Scrutiny of visits to colleges made by Supreme Court justices has now drawn attention to the court’s liberal wing as calls for stronger ethics rules for those who sit on the bench grow louder.
Investigative reporting by The Associated Press, published Tuesday, detailed how schools courted donors to attend the events, enabled encounters between justices and elected officials and provided opportunities for the justices to luxuriate in places like Hawaii and Europe for agreeing to light teaching responsibilities.
The report found the visits were made by justices across ideological lines, most notably including accusations that Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s staff pushed colleges to purchase her books when she traveled to their schools.
Justices’ speaking engagements at universities are nothing new, but their travels have faced increasing scrutiny in recent years as stories emerged about wealthy activists’ efforts to buy access.
The investigation also comes as Senate Democrats prepare to push a Supreme Court ethics bill, an effort they renewed in the wake of ProPublica’s recent reporting into undisclosed […]
Reminds me of childhood.. well, he did it, so why shouldn’t I?
The Supreme Court and ETHICS should not even be in the same sentence, if you ask me.
This is a wonderful article. It is important for the population to understand how the elites view their entitlements. Elites? Of course. Of the nine current Justices eight of them have come from Ivy league schools, except one – Amy Coney Barrett, who graduated from Notre Dame. It has been a long standing “tradition” that Justices are picked from the Ivy League. This is a functional definition of elite. The elites get privileges that the rest of us don’t have access to. They are not required to abide by ethics considerations that the rest of us are bound to. Again, functional definitions of being “elite”. As the population continues to be educated in this regard their esteem for the institute evaporates. As prestige erodes the only thing that remains is power. It will increasing difficult for elites to retain power except through brute force.