Alito doesn’t dispute that he accepted gifts in the form of extravagant vacations. Rather, he takes issue with the idea that he was required to disclose the gifts and that his impartiality as a judge could be undermined.
Full disclosure of gifts “should be a justice’s default position,” says Lubet, “rather than a grudging concession made only when there is no alternative.”
Alito asserts that he followed the “standard practice” of the Supreme Court.
Lubet believes that’s a big part of the problem. The Alito revelation follows scrutiny over Justice Clarence Thomas’s failure to disclose gifts from wealthy donors and failure to recuse himself from cases tied to his benefactors.
A bigger problem, argues Lubet, “is that Alito, like every other justice, arrogates the decision exclusively to himself. The practice of assigning recusal rulings solely to the affected justice is one of the most serious ethics issues confronting the Supreme Court, and Alito invokes it without embarrassment, insisting that the public must unquestioningly trust his appraisal of his own impartiality."
No one is accusing the justices of outright favor-trading. But “Justices who have enjoyed the trappings of wealth may identify, consciously or otherwise, with the welfare of their moneyed companions.”
“Supreme Court justices no doubt believe they are immune to such effects,” says Lubet. But an institution that prides itself on transparency and impartiality must do better.
Read the op-ed at TheHill.com.
