U.S. Supreme Court unveils new ethics code, but critics say it doesn’t go far enough
by Ashley Murray, Alabama Reflector WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court released a new ethics code Monday, just days before the Democrat-led U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary again attempts to subpoena two high-profile GOP donors following revelations that justices accepted undisclosed luxury trips and engaged in other potential conflicts of interest. Despite the headlines and the committee’s springtime request that Chief Justice John Roberts appear before the panel, Roberts has maintained that the court already followed its own ethics guidelines. But Monday’s 15-page code of conduct, co-signed by all nine justices, is a new maneuver by the court to publicize its standards. The document states in its opening that the rules are “not new” and that the court has “long had the equivalent of common law ethics rules.” “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,” the document states. “To dispel this misunderstanding, we are issuing this Code, which largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct.” The five “canons” outlined over eight pages include that: A justice should uphold the integrity and independence of the judiciary. A justice should avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all activities. A justice should perform the duties of office fairly, impartially, and diligently. A justice may engage in extrajudicial activities that are consistent with obligations of the judicial office. And, a justice should refrain from political activity. Durbin: Code falls short Sen. Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the new rules “fall short of what we could and should expect when a Supreme Court issues a code of conduct.” The court’s new code “does not appear to contain any meaningful enforcement mechanism to hold justices accountable for any violations of code. It also leaves a wide range of decisions up to the discretion of individual justices, including decisions on recusal from sitting on cases,” the Illinois Democrat said on the Senate floor Monday. “I’m still reviewing the court’s new code of conduct for now. I will note that the court’s adoption of this code marks a step in the right direction.” Durbin and fellow Democrats on the Judiciary panel had planned to vote last week to subpoena high-profile Republican donors Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo, who bankrolled luxury travel for conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. The vote to subpoena Crow and Leo, who Durbin claims have been uncooperative, was called off due to “scheduling issues,” Durbin said last week. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat who sits on the committee, attributed the delay Thursday to the panel’s Republicans introducing dozens of amendments that “jammed the gears of the committee.” Whitehouse, whose Supreme Court ethics bill was passed favorably out of committee in July, called the court’s release Monday “long overdue” and lacking. “The honor system has not worked for members of the Roberts Court. My ethics bill would create a transparent process for complaints and allow a panel of chief judges from the lower courts to investigate and make recommendations based on those complaints,” Whitehouse said in a statement Monday. The committee is again scheduled to vote on the subpoenas this coming Thursday. Ethics questions In April, ProPublica chronicled years of private jet and yacht excursions paid for by Crow that Thomas never disclosed. The nonprofit investigative outfit also revealed that Thomas did not disclose a real estate transaction with Crow. Following the ProPublica revelations, Politico reported that Justice Neil Gorsuch did not identify the purchaser who bought a 40-acre plot in Colorado co-owned by the justice — a sale from which he made between $250,001 and $500,000, according to federal disclosure forms. The purchaser turned out to be attorney Brian Duffy of the law firm Greenberg Traurig who has since argued numerous cases in front of the court. The spring revelations set in motion a series of hearings by the Senate Committee on the Judiciary and its subcommittees. Roberts was invited to but declined to attend the first of the hearings in early May. In June, ProPublica revealed that Alito attended a fishing expedition in Alaska paid for and organized by Republican donors, including Leo. In July, The Associated Press uncovered that Justice Sonia Sotomayor allegedly directed taxpayer-funded court staff to schedule speaking engagements related to her literary work and pitch sales of the justice’s books, according to the AP’s reporting. Through more than 100 public records requests, the AP uncovered details about the court staff’s involvement in promoting Sotomayor’s memoir and children’s books — from which the justice has earned roughly $3.7 million. Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Follow Alabama Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.
