Editor’s note: This piece was updated to correct a spelling error, the classification of a family relationship, a dollar amount associated with a gift and the number of times an individual had cases before the Supreme Court. It was also amended to add details surrounding a case that was rejected by the Supreme Court. We regret the errors.
This year has been a disaster for the Supreme Court’s legitimacy and public faith in its 6-3 conservative majority. Near daily revelations of unseemly financial relationships between the court’s conservative justices and their billionaire patrons were hallmarks of another blockbuster, precedent-busting term.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans have obstructed Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin’s (D-Ill.) attempts at exercising oversight through Judiciary Committee hearings and Congress has failed to pressure the court into adopting a formal code of conduct.
In April, Chief Justice John Roberts very publicly stonewalled Senate inquiries into the court’s ethical practices, undercutting his credibility and enhancing perceptions that today’s court is corrupt, partisan to its core and unaccountable to any other branch of government.
Nearly all of the court’s ethical scandals are tied to the Federalist Society, its leader Leonard Leo and his shadowy network of Republican billionaires, nonprofit groups and consulting firms. Following the Federalist Society’s money trail raises serious questions about how the Supreme Court’s conservative justices fund their lifestyles, their fidelity to government ethics laws and the possible influence Republican billionaires wield over Supreme Court decisions.
Aping Chief Justice Roberts, Leo is refusing to cooperate with Senate investigators’ requests for information.
To restore faith in the court, the Senate needs to use its full investigatory powers to compel answers from Leo, the Federalist Society and its donors about their financial influence over the court.
Launched by Yale and University of Chicago law students in 1982, the Federalist Society was founded to showcase conservative legal scholarship and organize, recruit, educate and mobilize conservative law students. Students and lawyers attended meetings with conservative judges and justices. Connections were made that led to clerkships and judgeships. By 1987, a co-chairman of a Federalist Society convention proclaimed its work would eventually lead to the placement of Republicans in high-ranking positions across all three branches of government. Corporate donations came flowing in.
Today, the group boasts a deep network of billionaire donors cultivated by Leo, who is best known for selecting all three of former President Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, as well as more than 200 lower court judges — many of whom are far-right extremists. Leo also made headlines after receiving a highly questionable $1.6 billion donation from a friendly billionaire — perhaps the largest political donation in U.S. history.
For decades Leo and the Federalist Society hosted events allowing Federalist Society judges, corporate executives, corporate lawyers and billionaires to mingle. The Supreme Court’s Republican justices are frequent guests, while reporters and members of the public are barred from attending. Given several Republican justices’ relaxed attitudes about capitalizing off of their connections to the ultra-wealthy, the stench of impropriety from these soireés has become inescapable.
For over 20 years, Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni Thomas were gifted luxury travel from Harlan Crow — a Republican billionaire closely connected to Leo, who may have used these trips to commit tax fraud. Crow also paid private school tuition for Thomas’s grandnephew, owns the home where Thomas’s mother lives and partially paid for Leonard Leo’s public relations campaign promoting Thomas.
The Washington Post also uncovered cash payments secretly funneled to Ginni Thomas by Leo. These payments and gifts were kept off Justice Thomas’s federal disclosures, in what appear to be major violations of government ethics laws.
Leo also helped to organize an undisclosed luxury vacation for Justice Samuel Alito paid for by Republican billionaire Paul Singer. The vacation included lavish travel on Singer’s private jet valued at more than $200,000, free lodging at a high-end Alaskan fishing lodge valued at more than $1,000 a night and complimentary meals including $1,000 wine.
Singer has had interests before the court in the past. In 2005, the court declined to hear a case involving Trammel Crow Residential, a company that Crow Holdings holds a minority interest in. Thomas and Alito failed to recuse themselves from those cases.
Even after the court’s Republican justices’ self-interested gutting of U.S. anti-corruption laws, no other government employee could get away with such blatant profiteering. And, based on what has come out, it’s reasonable to assume that these ethical violations are just the tip of the iceberg.
To protect the court, the Senate must fully investigate Leo and the Federalist Society, including by issuing subpoenas. Failing to do so will erode a longstanding principle of American democracy — that no public official is above the law.
Inaction will also signal that government officials can openly flout ethics laws and use their positions to enrich themselves and their families. Just as long as they are powerful enough to get away with it, that is.
Nan Aron is a distinguished lecturer in residence at Georgetown Law Center and founder and former president of Alliance for Justice.