Mr. President, the subject of our colloquy is going to be the enormous, secret gifts that have recently been disclosed going into the pockets of certain Supreme Court Justices. The first thing that is remarkable about these gifts is how…
Mr. President, the subject of our colloquy is going to be the enormous, secret gifts that have recently been disclosed going into the pockets of certain Supreme Court Justices.
The first thing that is remarkable about these gifts is how magnificent they are--luxury trips on private jets, luxury trips on superyachts, paying for a Justice's mother's home, paying for private school tuition of dependents, $500,000 donations to organizations that the spouse worked for, $25,000 fees into a spouse's consulting firm, jet and fishing trips across the country. So it is all pretty rich stuff.
In Rhode Island, if you want to take a gift from somebody--let's say you are a municipal employee, and they want to take you to lunch across the street from city hall. It is 25 bucks. That is your limit, and you have to disclose it. You get to do that three times, and then you are all done. Then you can't even take the $25 lunch if you disclose it. So in Rhode Island, people are really upset about these multi-hundred- thousand-dollar gifts.
It gets worse. It is not just the size of the gifts. It is the network. It is the web. The billionaires who are involved in giving these gifts overlap with an array of front groups that are involved with the billionaires and with the gifts, and there is a common ``fixer'' who ties many of these threads together. The trips very often involve the fixer and the Justices and the billionaires, and the whole mess is interwoven. The donations go through the front groups to the Justice from the fixer over and over. This thing is a web, and we are working hard in the Judiciary Committee to try to untangle it.
On Thursday, we will be taking up the question of subpoenas to the billionaires and the front group corporations that have participated in these different gifts to find out what really went on. How bad, really, was it? What we know already is bad enough, but there is more to discover.
With that, let me yield to my colleague Senator Blumenthal, and then I will wrap up after Senator Hirono and Senator Welch have had their chance to speak as well.
Mr. President, first, let me thank my three colleagues for joining me on the floor today. A word that came up repeatedly was ``reverence,'' and I want to start with that word because I think we all do share a reverence for the institution of
the Supreme Court. And that is what makes it so bitter, to see how badly the Supreme Court is failing us now and to see the paths that billionaire influence has led it down.
It has to correct, and if it is not going to correct itself, then Congress is going to have to correct it.
As Senator Blumenthal said, the problem here is that there is no ethics process for the Supreme Court. There is a perfectly good code of ethics for all of the Justices and for all of the Federal judges, but there is no way to enforce it for the Supreme Court.
If you have a complaint about a Supreme Court Justice, there is nowhere to file it. There is not even an inbox, and if there were an inbox and complaints came through, there is nobody on the other side of the inbox to screen out the nutty ones from the legitimate ones. And once you have a pile of legitimate ones, there is no staff attorney to do the basic research into what are the facts here. At the end of the day, when you have the facts determined and the judge or Justices have their say, then you have the factual predicate to compare with the ethics standard and a neutral decider to decide whether or not it comports. That is the basic structure of U.S. due process, and the Supreme Court will not allow that for itself. That is the problem that we have.
So none of the questions that deserve to be answered about all of these secret gifts and about all of this billionaire influence--none of them--have even been asked over at the Supreme Court, let alone answered. So we have an absolute obligation to go forward with answers.
And we have tried. We have asked very nicely. We have sent lists of questions. We have gone forward with the people who would know about all of this.
And we have received two answers. One was that this is unconstitutional, and so we are not going to participate with you at all. You get nothing. You don't get a single answer.
That, as Senator Blumenthal said, we believe to be a complete sham and a complete charade because the disclosure rules--right? We are talking about disclosure of gifts to Justices. They went undisclosed.
So the question is, Should they have been disclosed? And there is a rule about disclosure that just happens to be a law passed by Congress. And there is a related law passed by Congress that relates to recusal, and recusal relates to gifts because, if you take big enough gifts from someone, you then have to recuse yourself as a judge from their cases. And the recusal rule is also passed by Congress.
So you have a disclosure law passed by Congress, and you have a recusal law passed by Congress, and you have what Senator Blumenthal described--the Judicial Conference, which is the administrative body that oversees the administrative side of the judicial branch, and that body was also created by Congress.
So the argument that is being made to us is that Congress has no authority to oversee how an Agency that Congress created is implementing laws Congress passed. That argument is, on its face, preposterous, and that, in turn, suggests that there is a lot to look at when we get a chance to look under the hood of all this mischief.
And they really don't want us to see it, and they are going to manufacture completely preposterous arguments just to try to throw us off the trail.
Another recipient of our questions said: OK, it is unconstitutional, but I will offer you a few things. You know, in good faith, I will offer you a few things, but you can only go back 5 years.
Well, we happen to know, with respect to this billionaire, that they were giving gifts to Justices way more than 5 years ago. So they are not even allowing us to ask into the known gift-giving conduct between the billionaire and the Justice, which, by the way, was undisclosed at the time.
