Catching on

It turns out that the Supreme Court’s incredibly narrow definition of corruption is not shared by the public at large:

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas ended a monthslong saga last week by officially disclosing trips paid for by GOP megadonor Harlan Crow.

The incident brought to light a key fact: Unlike other federal courts and the executive and legislative branches, the US Supreme Court does not have a formal ethics code.

Americans, it turns out, don’t think the Supreme Court should be an exception in this case. And when it comes to honesty and ethics, they believe the justices on the court are, at best, average.

Take a look at a Marquette University Law School poll conducted in July. Just 32% of Americans rated the honesty and ethical standards of the Supreme Court justices as high, while 35% percent said they were low and 33% said they were average.

These poll results are largely in line with Marquette’s May poll findings on the same topic.

From a historical standpoint, 32% is low. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, about 50% of Americans agreed that the moral and ethical practices of the Supreme Court justices were excellent or good. Only about 15%, on average, said they were poor.

Unsurprisingly, given the court’s conservative majority, Republicans are far likelier now to say that the justices have high (about 55%) honesty and ethical standards than Democrats (about 16%).

But there is no significant partisan gap when it comes to whether there should be a formal ethics code for the high court justices.

It says something about the surpassing arrogance of the Court that they refuse to institute an ethics code even though it would be mostly symbolic. For people like Clarence Thomas, even purely formal institutional rules are too much. (For him, I mean — if a lawyer in a death penalty case splits an infinitive all further rights to appeal shall be forfeited.)