Global Courant 2023-04-15 17:30:00
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Clarence Thomas faces impeachment requests following a report on his real estate dealings with a GOP donor.
But Supreme Court experts told Insider there is no chance the conservative judge will be removed.
The Supreme Court has little regulatory oversight and few routes to discipline its judges.
Judge of the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas has been confronted renewed control following the revelation this week that the powerful judge sold his childhood home to GOP mega-donor Harlan Crow — and never disclosed the sale.
Legal ethics experts told Insider the bombshell ProPublica report left them “shocked” and “disturbed”. But don’t expect the SCOTUS life appointee to suffer real repercussions from his growing list of ethical concerns, at least not in this political climate, they said.
The outlet reported Thursday that in 2014 Thomas sold a property in Savannah, Georgia, to Crow, a longtime friend and powerful right-wing donor, for $133,363, the first known, but never revealed, instance of direct cash flow between the two.
“The idea of someone shuffling money to a Supreme Court judge without disclosing is deeply disturbing.” Clara Pastora professor of legal practice at the USC Gould School of Law and an expert in legal ethics, told Insider.
The ProPublica report comes a week after the outlet reported that Thomas has been accepting and also not disclosing several luxury vacations from Crow for years. While Thomas defended the secret travels by citing an ill-defined one exemption “personal hospitality”. included in disclosure requirements, real estate disclosures can be more difficult to explain away.
Federal law requires government employees, including Supreme Court justices, to report most real estate transactions valued at more than a thousand dollars.
“It’s fair to say we would expect the most powerful judges to follow federal law,” Scott Lemieuxa political science professor at the University of Washington and an expert in constitutional law, told Insider.
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ProPublica also reported that Thomas’s 94-year-old mother still lives in the home, which Crow put tens of thousands of dollars into for renovations after acquiring the property. The Republican donor told the outlet that he hoped to turn the property into a museum dedicated to Thomas’s legacy.
Four ethics law experts told ProPublica that Thomas likely violated a federal disclosure law enacted in the wake of Watergate, prompting renewed calls for his resignation, with some Democratic lawmakers are raising the topic of impeachment.
But legal experts told Insider that talking about Thomas’ removal is essentially a nonstarter.
‘That won’t happen,’ said Pastore clearly.
Protesters called for the impeachment of Judge Clarence Thomas in late March.Paul Morigi/Getty Images for MoveOn
Political parties are far too polarized
Supreme Court justices, who are appointed for life and are among the most powerful people in the country, face little confrontation with their positions and little discipline for missteps, experts say.
“One problem we have is that the only discipline of Supreme Court justices is the extreme form of impeachment or removal,” Lemieux said. “Clarence Thomas could shoot someone on Pennsylvania Avenue and this Senate wouldn’t remove him.”
Similar to the impeachment process of a president, a Supreme Court justice can only be removed off the bench if a simple majority of the House of Representatives first votes to impeach, then two-thirds of the Senate, a supermajority, votes to convict.
The impeachment of a Supreme Court justice is also almost unprecedented. Only once before have lawmakers voted to impeach a top court judge, and he ended up not being convicted, holding his seat on the bench. In 1804, the House voted to impeach Judge Samuel Chase for “refusing to dismiss biased jurors and excluding or limiting defense witnesses in two politically sensitive cases,” according to the Senate website.
But because of near record levels of polarization between party lines todayand a Democrat in the White House who would have the power to choose a replacement, experts said there’s no chance Thomas will face a legitimate threat to his seat anytime soon.
Republican lawmakers so far hurried to defend Thomas in the wake of the ProPublica reports.
Aside from impeachment, Supreme Court justices will not face any other obvious disciplinary action, experts said.
“We don’t have those mechanisms with lifelong judges, so their behavior on the bench is therefore even more important than politicians we do have some checks on,” Pastore said.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas attends the ceremonial swearing-in ceremony of Amy Coney Barrett as U.S. Supreme Court Justice on the South Lawn of the White House on October 26, 2020.Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
The court could soon institute internal controls
The impeachment impeachment and the lack of additional disciplinary action mean Thomas could theoretically continue to take secret sums of money from whomever he chooses, with little real-life repercussions.
But Lemieux said he thinks the controversies ravaging the court’s level of public confidence, which is at a point nadir in recent months, even before this onslaught of Thomas-focused crises, will eventually lead to internal policing and behavioral changes within the Supreme Court.
While lower courts are bound by a code of ethics, the Supreme Court has no such regulatory tool, nor does it have higher courts to oversee it. But Pastore predicted that this could prompt the court to eventually adopt such a code or even submit to the existing code of ethics that applies to other judges.
“I think it’s pretty likely we’ll get some movement in one of those ways,” she told Insider. “That would be a good step in the right direction.
Read the original article Business Insider
