublica to have accepted trips
from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow for years.
The ethics disputes led Senate Democrats to consider requiring the Court to stick to stricter ethics standards, closer to those seen in the congressional and executive branches of the government.
On July 20, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) that would require the Supreme Court to adopt a code of conduct and create a process to investigate potential breaches.
Chief Justice John Roberts has said such changes aren’t needed, and
the court could be trusted to self-regulate
. But Alito’s comments appear to go much further, saying Congress cannot impose any requirements on the Supreme Court because it is part of an equal branch of government created by the U.S. Constitution.
Congress already controls one big aspect of the Supreme Court by setting how much it can spend annually, and the Constitution also notes its jurisdiction as a court of appeals is