This morning the Senate Judiciary Committee holds a hearing on Supreme Court ethical standards. This follows news reports about the friendship between Texas billionaire Harlan Crow and Justice Clarence Thomas -- and Crow's financial largesse benefitting Thomas and his family. Did Thomas disclose what he's legally obligated to report? Disclosure requirements aside, should the ethics rules be tightened?
These are legitimate questions and the troubling stories about Clarence Thomas set off a minor frenzy in the media. None of these efforts quite delivered the goods. Neil Gorsuch was targeted in a Politico story not for failing to disclose a real estate sale, but for disclosing it. The New York Times went after George Mason University's law school for -- hold your breath -- hiring justices to teach summer school law classes. Notre Dame apparently paid Justice Samuel Alito to talk to students in Italy.
Is it only conservative jurists? Well, one imagines that Republican senators will try to turn the discussion to any financial relationship between Ketanji Jackson and Elena Kagan may have had with Harvard's law school. That's how Capitol Hill politics works. Partisanship aside, the goal of ensuring that Americans have an independent federal judiciary is not a trivial matter.
At Saturday night's White House Correspondents' Association dinner, President Biden made a joke about his old friend "Jimmy Madison" enshrining press freedom in the Bill of Rights. But an independent judiciary was just as much on the Founders' minds as an independent press.
The practice of King George III to make English judges subservient to his wishes was singled out by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton wrote that an independent judiciary -- and this was understood to mean financially secure as well as politically independent -- was "the best expedient which can be devised in any government, to secure a steady, upright, and impartial administration of the laws."
For that reason, Article III of the Constitution assures that federal judges remain in office "during good behavior," which has translated into lifetime appointments. Article III also constrains Congress from reducing judicial salaries.
At the same time, nothing anticipated in the Founding suggests that jurists are entitled to enjoy lives of luxury, and congressional Democrats who want to tighten ethics rules are on solid ground. This is decidedly not the case with progressive Democrats' various court-packing schemes, which has essentially the opposite goal.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
