The Supreme Court of the United States announced news on Monday regarding a "Code of Conduct" the justices have agreed upon as Democrat attempts to undermine the Court — namely the originalist justices on the bench — sought to delegitimize the highest court in the land as retribution for decisions with which Democrats did not agree.
"The undersigned Justices are promulgating this Code of Conduct to set out succinctly and gather in one place the ethics rules and principles that guide the conduct of the Members of the Court," a statement from SCOTUS explained.
"For the most part these rules and principles are not new: The Court has long had the equivalent of common law ethics rules, that is, a body of rules derived from a variety of sources, including statutory provisions, the code that applies to other members of the federal judiciary, ethics advisory opinions issued by the Judicial Conference Committee on Codes of Conduct, and historic practice," the Court reminded.
"The absence of a Code, however, has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules," the statement noted. "To dispel this misunderstanding, we are issuing this Code, which largely represents a codification of the principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct."
The Code of Conduct and commentary from the justices can be viewed in full here.
The Court's statement comes after, as Katie reported last week, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee "hit the brakes on plans to subpoena conservative legal scholar Leonard Leo and billionaire Harlan Crow during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill Thursday, scoring a win for the integrity of the Supreme Court." The Judiciary Committee is slated to again consider subpoenas related to Supreme Court ethics this Thursday and it remains unclear if the Court's adoption of a formal code on Monday will change that.
As Judicial Crisis Network (JCN) President Carrie Severino observed, it's unlikely that the Code of Conduct adopted by the Supreme Court on Monday will "satisfy Senate Democrats and their liberal dark-money backers." For them, it's never been about concern for the Supreme Court's ethics standards, it's been a multi-front assault on the legitimacy of SCOTUS that has run for years and only escalated with key opinions from SCOTUS which moved the federal government and Supreme Court closer to their constitutionally intended roles.
I doubt this Code will satisfy Senate Democrats and their liberal dark-money backers, as their campaign has never really been about ethics but rather intimidating a Court that it despises for being faithful to the Constitution. https://t.co/PgObBw0evF
— Carrie Severino (@JCNSeverino) November 13, 2023
This is a developing story and may be updated.