>In an interview in the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion section, he says there’s no room for Congress to set rules for the court.https://www.huffpost.com/entry/samuel-alito-wsj-supreme-court-ethics_n_64c43c76e4b0fd06594b3711Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who has been at the center of a number of ethics controversies at the court recently, told the Wall Street Journal lawmakers need to give up on the idea of imposing new rules on the justices.
“No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period,” he told a pair of interviewers for the business paper’s Opinion section in a piece that appeared Friday.
Alito, who authored the opinion in the Dobbs case that overturned Roe v. Wade, has been unusually active for a sitting federal judge in fending off claims of impropriety.
He went so far as getting the Journal to publish an op-ed he wrote defending himself against claims in a ProPublica story he had failed to disclose a gifted luxury trip and private jet travel — before ProPublica had even published the story.
In the interview published Friday, Alito said ordinarily, “the organized bar” of lawyers would defend the court against its critics. But he said that hasn’t been happening, “And, so at a certain point I’ve said to myself, nobody else is going to do this, so I have to defend myself.”
There’s been a lot to defend lately, as Alito and fellow conservative Justice Clarence Thomas have been accused of failing to properly report gifts on federal disclosure forms. Thomas, in particular, was reported by ProPublica to have accepted trips from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow for years.
The ethics disputes led Senate Democrats to consider requiring the Court to stick to stricter ethics standards, closer to those seen in the congressional and executive branches of the government.
