Daily Herald opinion: Friendly or not, lavish gifts create appearances that tarnish the Supreme Court
In assessing the disclosure of years of exotic and expensive free trips provided to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, we can't help beginning with raised eyebrows at the justice's description of the gifts. He was advised, he said in a statement on Friday, that this sort of "personal hospitality from close personal friends" did not need to be reported.
Personal hospitality? So that's what we're calling it now?
No doubt, unscrupulous public officials from state legislators to Congressmen to controllers, secretaries of state, governors and, yes, judges will want to stick that one away for the day their misadventures make the front pages.
It is too early in the development of this story, first reported by ProPublica on Thursday, to argue for a specific response to Thomas' actions, but they do lead to thornier issues than the mere semantics of graft. Why, for one, would a Supreme Court justice turn to "colleagues and others in the judiciary" who presumably did not reach the status of the highest court in the land for advice on the legal conduct of a judge, as Thomas says he did? And, perhaps more to the point, why would a Supreme Court justice not recognize the inherent potential for conflict in accepting lavish gifts from a prominent business leader who, though he might not be party to issues before the court immediately certainly could be one day - and whose interests certainly could be influenced by Supreme Court decisions at any time. Of course, there's also this: If the Supreme Court justice didn't see anything wrong with accepting "personal hospitality," why was he not more forthcoming about it?
Even more broadly, we also have to ask what kinds of hospitality are other justices or other judges at any level, getting on the sly?
The latest reports about Thomas surely will add fuel to aggrieved conservatives' complaints that he is just a victim of a supposedly ongoing drive by liberals to wrest power via the media that they couldn't accomplish at the ballot box. A former Thomas clerk, University of California law professor John Yoo, made essentially that argument in comments to The New York Times.
"This is part of this attack on him that goes back to ever since he joined the court, that somehow he couldn't hold these views from his own free thoughts," Yoo said.
That statement is uncomfortably reminiscent of late Democratic California lawmaker Jesse Unruh's famous vulgar claim that if an official couldn't accept, let's call it "personal hospitality," from lobbyists and still vote against them, "you've got no business being up here."
That is not the way we've come to define integrity regarding gifts and favors to people in power. It surely ought not be the standard for judging actions of justices on the nation's highest court. Appearance of impropriety, we know, can be just as devastating to respect for our leaders and institutions as undisputed corruption.
Obviously, stronger ethics rules are needed regarding judges to eliminate further questions, speculations and parsing of words.