One urgent reason the justices need a credible ethics code? Ginni Thomas.; The Washington Post, September 4, 2024

Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post; One urgent reason the justices need a credible ethics code? Ginni Thomas.

"The impropriety here is multilayered — and staggering.

Ginni Thomas is a political activist by vocation, and, as I’ve written before, that’s her prerogative. It’s her constitutional right. And justices’ spouses have every right to pursue separate careers, including in politics and advocacy. “We have our own separate careers and our own ideas and opinions too,” she told the Washington Free Beacon. “Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.”

That was in 2022, when reports surfaced about Ginni Thomas’s attendance at the Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse and her broader involvement in the “Stop the Steal” movement, including pressing state legislators to set aside the election results.

Now Ginni Thomas’s isn’t just lobbying to “Stop the Steal” — she’s trying to Stop the Reform of her husband’s own institution. So much for separate careers. Ginni Thomas’s own behavior around the 2020 election, and Clarence Thomas’s conduct in accepting, and failing to disclose, thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts from wealthy conservatives helped trigger the push for court reform in the first place. Now, we know, Ginni Thomas is a behind-the-scenes player seeking to frustrate any changes — and a grateful (“THANK YOU SO, SO, SO MUCH”) beneficiary of First Liberty’s efforts on the Thomases’ behalf."

STATEMENT OF THE COURT: REGARDING THE CODE OF CONDUCT; SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES, November 13, 2023

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES; STATEMENT OF THE COURT REGARDING THE CODE OF CONDUCT

"The undersigned Justices are promulgating this Code of Conduct to set out succinctly and gather in one place the ethics rules and principles that guide the conduct of the Members of the Court. For the most part these rules and principles are not new: The Court has long had the equivalent of common law ethics rules, that is, a body of rules derived from a variety of sources, including statutory provisions, the code that applies to other members of the federal judiciary, ethics advisory opinions issued by the Judicial Conference Committee on Codes of Conduct, and historic practice. The absence of a Code, however, has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules. To dispel this misunderstanding, we are issuing this Code, which largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct."