Once Again, Judiciary Committee Democrats Discredit Themselves Rather than the Supreme Court

For the second time this month, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats staged a hearing designed to put the Supreme Court under a pseudo-ethics cloud, only to have it backfire again. The earlier hearing on May 2 gave Republican members a chance to showcase their colleagues’ double standards and outright thuggery. Recall that Chief Justice John Roberts declined Chairman Richard Durbin’s invitation to testify at the previous hearing. Perhaps a follow-up hearing was retaliation for doing so.

In yesterday’s hearing, held by Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, and Federal Rights, Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse curiously decided on a narrow focus. He showcased a single witness, senior district court judge Mark L. Wolf, who vented his dissatisfaction that the United States Judicial Conference had cleared Justice Clarence Thomas between 2011 and 2012 after it was brought to their attention that he had inadvertently omitted his wife’s income from financial disclosure forms during the 2000s. It was widely known that she worked in political circles, and Thomas amended his forms once the omission was brought to his attention. Court watchers know that such amendments by federal judges are common. (The Court’s junior justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, is only the most recent justice who omitted and later amended spousal income data.)

Senator John Kennedy, the subcommittee’s ranking member, pointed out accurately that Judge Wolf “has been obsessed with complaining that the Judicial Conference got it wrong.” And that he “wasn’t getting his way from the head of the Judicial Conference or from Chief Justice Roberts himself.” There were four occasions, under the leadership of two different judges, that the conference’s financial disclosure committee cleared Thomas. Wolf harped on letters complaining about Thomas that were forwarded to the financial disclosure committee without being seen by the full conference, which he said lacked a sufficient opportunity to decide whether there was “reasonable cause” to refer Thomas to the attorney general. But such a referral was unnecessary unless there seemed to be a willful violation. Wolf seems to want to have it both ways: He declined on the one hand to claim that Thomas violated the law, but if he did not appear to violate the law, then passing the information on was not required. In any event, an argument for referral would rely not on reasonable cause to believe Thomas acted willfully, but on sheer speculation and inconsistent treatment of innumerable judges who amend financial statements while receiving the benefit of the doubt as to their intent. Kennedy also pointed out that his Senate colleagues on both sides of the aisle have amended their own financial disclosures.

Kennedy returned to a theme raised during the previous hearing—the Left’s assault on the Court, beginning with now Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s notorious 2020 threat to Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the steps of the Court: “You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Why the latest, presumably ethics-based assault on the Court? Kennedy quoted from a recent New York Magazine article by Eric Levitz that gave away the game:

It is therefore in the interest of the progressive movement to undermine the Court’s legitimacy. . . . [I]t makes sense for progressives to publicize Thomas’s obscene indulgences. But I think it’s true that the end goal of doing so isn’t to secure ethics reforms that will render the Supreme Court less vulnerable to perceptions of corruption. The point is (or at least, should be) to promote the perception of judicial corruption.

Having failed to make his case four times, Kennedy continued regarding Judge Wolf,

here he is a dozen years later, to tell us all about it. Even when the facts vindicate the accused, the nauseously woke Left can’t help but sling mud, especially when it comes to the Supreme Court. If we can’t control it, let’s burn it down. Forget innocent until proven guilty. The loon wing of the Left insists that good justices are guilty even after they’ve been found innocent four times. And that’s the perpetual political carousel that brings us here today. It makes me want to gag.

This hearing comes after Whitehouse used the May 2 hearing to showcase his bill that would introduce a free-for-all system of launching ethics challenges with the goal of subtracting justices from the Supreme Court in targeted cases. And just this week, Senator Ed Markey announced the reintroduction of his legislation to pack the Court with the addition of four justices. The entire spectacle shows how shameless the Left remains when it comes to the Supreme Court and its longest-serving justice.