The Hill News

A journalist I know questioned a two-bit Maryland legislator who voted for a law affecting property he had a financial interest in. “How about your conflict of interest?” he asked. “I got no conflict with that!” the lawmaker responded.

Alas, the American public has come to expect that kind of ethical blind spot in its legislators. But when the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court tells Congress he doesn’t get why folks question why the standard recusal laws that apply to all federal judges don’t apply to Supreme Court justices, I say bring in the stand-up comics.

In the chief justice’s annual report on the State of the Judiciary, John Roberts reported he had “complete confidence in the capability of my colleagues to determine when recusal is warranted.” They are, he reminded, “jurists of exceptional integrity.” One of these jurists, Justice Clarence Thomas, failed to recuse himself from cases before the Supreme Court even tho! ugh his wife worked for organizations interested in the matters at hand. When it was pointed out to him, Thomas changed his answer to his financial disclosure forms and disclosed that fact retroactively. He blamed the inadvertent error on his not understanding the nature of questions on that form, though he’d filled it out for years in the past.

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