Tommy Tuberville praises Hoover’s National Computer Forensics Institute
U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville praised Hoover’s National Computer Forensics Institute (NCFI) in a speech on the floor of the Senate, highlighting the importance of the NCFI and its impact on officers and public safety. Tuberville helped pass the reauthorization bill to support the NCFI, where law enforcement officers come to Alabama from across the country to receive cybercrime training. The Senate passed bipartisan legislation, the National Computer Forensics Institute Reauthorization Act, which reauthorizes the operation of the Alabama-based NCFI. The bill also approves resources for federal officers to attend the law enforcement training center, which has previously only been available for local and state officials. Sens. Tuberville and Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) cosponsored the legislation along with Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Dianne Feinstein (D-California), Maggie Hassan (D-New Hampshire), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island). “Cybercriminals can hack pipelines and other key infrastructure systems that are crucial to our daily lives and pertains to our national security,” Sen. Tuberville said. “Officials trained at NCFI are a part of our front line of defense against these attacks. That front line — our local police officers, district attorneys, and state officials — know the people they serve best. I want those protecting my home and my state trained to identify and combat the latest threats — and I’m sure you do as well.” “Earlier this year, after a madman terrorized shoppers at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, NCFI-trained graduates were able to act quickly and support the police response,” Tuberville continued. “They used what they learned to conduct a forensic exam of a Go-Pro camera and a cell phone used by the shooter. That crucial video evidence is currently being used in the prosecution.” “Brave men and women in law enforcement across the country are willing and able to protect Americans from all crime, including cybercrime, but they need the tools and resources to continue to do so effectively,” Tuberville added. “While some in Congress and the current administration have worked to shrink the size and strength of our law enforcement, I am unapologetic with my support for the men and women in blue. We must continue to provide specialized resources that all of them need to do their jobs. That’s why I joined a group of colleagues from both sides of the aisle to introduce the National Computer Forensics Institute Reauthorization Act.” “The National Computer Forensics Institute is an example of a state’s ingenuity and foresight — a group of individuals identifying a gap that needed to be filled and providing a service with national benefits,” Tuberville explained. “The success of the Institute represents the impact state leaders, and Congress can have on the entire country when we work together to support innovative and pragmatic solutions to our biggest problems. Alabama is proud of the National Computer Forensics Institute, and we’re proud to provide cutting-edge training to many Americans and our brave law enforcement.” In 2006, the Alabama Office of Prosecution Services and the Alabama District Attorneys Association saw the need for a more coordinated effort to train law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges in digital evidence. Those agencies outlined a plan to bring that training to more of our law enforcement officials — and formed a unique and important partnership with the U.S. Secret Service to create a center for forensics education for state and local law enforcement officials. NCFI opened in 2008 under a roof provided by the City of Hoover. The NCFI opened with a $4 million budget and just 264 students. The 40,000 square-foot NCFI facility now taps into a $13 million annual budget to train more than 4,000 students from across the country annually. To date, more than 19,000 state and local officers, prosecutors, and judges representing all 50 states have been trained at the institute in the heart of Alabama. The NCFI focuses on teaching officials how to investigate cyber and electronic crime — always accounting for emerging tech and novel digital capabilities — to prepare graduates to combat cyber-attacks and personal data theft. The skills learned at the NCFI also prepare law enforcement officers to identify and utilize key digital data during criminal investigations. The reauthorization will allow the NCFI to keep training thousands of officers a year in Alabama to keep communities across the country safe. Graduates have reported utilizing their training in more than 578,000 digital forensics exams. The NCFI seeks to educate state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges in the continually evolving cyber and electronic crime-related threats, and educate, train, and equip them with the tools necessary for forensic examinations to combat those crimes. Sen. Tuberville was elected to his first term in the Senate in 2020 after a career in football coaching. To connect with the author of this story, or to comment, email brandonmreporter@gmail.com.
