Think Progress's Ian Millhiser continues his great work exposing the myriad ethical lapses of Justice Clarence Thomas, this time writing about a gift of a statue worth $15,000 the Justice received from the American Enterprise Institute. Here's the ceremony in which he received the gift, a bust of Abraham Lincoln.
The problem for Thomas? "AEI, however, is not simply in the business of giving luxurious gifts to Supreme Court justices—it is also in the business of litigating before the United States Supreme Court."
Thomas recused from none of these three cases, and he either voted in favor of the result AEI favored or took a stance that was even further to the right in each case:
- Riley v. Kennedy: AEI filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to reverse a lower court decision preventing a change in Alabama’s voting law from going into effect. Justice Thomas did not recuse, and he joined the Supreme Court’s decision reversing the lower court.
- Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1: AEI filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to reverse a lower court decisionupholding a local school district’s desegregation plan. Thomas joined the majority opinion reversing the lower court’s decision, and he filed a lengthy concurrence defending that result.
- Whitman v. American Trucking Association: AEI joined a brief asking the Supreme Court to allow the EPA to consider the costs of implementing new air quality standards before it issued them. Thomas’ concurring opinion went much further than AEI asked him to go, suggesting that the law authorizing EPA to issue these standards is unconstitutional.
Even if the $15,000 gift didn't influence Thomas's vote (and in these cases he voted in his usual far-right vein), no Supreme Court Justice should be accepting $15,000 gifts from any entity that involves itself in cases before the court. Any federal judge at any level of the judiciary below the SCOTUS would be prohibited from doing so under the Code of Conduct. It's right there in black and white in Canon 4C(2): "A judicial employee should not solicit or accept a gift from anyone seeking official action from or doing business with the court or other entity served by the judicial employee, or from anyone whose interests may be substantially affected by the performance or nonperformance of official duties...." Thomas, and any other Justice, should be subject to the same restrictions.
