Senate Democrats Will Vote on Subpoenas for Ethics Probe of Supreme Court

Senate Democrats are scheduled to vote on authorizing subpoenas to two influential conservatives with ties to the U.S. Supreme Court as part of an ethics inquiry. This inquiry was prompted by reports of undisclosed gifts to conservative justices.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has set a hearing to consider subpoenas for billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow, who is a benefactor of conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, and conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, who played a key role in compiling former President Donald Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees.

Senator Dick Durbin, the committee’s Democrat chairman, said that subpoenas were necessary as Crow and Leo have refused to voluntarily comply with the panel’s previous requests for information, including itemized lists of all gifts, transportation, and lodging provided to any Supreme Court justice.

“They are not bit players in this crisis, and the information they hold is critical to understanding how individuals and groups with business before the court gain private access to the justices,” Durbin said in a statement last week.

Lawyers for Leo and Crow criticized the information requests as lacking a proper legal justification. Crow’s lawyer proposed turning over a narrower range of information, but Democrats rebuffed that offer, according to the panel’s Democrat members.

Durbin said Wednesday that the committee has dropped its plan to subpoena Robin Arkley II after the conservative donor “provided the committee with information that he had been withholding.”

Democrats were expected to face resistance from the panel’s Republican members, who have portrayed the oversight effort as an attempt to tarnish the Supreme Court after it handed major defeats to liberals in recent years.

ProPublica reported this year on Thomas’s failure to disclose luxury trips and real estate transactions involving Crow. The outlet also reported that Leo helped organize a luxury fishing trip in Alaska attended by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who failed to disclose taking a private jet provided by billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer.

Thomas said he believed the Crow-funded trips were “personal hospitality” and thus exempt from disclosure requirements, and that his omission of the real estate transaction was inadvertent.

Alito, regarding the flight, said that Singer had “allowed me to occupy what would have otherwise been an unoccupied seat.”

Unlike other members of the federal judiciary, the life-tenured justices have no binding code of conduct, though they are subject to certain financial disclosure laws.

The Senate Judiciary Committee in July approved a Democrat-backed bill that would mandate a binding ethics code for the justices. Given Republican opposition, the bill has little chance of becoming law.