AG Steve Marshall mum on whether Joe Biden is ‘duly elected’ president
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, testifying against the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, declined repeatedly Thursday to express an opinion on whether President Joe Biden is serving in the office legally. The exchange came as the Republican Marshall was questioned by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, about Marshall’s ties to a group that promoted the rally that occurred in Washington before the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump. “Is Joseph R. Biden of Delaware the duly elected and lawfully serving president of the United States of America?” Whitehouse asked. “He is the president of this country,” replied Marshall, who was invited by the Judiciary Committee’s Republican minority and questioned in his testimony whether Jackson stands up for crime victims.ADVERTISEMENT “Is he the duly elected and lawfully serving president of the United States?” Whitehouse pressed. “He is the president of our country,” Marshall answered. “Are you answering that omitting the language ‘duly elected and lawfully serving’ purposefully?” Whitehouse responded. “I am answering the question. He is president of the United States,” Marshall said. “And you have no view as to whether he was duly elected or is lawfully serving?” the senator asked. “I am telling you he is the president of the United States,” Marshall replied. Afterward, Whitehouse said, “I have no further questions.” A spokesman for the state attorney general’s office didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment on the remarks by Marshall, who was among a group of attorneys general who joined in a 2020 legal brief challenging voting results in four battleground states lost by Trump, who falsely claims the election was stolen. Marshall is a former county prosecutor who was first appointed to the state’s top legal position in 2017, won a full term in 2018, and is seeking reelection this year. Marshall also is a member of the executive committee of the Republican Attorneys General Association, a branch of which promoted the pro-Trump rally that preceded the Capitol riot. Under questioning from Whitehouse, Marshall denied that the group had anything to do with the violent attack and declined the senator’s invitation to address U.S. Capitol Police officers who were injured. “We’ve denounced that violence before and as I’ve done with you here today,” Marshall said. Marshall previously said staff members with the GOP association made unauthorized decisions ahead of robocalls that went out promoting the rally. Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
Daniel Savickas: Oil windfall tax makes a bad situation worse
Gas prices are in the news again for all of the wrong reasons. According to data from AAA, the national average price for regular gas is now roughly $4.33 per gallon. In some states (like California), the average is as high as $5.74 per gallon. These figures represent a 51 percent increase from this time last year. Part of this has been attributed to the impact of the war in Ukraine. However, U.S. government policies toward spending and energy have no doubt been a major cause. And, the response of some members of Congress is to make the cost of gas even higher with a new tax. U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) have introduced legislation that would impose a steep “windfall” tax on American oil companies. The proposal would create a tax on profits that oil companies make above $66 per barrel. Those profits would be taxed at the staggeringly high rate of 50 percent. The proceeds from that tax would then be used to create another stimulus check – $240 for individual filers and $360 for joint filers. This proposal is a disaster for a number of reasons and reflects the fundamental misunderstanding many Washington policymakers have about soaring gas prices. The first is the disregard for the role government policy has had on price inflation. The U.S. federal government has spent as much money in the last five years as it did in the prior eight years. The U.S. also imposed strict sanctions after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which impacted global supply. To attribute price hikes to “corporate greed” as Sen. Whitehouse and Rep. Khanna did, is to ignore the impact of their own policymaking and to miss the point entirely. This view of economics supposes that the relatively low prices for a barrel of oil until now have been because of corporate altruism on the part of the same companies now being maligned as greedy. The true explanation is a tad more complex than policymakers would care to admit. Oil companies are responding to global economic forces, which at the moment are making it more costly to bring supply to the market. Prices are rising, producers are incurring greater costs and markets are anticipating the need for new sources of supply. Another contradiction in the way Washington Democrats are approaching this issue is in their discussion of supply. In a public comment, White House press secretary Jen Psaki accused the oil industry of purposely refusing to drill so prices would go up. Psaki cited the fact that there are 9,000 permits not in use. This also misses the mark. While there are unused permits, the federal government has paused leases on federal lands for oil companies. Permits and leases are only one part of a longer production process where the federal government has erected and maintained barriers to increased production. At a time where U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has pushed oil companies to produce more oil, the administration has a pause on leases and Congress is trying to further dissuade more production. Rapidly ramping up production would create millions of dollars of risk for these companies. Costs will rise, and prices usually follow. Bills like the Whitehouse-Khanna proposal would obliterate the incentive to assume such risks. The messaging is not in sync with actual policy coming from Capitol Hill. Further, the guidelines set in the Whitehouse-Khanna bill are arbitrary at best. The $66 per barrel threshold is based on “the average price of oil between 2015 and 2019.” No justification was given for why that metric was used or why such a short window of time was used to generate it. In the midst of rampant inflation, a waning pandemic, and conflict in Eastern Europe, the current global market price sits at just under $100 per barrel. A $66 benchmark is out of touch with clear and present realities in the market. The solution to the lagging global oil supply is to incentivize production wherever possible, not to seek out ways to punish those who might. Higher prices are part of incentivizing said production. The solution to rising inflation is to cut government spending, not to create a new entitlement on the back of that aforementioned punishment. The Khanna-Whitehouse proposal on oil “windfalls” manages to consolidate much of what has gone sideways in Washington in recent years. Not only will it fail to address the current issues, it will exacerbate those problems. Daniel Savickas is Government Affairs manager at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance. Republished with the permission of The Center Square.
