US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is refusing to testify in the US Congress about business dealings by two conservative justices and lavish gifts one received that have raised ethics issues.
Roberts cited “separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence” in declining the committee’s invitation in a letter dated Tuesday to the US Senate Judiciary Committee.
He included a copy of court ethics guidelines and a statement signed by the Supreme Court’s nine justices in which they “reaffirm and restate foundational ethics principles and practices.”
Photo: REUTERS
However, Roberts made no direct reference to the controversy engulfing the court’s most senior justice, Clarence Thomas, that he and his wife, Ginni Thomas, received lavish gifts and took vacations worth millions of US dollars with property billionaire Harlan Crow.
Clarence Thomas did not report those gifts, which included a flight on Crow’s private jet to Indonesia for an island-hopping cruise on Crow’s 49m yacht, independent news Web site ProPublica reported.
Nor did he report regularly vacationing at luxury resorts owned by Crow, or that the tycoon bought properties in Savannah, Georgia, from the justice, including the home occupied by Clarence Thomas’ mother, ProPublica said.
Roberts’s refusal to testify also followed a report by Politico that Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, just after being confirmed to the court in 2017, sold a large rural Colorado property to the head of Greenberg Traurig, a major US law firm that regularly handles cases before the court.
Gorsuch had tried without success to sell the property for two years before joining the court, and he did not disclose the buyer on his personal disclosure reports, Politico said.
US Senator Dick Durbin, chair of the Judiciary Committee, on Thursday last week asked Roberts to appear on Tuesday next week to discuss ethics issues around the court.
Since the last time justices appeared before Congress in 2011, also on ethics questions, “there has been a steady stream of revelations regarding justices falling short of the ethical standards expected,” Durbin said.
The 2011 appearance by two justices was also sparked by allegations of Clarence Thomas and his wife benefitting financially from relations with Crow and other powerful Republican donors.
A specific focus then was Crow’s donation of US$500,000 to fund Ginni Thomas’ new Liberty Central advocacy group.
Ginni Thomas is currently under scrutiny for her role in former US president Donald Trump’s re-election campaign claiming, without evidence, that US President Joe Biden’s election victory over him was fraudulent.
After Roberts turned down the committee invitation, US senators Angus King and Lisa Murkowski announced a bill requiring the court to create a code of conduct and appoint an official to review potential conflicts and public complaints.
Supreme Court justices are the only US federal judges not explicitly bound by a code of conduct, they said.
“The American public’s confidence in the Supreme Court is at an all-time low,” Murkowski said. “Americans have made clear their concerns with the transparency — or lack thereof — coming from the Supreme Court and its justices.”
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
RSS