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Supreme Court disclosure requirements tackle gifts and free trips

It may shock readers, but the United States Supreme Court – unlike all other federal courts – does not adhere to an enforceable ethics code.

The lack of an enforceable ethics code with penalties for Supreme Court justices is a glaring omission in the nation’s ethics laws. There is not even a legal mechanism to force justices to recuse themselves when they have a clear conflict of interest in a case before the Court.

There is good news on this front, as The Hill reports:

Supreme Court justices must follow strengthened financial disclosure requirements surrounding gifts and free hotel stays, which follows rising pressure from lawmakers about the high court’s ethics rules.

The new regulations quietly went into effect on March 14 and clarify that the justices — and all federal judges — must disclose gifts and free stays at commercial properties, or when gifts of hospitality are being reimbursed by a third party who is not the person providing it.

A committee of the Judicial Conference, which sets policy for the federal courts, approved the new regulations, according to a letter from the director of the federal courts’ administrative arm that was made public on Tuesday.

We welcome these new requirements, although it is hardly enough to give Americans confidence in the Supreme Court’s adherence to the highest ethical standards. In fact, all this does is require reporting. It does not impose an ethics code with penalties. It’s better than nothing, but it’s far from sufficient.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) welcomed the news in an interview with Lawrence O’Donnell, which you can watch below:

Photo Credit: Wally Gobetz, Flickr

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The Supreme Court likely decided control of the House in this year’s elections

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court very likely decided control of the House of Representatives.

Kevin McCarthy should consider sending Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas holiday cards. The incoming razor-thin Republican majority in the House of Representatives – the exact size of which is still unknown – can thank the United States Supreme Court.

Utilizing the shadow docket, the Supreme Court issued a stay, reversing a lower court’s ruling that forced the state of Alabama to comply with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in time for the midterm elections. At issue is whether Alabama is compelled to create a second black-majority congressional district in a state where over a quarter of the population is black. It’s a case that we previously covered back in January.

“Black people drove a disproportionate share of Alabama’s population growth. Throughout last year, Black Alabamians publicly called on the Legislature to recognize this reality and sought equal representation in Congress,” said NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Senior Counsel Deuel Ross. 

The Brennan Center calls the Supreme Court’s intervention “dangerous,” noting that SCOTUS was setting the stage for overturning four decades of precedent that has resulted in greater representation for non-white voters.

Michael Li, Senior Counsel at the Brennan Center, writes:

The case centers on whether Alabama has an obligation under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to create a second district where Black voters have a reasonable opportunity to elect community-preferred candidates. Black Alabamians are currently 27 percent of the state’s population, but under the map passed by the Republican controlled Alabama legislature, have the ability to successfully elect candidates in only one of the state’s seven congressional districts.

This anomalous result is the product of a carefully constructed two-step maneuver. First, lawmakers packed a large portion of Black Alabamians into the sprawling, heavily Black 7th Congressional District, which joins much of the state’s historic Black Belt with parts of both Birmingham and Montgomery. For the rest of the state, map drawers then surgically divided Black voters among the remaining six white-majority districts. The outcome is a map where the 7th District is more than 56 percent Black, but where no other district is more than 30 percent Black, well below the level needed for Black Alabamians to sway elections given the high levels of racially polarized voting in the state.

The Alabama case resulted in federal courts allowing racially gerrymandered maps to go into effect in Georgia and Louisiana. A federal judge found that Georgia’s Congressional map likely violated the Voting Rights Act but cited the Supreme Court’s decision in the Alabama case to allow the map to remain in place for the 2022 elections. The Supreme Court itself intervened after a federal court ordered Louisiana to redraw its racially gerrymandered maps.

All told, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Alabama directly resulted in at least three fewer black-majority districts in the South – seats that were all but guaranteed to go to the Democrats. Beyond those seats, it’s important to point out that gerrymanders in Florida, Ohio, Tennessee, and Wisconsin cost the Democrats between a half dozen and a dozen seats.

In 2019, the conservatives on the Supreme Court decreed that federal courts could not rule on partisan gerrymanders but left the door open to ruling on racial gerrymanders. With its shadow docket rulings in Alabama and Louisiana, it looks as if those guardrails against racially-discriminatory maps are now gone as well.

We are a nation of laws, but it is increasingly obvious that the United States Supreme Court is bending our nation’s laws to benefit one particular political party.

Photo Credit: Wally Gobetz, Flickr

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Supreme Court dismisses Trump’s remaining election lawsuits

The United States Supreme Court has formally rejected eight election-related lawsuits still pending even after President Joe Biden took office.

According to Reuters:

The justices turned away appeals by the Republican Party of Pennsylvania and Republican members of the state legislature of a ruling by Pennsylvania’s top court ordering officials to count mail-in ballots that were postmarked by Election Day and received up to three days later.

Three of the nine-member court’s six conservative justices – Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch – dissented from the decision not to hear the Pennsylvania case.

Trump, a Republican, lost his re-election bid to Democrat Joe Biden, who took office on Jan. 20. Biden defeated Trump by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania and the legal case focused on fewer than 10,000 ballots.

The high court, as expected, also rejected two Trump appeals challenging Biden’s victories in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin based on claims that the rules for mail-in ballots in the two election battleground states were invalid. The court also turned away separate cases brought by Trump allies in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Arizona – all states won by Biden.

This is yet another defeat for Trump from the conservative-dominated United States Supreme Court. Back in December, the Supreme Court rejected a last-ditch effort to overturn Pennsylvania’s election results.

Photo Credit: Wally Gobetz, Flickr

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Supreme Court rejects bid to overturn Pennsylvania election results

In the latest court defeat for President Trump and his allies, the United States Supreme Court denied a request to invalidate over 2.5 million ballots in the state of Pennsylvania.

President-elect Joe Biden won the state of Pennsylvania with a margin of over 80,000 votes. However, Trump and his allies have sought to discredit Biden’s victory and overturn the results across multiple states.

According to NPR:

The lawsuit was brought by Republican Rep. Mike Kelly, who argued a 2019 state law authorizing universal mail-in voting is unconstitutional and that all ballots cast by mail in the general election in Pennsylvania should be thrown out.

“The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied,” read the court’s order, which did not comment further or suggest any dissent among the court’s nine justices.

Kelly, along with several others, filed the lawsuit on Nov. 21 and requested Pennsylvania either reject the over 2.5 million ballots that were cast by mail or allow state lawmakers to select presidential electors. Republicans control Pennsylvania’s state legislature.

The state Supreme Court unanimously dismissed the lawsuit on Nov. 28, saying the GOP had waited too long to challenge the law.

Photo Credit: Wally Gobetz, Flickr