This article was originally published by Vanity Fair.
Clarence Thomas isn’t alone. As it turns out, Samuel Alito also failed to disclose gifts from a GOP megadonor, according to a ProPublica report that the conservative justice tried to get ahead of in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Tuesday.
ProPublica reported that Paul Singer—a conservative billionaire—flew Alito on a private jet to Alaska for a luxury fishing trip in 2008; the fishing lodge cost about $1,000 a day and the flight would have cost Alito more than $100,000 one way. The trip was reportedly organized by Leonard Leo, a leader of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal organization behind George W. Bush and Donald Trump judicial appointees. Not only did Alito fail to report the trip on his yearly disclosures, in apparent violation of federal law—he did not recuse himself from at least 10 cases in which Singer’s hedge fund came later before the Supreme Court, according to ProPublica.
“Yet again the Court-capture operative Leonard Leo appears to be hooking up SCOTUS justices with right-wing billionaires for freebie vacations,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a fierce advocate for Supreme Court reform, wrote Wednesday. (A Singer spokesperson told ProPublica that he was unaware Alito would be attending the trip and “never discussed his business interests” with the justice. Leo told the outlet in a statement that “no event, meeting, dinner, or trip would influence [Alito’s] approach to the rule of law,” and suggested that ProPublica’s reporting was “bait for reeling in more dark money from woke billionaires who want to damage this Supreme Court and remake it into one that will disregard the law by rubber stamping their disordered and highly unpopular cultural preferences.”)
In an unusual move, just hours before ProPublica’s latest report went live, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Alito in which the influential justice—who penned the majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade last year—attempted to undermine the reporting on his ethics violations as “misleading.” He argued that had “no obligation” to recuse himself and did not need to disclose the trip under the rules as written. He also claimed to have stayed in a “modest room” at the fishing lodge, ate “homestyle fare,” and only accepted the trip in Singer’s private jet because the “seat…would have otherwise been vacant.”
“He allowed me to occupy what would have otherwise been an unoccupied seat on a private flight to Alaska,” Alito wrote. “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.”
But even if you take Alito’s word for it that there’s nothing fishy about a conservative billionaire paying for vacations for him and the late Antonin Scalia, the idea that such consequential ethical decisions would be left to his own “judgment” underscores the need for the kind of reform Whitehouse and other Democrats have been pushing for. Indeed, similar revelations about Thomas’s relationship with conservative billionaire Harlan Crow have renewed calls for the high court to be held at least to the same ethics, recusal, accountability, and transparency standards as others in the judiciary—with some even demanding the court be expanded or that term limits be imposed to rein in the justices’ extraordinary power. But all those efforts have been met with resistance from Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues, as well near-unanimous opposition from the Republicans who installed the high court’s 6-3 conservative supermajority.
“This is an unseemly effort by the Democratic left to destroy the legitimacy of the Roberts court,” Republican Lindsey Graham complained during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last month on Thomas’s apparent ethics violations.
Of course, it’s not Democrats but the court that is eroding its own legitimacy—both through the lack of transparency and accountability, as illustrated by Alito’s 2008 fishing trip, and its partisanship, as seen in his attempt to undermine ProPublica’s reporting using the Journal’s conservative editorial pages. In the end, Alito's preemptive defense only adds to longstanding questions about his ethics and conduct: “If you were good friends, what were you doing ruling on his case?” as Indiana University law professor Charles Geyh, a leading expert on recusals, told ProPublica. “And if you weren’t good friends, what were you doing accepting this?”
