US Senate Democrats expected to vote on Supreme Court ethics subpoenas
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[November 30, 2023]
By John Kruzel and Andrew Chung
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senate Democrats are expected on Thursday to vote
on authorizing subpoenas to a pair of influential conservatives with
ties to the U.S. Supreme Court as part of an ethics inquiry spurred by
reports of undisclosed largesse directed to some conservative justices.
The Democratic-led Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing to
consider subpoenas for billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow, a
benefactor of conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, and conservative
legal activist Leonard Leo, who was instrumental in compiling Republican
former President Donald Trump's list of potential Supreme Court
nominees.
The panel's meeting comes after the nation's top judicial body on Nov.
13 adopted a new code of conduct that some of the panel's Democrats
complained lacked any enforcement mechanism.
Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, the committee's chairman, has said
subpoenas were necessary in light of the refusal by Crow and Leo to
voluntarily comply with the panel's previous requests for information,
including itemized lists of all gifts, transportation and lodging
provided to any Supreme Court justice.
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Democrats are expected to face resistance from the panel's Republican
members, who have painted the oversight effort as an attempt to tarnish
the Supreme Court after it handed major defeats to liberals in recent
years on matters including abortion, gun rights and student debt relief.
Lawyers for Leo and Crow in letters to the committee criticized the
committee's information requests as lacking a proper legal
justification. Crow's lawyer proposed turning over a narrower range of
information but Democrats rebuffed that offer, according to the panel's
Democratic members.
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![](../images/113023PIX/news_x22.jpg)
People visit the U.S. Supreme Court building on the day that
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito released their delayed
financial disclosure reports and the reports were made public in
Washington, U.S., August 31, 2023. REUTERS/Kevin Wurm/File Photo
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The news outlet ProPublica reported this year on Thomas's failure to
disclose luxury trips and real estate transactions involving Crow, a
Texas businessman.
The outlet also reported that Leo helped organize a luxury fishing
trip in Alaska attended by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who
failed to disclose taking a private jet provided by billionaire
hedge fund manager Paul Singer. Trump chose all three of his
appointees to the court from lists of candidates that Leo played a
key role in drawing up, giving it a 6-3 conservative majority.
Thomas has said he believed the Crow-funded trips were "personal
hospitality" and thus exempt from disclosure requirements, and that
his omission of the real estate transaction was inadvertent.
Alito, regarding the flight, said that Singer had "allowed me to
occupy what would have otherwise been an unoccupied seat."
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Additional reporting by Andrew Chung in
New York and Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Will Dunham)
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