If You Can't Trust the Courts...?

[JackLuis]

Should SCOTUS Judges Pal Around With Professional Bigots Whose Cases They Are Trying?

Some Supreme Court justices just can't stop being bigots.

Last week not one, but two justices with lifetime appointments to the highest court in the United States decided it would be fun to hang out with the leader of an anti-LGBTQ hate group at the Supreme Court. In the same term as SCOTUS is set to decide three important cases that will likely set the tone for decades to come.

So that's all just great.

A socialite, a priest, and a bigot walk into a bar ...

Last week, Justices Samuel Alito and Kegs Kavanaugh spent a day palling around with a Catholic activist and German socialite, a Cardinal in the Catholic Church, and Brian Brown, who leads both American and international hate groups.

Gloria von Schönburg-Glauchau is a German socialite and fundamentalist Catholic who has said that Africa has high rates of AIDS because "the blacks like to copulate ('schnackseln') a lot." She's friends with white nationalist Steve Bannon and has talked to him about letting him use her palace as a place to train right-wing Catholics. (As if this timeline needs another cartoon villain.)

Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller is a German Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church who sometimes talks about how secularism is ruining the world. Brian Brown is an American bigot who spends his life fighting against equal rights for LGBTQ people. And the trio spend October 29 hanging out at the US Supreme Court with a couple of justices.
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As I'm sure you are aware from your previous service on lower courts, Canon 2(B) of the Code of Conduct for Federal Judges states that judges must take care to avoid the appearance of improper influence:

Outside Influence. A judge should not allow family, social, political, financial, or other relationships to influence judicial conduct or judgment. A judge should neither lend the prestige of the judicial office to advance the private interests of the judge or others nor convey or permit others to convey the impression that they are in a special position to influence the judge ....

While the Code of Conduct unfortunately does not apply to the Supreme Court, each justice has an ethical duty to decide for themselves if recusal is necessary to avoid bias or the appearance of bias. In order to meet this duty, you must recuse yourselves s from the three cases currently before the court for which the National Organization for Marriage has filed briefs. The fact that the Supreme Court does not have formal ethics rules is no excuse for behaving unethically.
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It's true: the judicial code of conduct does not apply to Supreme Court justices. The justices who have the absolute final say in the United States judicial system are the only nine federal judges who don't have to follow mandatory ethics rules.

If that sounds problematic, that's because it is.

 

[magicalmoments]

I don't see the problem with the highest court in the land not having code of ethics. Their "code" is the constitution and other founding documents.
They would surely self police issues like allowing their personal prejudices to influence their judgements? A good spanking from the Chief Justice perhaps!
The English system is far better, the queen, selected by God, is the ultimate authority there.

 

[JackLuis]

When was the last time a Judge was chastised for assholery?

Don't tell me it never happens, I've been to Virginia.