'Impossible' for Supreme Court to exist as it does now if corruption stories keep leaking: analyst
Prior to ProPublica's new bombshell story about Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito accepting a luxury fishing vacation in Alaska from Paul Singer, a billionaire with business before the justices, Alito wrote an angry op-ed in the Wall Street Journal trashing the reporting and denying any impropriety.
But that isn't going to reverse the growing public sentiment against the court, argued analyst Nia-Malika Henderson on CNN Wednesday.
"So before the article even came out, Alito gave this op-ed to his friends at the Journal disputing some of the charges," said anchor Jake Tapper. "Quote, '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.' He claimed he had no idea that Singer had any business before the court. Although I think if you Googled some of the matters, his name would have popped up. What do you make of this?"
"I think this, on top of the story around Clarence Thomas accepting luxury gifts and luxury trips, will make it impossible for the Supreme Court to exist as it exists now. Which is sort of above ethics rules," said Henderson. "If you look at a lot of the data on the Supreme Court, it had been seen as an aboveboard, apolitical institution. Over the last two or three years, it has declined. It has declined something like 20 points in the last couple years, because of some of the things they've done in terms of decisions they made. You have moves that will happen on Congress to put some laws in place to make this not happen again."
One of the biggest issues, said Henderson, is the simple "lack of judgment" Alito and Thomas exercised.
"Here you are on the highest court in the land, and you can't think that this is a sort of improper thing to do, even by appearances?" said Henderson. "Not to say he did anything wrong or even necessarily unethical. But by the appearance of it, it would seem someone would know to not do this. To recuse himself from the cases, to know Singer is coming before him, or to list this on the documents that you had to put forward."
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