No escape: Senators to be quiet, unplugged for Donald Trump impeachment trial
Senators will begin each day with a proclamation: “All persons are commanded to keep silence, on pain of imprisonment.”
Supreme Court takes up gun case, though disputed law has changed
The Supreme Court is turning to gun rights for the first time in nearly a decade, even though those who brought the case, New York City gun owners, already have won changes to the regulation they challenged. The justices’ persistence in hearing arguments Monday despite the city’s action has made gun control advocates fearful that the court’s conservative majority could use the case to call into question gun restrictions across the country. Gun rights groups are hoping the high court is on the verge of extending its landmark rulings from 2008 and 2010 that enshrined the right to have a gun for self-defense at home. For years, the National Rifle Association and its allies had tried to get the court to say more about gun rights, even as mass shootings may have caused the justices to shy away from taking on new disputes over gun limits. Justice Clarence Thomas has been among members of the court who have complained that lower courts are treating the Second Amendment’s right to “keep and bear arms” as a second-class right. The lawsuit in New York began as a challenge to the city’s prohibition on carrying a licensed, locked and unloaded handgun outside the city limits, either to a shooting range or a second home. Lower courts upheld the regulation, but the Supreme Court’s decision in January to step into the case signaled a revived interest in gun rights from a court with two new justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, both appointees of President Donald Trump. Officials at both the city and state level scrambled to find a way to remove the case from the justices’ grasp. Not only did the city change its regulation to allow licensed gun owners to transport their weapons to locations outside New York’s five boroughs, but the state enacted a law barring cities from imposing the challenged restrictions. “There is no case or controversy because New York City has repealed the ordinance and the New York state Legislature has acted to make sure it remains repealed,” said Jonathan Lowy, chief counsel and vice president of the gun control group Brady’s legal action project. But those moves failed to get the court to dismiss the case, although the justices are likely to ask at arguments about whether there’s anything left for them to decide. Paul Clement, who represents three New York residents and New York’s National Rifle Association affiliate challenging the transportation ban, said in an email that among the reasons the case remains alive legally is that the court frowns on tactical moves of the sort employed by the city and state that are meant to frustrate the justices’ review of an issue. In addition, he wrote, that “the City still views firearm ownership as a privilege and not a fundamental right and is still in the business of limiting transport and denying licenses for a host of discretionary reasons.” In the event the court reaches the substance of the law, the city does contend that what it calls its “former rule” did not violate the Constitution. But that would seem to be a tough sell given the court’s makeup, with Gorsuch and, in particular, Kavanaugh on the court. Kavanaugh voted in dissent when his federal appeals court upheld the District of Columbia’s ban on semi-automatic rifles. “Gun bans and gun regulations that are not longstanding or sufficiently rooted in text, history, and tradition are not consistent with the Second Amendment individual right,” Kavanaugh wrote in 2011. Gun control advocates worry that the court could adopt Kavanaugh’s legal rationale, potentially putting at risk regulations about who can carry guns in public, limits on large-capacity ammunition magazines and perhaps even restrictions on gun ownership by convicted criminals, including people convicted of domestic violence. “This approach to the Second Amendment would treat gun rights as an absolute right, frozen in history, and not subject to any restrictions as public safety demands,” said Hannah Shearer, litigation director at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Reflecting the possible high stakes, more than three dozen supporting legal briefs have been filed. The Trump administration, 25 mainly Republican states and 120 members of the House of Representatives are on the side of the gun owners. A dozen Democratic-led states and 139 House lawmakers back the city. In addition, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat-Rhode Island, a vocal court critic, filed a brief joined by four Senate Democratic colleagues that asked the justices to dismiss the case and resist being drawn into what he called a political project. Whitehouse also included a warning to the justices. “The Supreme Court is not well. And the people know it. Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics,’” he wrote, quoting a public opinion poll showing support for such changes. All 53 Republican senators responded with a letter urging the court not to be cowed by the Democrats’ threats. A decision is expected by late June. By Mark Sherman Associated Press. Republished with the Permission of the Associated Press.
