Retired judges demand Supreme Court reform
95 Washington jurists warn Roberts that judicial credibility, authority at stake
Nearly 100 retired superior court judges from Washington —including Cowlitz County’s own Stephen Warning — are urging Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to address ethical concerns shaking the nation’s high court.
In a May 1 letter, the retired jurists assert that the crisis threatens to undermine the credibility and authority of courts across the board. In effect, the letter is a careful rebuke of Roberts’ failure to act.
“The Supreme Court is faced with a choice. It can take public remedial action or it can choose to maintain an air of insularity in the hope that the crisis will pass,” according to the letter, sent to Roberts and copied to the other eight justices.
“For the sake of an institution that we all served and cherish, we respectfully urge you to exercise your authority as Chief Justice and take appropriate action that will restore the public’s trust and confidence in the Supreme Court and, by extrapolation, all courts.”
A significant number of the 95 retired Superior Court judges who signed the letter are from King County, which has by far the largest county court system in the state. However, signatures also come from retired jurists in more conservative counties, including Lewis County and Lincoln and Okanogan counties in red-leaning Eastern Washington.
To put the scope of the letter in perspective, the number of retired superior court judges who signed it equals nearly half of the 200 superior court judges actively serving across the state, according to Warning. Warning is the only living retired Superior Court judge in Cowlitz County, elected in 1996 and serving until August 2020.
“I think it is important to remind the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court that their bad decisions don’t just harm them. They do damage to the entire judicial branch. The kind of ethical lapse(s) we’re talking about are not rocket science,” said Warning, who shared the letter with me.
Superior court judges are the state’s highest-ranking county judges, below state appeals court and the Washington Supreme Court in the state’s judicial pecking order.
The May 1 letter does not specifically list the ethics issues that have arisen recently involving Supreme Court associate justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch. But it clearly relates to them.
Thomas has been under fire for failing to report lavish trips and vacations paid for by GOP billionaire Harlan Crow. Thomas also did not report that Crow paid private school tuition — perhaps as much as $150,000 — for his teenage grandnephew, who had lived with the justice and his wife.
Thomas said Crow never has had a case before the high court and that he consulted other (unnamed) judges who told him the gifts were not reportable on financial disclosure forms.
Gorsuch, a conservative, and Sotomayor, a liberal, have come under scrutiny for not recusing themselves from cases involving book publishers who paid them lavish amounts for book deals.
According to CNN, Sotomayor reported receiving book advances from Knopf Doubleday that totaled $3.1 million in 2010-11. And the company paid her nearly $500,000 in book royalties and advances for 2017-21.
In recent years Gorsuch received $655,000 in payments from Penguin for penning “A Republic, If You Can Keep It,” according to his financial disclosure reports.
Judges who decide thorny and complicated ethical and legal issues should be beyond reproach or even the appearance of having conflicts of interest.
Chief Justice Roberts has declined to comment on the controversies, despite critics’ calls for reform and a Supreme Court code of ethics. Roberts even refused to testify at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday about the recent revelations. And a statement the court put out last week largely dismissed the concerns, in effect saying “let us handle it.”
Nevertheless, watchdog groups in particular have called for greater transparency and reform to make sure justice don’t participate in cases in which they may have a financial or other conflicts of interest.
In their May 1 letter, the retired superior court judges noted that courts have little power except for the judicial system’s moral and institutional integrity — which the ethics concerns undermine.
“All of us strove every day of our careers to exemplify the highest level of allegiance to our oaths of office, to administer justice fairly and impartially and to comply with our code of ethics. Attention to these goals was not only important to our professional reputations but was essential to maintain the continued effectiveness of the judicial branch of government,” the letter states.
The letter — somewhat ominously — quotes Andrew Jackson, the nation’s seventh president, who famously scoffed at Supreme Court power: “(Chief Justice) John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.“
It stretches credulity and one’s sense of ethics to believe, as Thomas asserts, that gifts worth hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars should not be disclosed. To put that claim in perspective, candidates for public office in Washington must itemize individual contributions to their campaigns of just $25 or more.
It is true, of course, that Thomas, Sotomayor and Gorsuch are not running for office and serve for life or until they resign. Yet their court decisions have a profound effect on American life and law. Judges who decide thorny and complicated ethical and legal issues should be beyond reproach or even the appearance of having conflicts of interest.
The rule of thumb here is simple: If jurists have to ask whether they have conflict of interest, they have one.
Roberts and the court are not above the law or basic ethical considerations every adult citizen of this nation understands. It’s time for reform.