Senate Democrats’ affection for slinging mud at Republican-nominated Supreme Court justices dates back decades. Yet, even after years of failed attempts to stifle confirmations and ruin reputations, their campaign to delegitimize the justices and institution as a threat to their unconstitutional agenda continues with a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing focused on “ethics.”
Democrats claim their concerns about justices’ financial disclosure and ethics practices predate the Biden administration. But it wasn’t until a string of coordinated recent hit pieces calling conservative-nominated justices’ integrity into question that leftist legislators on the Senate Judiciary Committee decided to take action.
Politico’s Heidi Przybyla, who smeared Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, recently painted Justice Neil Gorsuch’s real estate — initiated two years before confirmation to the Supreme Court — as a picture of corruption. That piece of shoddy “investigation” was debunked just as easily as ProPublica’s attempt to accuse Justice Clarence Thomas of cozying up with a conflict of interest was quashed.
To justify their ongoing smear campaign, Democrats brought in congressional witnesses such as Kedric Payne, who is not only quoted in Politico’s Gorsuch smear but also works for a legal group that asserts on its front page the Supreme Court is “a threat to our democracy.”
They’ve also already introduced legislation that would compel the Judicial Conference of the United States, the federal courts’ policymaking body, to create a code of conduct, designate an Ethics Investigations Counsel, and mandate justices to disclose cases in which they recused or risk losing the court’s federal funding
