It has come to light that United States Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has used her staff to book speaking engagements and pressured people into purchasing copies of her books. Sotomayor has reportedly (according to NPR) received a 3.1 million advance on her autobiography and has received royalties on her children books to the tune of $400,000 since 2019.
Here is the link to the AP article on the National Public Radio website:
www.npr.org/...
It seems that many at Daily Kos, think that press shouldn’t be writing articles about this and is merely engaging in bothsidesism. While it is true that the gifts (or should I say bribes?) that Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have received from the likes of Harlan Crow and Paul Singer are much more likely to have influenced their rulings than the organizations who have sponsored Sotomayor’s speaking engagements and purchased signed copies of her books at the request of her staff; it is nevertheless a breach of ethics to have her staff working for work unrelated to her work as Supreme Court justice.
While many of us have occasionally used company resources (like copy or fax machines) for personal business, it’s hard to imagine that she wouldn’t be able to employ a personal assistant with a portion of the $90,000 plus per year that she receives from her children’s books royalties alone. I daresay there’s probably a more than a few college students in the District who would be more than happy to be paid to take on that task to help subsidize their education.
Have abuse of the public purse become so commonplace that we at Daily Kos don’t see a problem with this? How would we feel about this if it were Justice Roberts engaging in this behavior? Members of Congress would be barred from engaging in this behavior according to House ethics rules. A revision of ethics rules for the United States Supreme Court is a necessary step to restoring the legitimacy of the court. But those ethics rules need to apply to all the justices, not merely the ones we deem unworthy of our respect.
