Opinion:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... rt-ethics/
"Another justice, another luxury trip, all expenses paid by conservative activists with ideological or financial interests before the Supreme Court.
This time, it’s Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the venue is an Alaskan fishing lodge, and the underwriters of the junket are hedge fund tycoon Paul Singer and businessman Robin Arkley II. Both are donors to the conservative Federalist Society and were joined on the 2008 fishing trip by Federalist Society official Leonard Leo. Leo was fresh off helping Alito get confirmed two years earlier.
The entitlement. The hubris. The tone-deafness about how accepting these perks is perceived by ordinary people who believe judges are neutral umpires just calling balls and strikes.
When ProPublica reported on Clarence Thomas’s far-flung and repeated vacations with GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, the justice’s defense, if it can be called that, was that the Crows are among the Thomases’ “dearest friends” and that the acceptance of luxury travel (private jet flights, a yacht trip) was justified under the carve-out in federal ethics rules for acceptance of “personal hospitality.”
This time, in another story by ProPublica, the defense is, in part, effectively “I barely knew the guy when he offered me a spare seat on his private plane.” Heads, I travel; tails, you don’t know about it.
Of course, justices get to have friends, and spend time with them. Of course, it’s a good thing for justices to interact with lawyers, law students and the public. I don’t begrudge a bit of law-teaching in a pleasant European city. Everyone benefits — students, justices, the school.
The resort at which he stayed, where rooms ran $1,000 a night, was owned by Arkley, a conservative California businessman and financial supporter of the Federalist Society. What is Alito’s relationship with Arkley? How could it possibly be acceptable to take this kind of gift?
The private-jet connection was even more questionable. At the time of the event, Singer, a hedge fund manager and major donor to Republicans and conservative causes, was embroiled in a high-stakes legal battle with Argentina, which had defaulted on its debt. Singer’s hedge fund was trying to force the country to pay up, in full. The dispute had already made its way to the Supreme Court once, the year before, and it was entirely foreseeable that the matter would be back before the court.
And so it was, eight times, including a June 2014 decision in which the court ruled 7-1, with Alito in the majority, for Singer’s firm. It ended up making Singer’s fund $2 billion.
Should Alito have recused himself, given Singer’s generosity? Some ethics experts quoted by ProPublica say so; Alito, in his astonishing pre-buttal published in the Wall Street Journal before the ProPublica story was posted, disputes that assessment. “It was and is my judgment that these facts would not cause a reasonable and unbiased person to doubt my ability to decide the matters in question impartially,” he wrote.
But the public would not know to question Alito, because the justice didn’t deign to disclose Singer’s largesse. And his explanation for why he shouldn’t have stepped aside on his own beggars belief: “I was not aware and had no good reason to be aware that Mr. Singer had an interest in any party. … In the one case in which review was granted … Mr. Singer’s name did not appear in either the certiorari petition, the brief in opposition, or the merits briefs.”
Come on. Singer’s name was in the headline or lead paragraph of pretty much every news report about the case.
Conservatives seem to have worked themselves into a frenzy of injured outrage responding to the stories about some justices’ ethical lapses. Some reports indeed have strained to find scandal — the reactions to Neil M. Gorsuch’s real estate transaction and Jane Roberts’s headhunting income seem overblown. And some liberal critics of the court’s rightward lurch might find it convenient to seize on these lapses to augment doubts about the institution’s legitimacy.
But this is not a partisan issue. Unethical behavior is unethical no matter who commits it, and it does the institution a dangerous disservice to pretend otherwise.
The game here isn’t — at least it shouldn’t be — to figure out how much you can take in the way of freebies and keep that hidden. It should be to behave in a way that is above reproach and comply with the spirit of the ethics rules. Justices scouring the code for loopholes that seem to shield their bad behavior is not a good look.
How do you know you are in the wrong? When the ethics law clearly limits the personal hospitality exception to “food, lodging and entertainment” but you find yourself arguing that a private plane counts as a facility. (Another part of the law references “property or facilities owned by” the individual providing personal hospitality.) When you’re reduced to insisting that there wasn’t much of a benefit from flying at someone else’s expense because there just happened to be an open seat on the private jet.
The photograph at the top of the ProPublica story says it all: Alito and Singer, standing in front of a fishing boat, wearing waders and beaming as they hoist their Alaskan king salmon.
How nice for them. And how troubling for the rest of us chumps, who pay our own way and are naive enough to expect more from those who sit on the highest court in the land."