Associate Justice Clarence Thomas poses during a gaggle photo of the Justices on the Supreme Court in Washington, April 23, 2021.
Erin Schaff | Pool | Reuters
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Democratic majority on Monday called for an investigation into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ behavior after a report revealed he had didn’t disclose years of luxury trips funded by a Republican megadonor.
Chief Justice John Roberts should “immediately open” a probe into “how such conduct could happen” on his watch, read a letter from Chairman Dick Durbin of Illinois and the Senate Judiciary panel’s 10 other Democratic members.
The committee announced within the letter that it will hold a hearing “in the approaching days” on “the necessity to restore confidence within the Supreme Court’s ethical standards.”
The Democrats also warned they’d “consider laws to resolve” the difficulty if the high court doesn’t achieve this by itself.
The letter got here three days after Thomas said he had been advised early in his tenure as a Supreme Court justice that “this type of non-public hospitality from close personal friends, who didn’t have business before the Court, was not reportable.”
“I actually have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure, and have all the time sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines,” Thomas said in a press release.
The 74-year-old justice, who has served on the nation’s highest court since 1991, was responding to ProPublica’s report last Thursday that he had accepted expensive trips from wealthy GOP donor Harlan Crow for greater than 20 years.
Crow told ProPublica that “the hospitality we’ve got prolonged to the Thomas’s over time isn’t any different from the hospitality we’ve got prolonged to our many other dear friends.” That hospitality included vacations on Crow’s 162-foot superyacht, flights on the GOP donor’s private jet and stays at his exclusive resort, based on ProPublica.
The investigation, which cited a variety of documents and interviews, also quoted ethics experts who said Thomas appears to have violated a disclosure law by not reporting the trips. But some judicial ethics experts have said Thomas may not have been required to report the trips under the principles that had been in place before they were updated last month.
Thomas’s statement noted that the reporting guidelines “at the moment are being modified, because the committee of the Judicial Conference liable for financial disclosure for your entire federal judiciary just this past month announced recent guidance. And, it’s, after all, my intent to follow this guidance in the longer term.”
The Senate Judiciary panel’s letter to Roberts said Thomas’ failure to report the trips is “plainly inconsistent with the moral standards the American people expect of any person ready of public trust.”
The letter got here after Durbin, the Senate majority whip, called for the imposition of an “enforceable code of conduct” for justices, who should not sure by the identical ethics rules followed by other federal judges.
