Democrats unveil bill to impose ethics, recusal standards on Supreme Court

A group of Democratic lawmakers unveiled legislation on Wednesday that would force the Supreme Court to adopt various ethics standards, including recusal requirements for justices with financial and personal ties to parties involved in cases before the high court.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) led a group of lawmakers on the House and Senate Judiciary committees in announcing the bill, called the Twenty-First Century Courts Act. Whitehouse said the bill is aimed at addressing a lack of clear, enforceable standards for when justices should recuse themselves.

“A Supreme Court justice is not required to address why he or she doesn’t think he or she needs to recuse, and if a party thinks they really ought to have recused, they have no recourse,” Whitehouse said at a press conference.

“There’s no penalty for getting a recusal wrong,” he added.

The legislation largely mirrors previous bills aimed at reforming judicial ethics at the Supreme Court, but the Democrats said Wednesday there’s a new urgency behind the effort amid outcry over revelations involving Ginni Thomas, a Republican activist and the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas.

Text messages released last month indicated Ginni Thomas had been texting with former President Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, apparently calling for action to overturn the 2020 election in the days before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Clarence Thomas later participated in the Supreme Court’s review of Trump’s court battle with the House Jan. 6 select committee over records requests for White House documents and communications with senior officials, including Meadows. Thomas was the lone dissenter in the court’s 8-1 decision granting the House committee’s access to the records.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), one of the bill’s co-sponsors, said the controversy made the legislation especially timely but that the proposed ethics standards would address long-running concerns about accountability in the high court and the judiciary as a whole.

“The public is watching the United States Supreme Court to see whether or not Justice Thomas will recuse himself in future cases and what action may be taken regarding his failure to recuse himself in past cases,” Blumenthal said. “But the issue here is much bigger and broader than one justice. In fact, it’s bigger and broader than the United States Supreme Court.”

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, added in a statement, “The American public deserves a justice system it can believe in, and that belief must be rooted in accountability and transparency. This essential legislation directly responds to the cascade of judicial ethics scandals that threaten to undermine the integrity of our federal courts.”

The bill would, among other things, force the Supreme Court to adopt a code of conduct for justices. The justices are currently the only judges in the federal judiciary who are not subject to such ethics policies.
It would also allow parties litigating before the Supreme Court to file motions asking for a justice’s recusal. Under the proposed system, all nine justices would be involved in reviewing such motions.

Whitehouse said Wednesday that the lack of standards at the nation’s highest court have damaged public trust in the institution.

“Big special interests spend massive sums of money to rig the federal judiciary in their favor, and Supreme Court justices have the least stringent ethics and transparency rules of any senior federal officials,” the Rhode Island Democrat said. “Our bicameral bill would help to hold judges to account and restore Americans’ faith in their courts.”