So the 5-year rule is just nonsensical, just picked out of the air-- picked, actually, out of a criminal statute, as if that had a bearing on a congressional investigation.
Then they said: We will only give you documents that you already have. For everything else, we will just give our lawyers narratives about what took place.
Well, anybody who has ever tried a case knows perfectly well that if you rely on the other side's lawyer's narrative, you are getting no place.
Discovery means you see the documents. You do your real homework like lawyers do. So for one lawyer to suggest to another: No, we are not going to show you the documents; we have them, but we are not going to show them to you; we are just going to give you a narrative of them-- there isn't a lawyer in this country who would accept that as a condition in discovery in a case.
The third one is that, once we have answered your first round of questions and given you our phony-baloney narrative for the 5 years that is all we will let you inquire about, no more questions. You waive your right to ask us any more questions forever.
Again, there is not a lawyer in the country who would accept that as a condition of a discovery order. You get to ask the second question. ``One and done'' is not a thing when you are doing an investigation.
So all of these theoretical accommodations that were offered were just completely fake. We cannot proceed that way--not with any kind of professionalism and not with any kind of ability to get to the truth, which is, at the end of the day, what we really need to do here.
I will conclude by going back to where I started. The reason that we need to follow this process of getting subpoenas so we get answers to our questions is because of two failures: one, the failure of the Supreme Court to even ask these questions itself. If there were a viable process going forward, using the basic due process investigation standards that everybody in government has to face for ethics, except these nine Justices, we wouldn't need to do this. But the Supreme Court won't allow questions to be asked about itself. So we can't go to them for a proper investigation. They refuse to do it.
When we asked the participants in this gift scheme what they were up to, they told us, as the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, I think, rather artfully summarized, to go pound sand. Well, when Congress has a legitimate inquiry into how an Agency that it created is implementing statutes that it passed, ``go pound sand'' is not a legitimate answer. So the next step is to move to authorize these subpoenas, and we are going to do that.
This business of the Court not answering obvious questions is really a problem. The question of whether Justice Thomas should have recused himself from the January 6 cases depends on a single fact: what he knew about his wife's involvement in insurrection activities. If he knew absolutely nothing at all, OK. Then it is probably OK for him to recuse himself--maybe a little bit of appearance of impropriety. But if he actually knew of her involvement in those matters, then he absolutely should have recused himself.
The question ``Justice Thomas, what did you know, and when did you know it?'' has never been asked and never been answered. That is not a tenable way for a Court that purports to represent due process and enforce due process to conduct itself with respect to a conflict of interest.
It is the same thing with these gifts. There is no Federal judge in the country who is receiving multihundred-thousand-dollar vacation gifts, who is getting huge half-million-dollar checks sent in to a spouse's small private company out of which she takes money. This behavior of free private jet travel--at beck and call, it seems--nobody else does that. It is not OK. But looking at it to find out what actually took place and why and when is a basic responsibility of the Judiciary. In any other court, these claims, these charges, these circumstances would be properly investigated. We would know the facts, and we are entitled to know the facts.
The last is that, in the context of our investigation, one of these lawyers made up what I consider to be a sham argument that we can't ask any questions because it is unconstitutional. I have addressed that. It is a congressionally established entity applying congressionally established laws. Yes, we do get to inquire about that kind of job. Because, perhaps, that argument is so weak, so sham, that lawyer actually recruited a Supreme Court Justice to
go into the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and offer an extrajudicial opinion--not an opinion of the Court, just his own personal opinion--that we had no business investigating.
That violates a ton of stuff. That violates the rule that they are not supposed to offer opinions on matters that might come before the Court. That violates the rule that you shouldn't be engaging as a Justice in an ongoing dispute, sort of like a de facto expert witness for a party in an ongoing dispute. In this case, the dispute is over access to information.
The lawyer's client in that is one of the people involved in this scheme, Leonard Leo. Leonard Leo has a personal relationship also with Justice Alito. He is described as his friend. None of that is disclosed. He just offers his opinion on behalf of the lawyer for his friend.
At the end of the day, the inquiry looks at free gifts, undisclosed, received by Justice Alito. At the end of the day, the lawyer for Leonard Leo was able to recruit a member of the Supreme Court, Justice Alito, to offer a private--I should say a public opinion but a nonofficial opinion, a personal opinion, in the Wall Street Journal editorial page to prop up the argument that says we can't look into gifts that Leonard Leo, the client, organized for Justice Alito, the recipient. That is a tangled mess of ethics violations, and nobody can look at that. Nobody will look at that. That can't be.
So, with the Court looking at none of this scandalous behavior, it is entirely incumbent upon the Congress to do its job and get to the bottom of what went on. That is what, under the leadership and guidance of our Judiciary chairman, Dick Durbin, we will do.
With that, I yield the floor.