POLITICS

The Supreme Court Has a New Code of Ethics

But there is no way to enforce it

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

Didja see that the Supreme Court has brand spanking new Code of Ethics? Yeah, I was just as surprised as you were. Chief Justice John Roberts has been saying for months that SCOTUS doesn’t need a formal code of ethics. They have their own informal code that they follow.

Then … exposure of billionaires providing luxury vacations, rides on private jets, and real estate transactions followed by public outcry and the threat of Congress imposing a code of ethics on the court … and, wham! An ethics code appears out of thin air.

Fucking amazing how that works.

Of course, the justices are claiming that the code is nothing new. It’s how they have always functioned:

“For the most part these rules and principles are not new. The absence of a code, however, has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the justices of this court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.”

Um, I don’t think there was any “misunderstanding.” It has been pretty clear that the justices have been doing whatever the fuck they want. I love how they claimed that their actions were allowed under this informal code that Supreme…