 Lately, the Supreme Court has been subject to numerous corruption scandals involving multiple Supreme Court justices and to make matters worse, they refuse to adopt a binding code of conduct or recuse themselves from cases where there is a clear conflict of interest. And furthermore, Chief Justice John Roberts won't even testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about ethical concerns that U.S. senators have. Yet Justice Samuel Alito says that all of this talk about Supreme Court corruption and them being illegitimate is a mean, and we're hurting his feelings by discussing their corruption and we should totally stop it. I'm of course paraphrasing what he said, but that was basically the sentiment that he echoed in an interview to The Wall Street Journal. As Jezebel reports, Alito told The Wall Street Journal in an interview published Friday that attacks on the legitimacy of the High Court are new during his lifetime. Quote, we are being hammered daily and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances and nobody, practically nobody is defending us, he said. The idea has always been that judges are not supposed to respond to criticisms, but if the courts are being unfairly attacked, the organized bar will come to their defense. But if anything, the justice continued, they've participated to some degree in these attacks. Interesting. Have you ever considered, Alito, that if the bar is supposed to come to judges' defense if they're attacked unfairly, maybe you're not being attacked unfairly? Probably perhaps it's the case that these criticisms are actually legitimate and the court being in a legitimacy crisis currently is really bad for the US judiciary. Have you ever considered that? No, of course not. See, he's actually telling us that everyone else is wrong and they're right. These nine unelected justices, they're correct. Now we'll talk about that in a moment here, but I got to address that in the same interview he claimed to have a pretty good idea, who the Dobbs leaker was, and he says that the draft decision was likely leaked to intimidate the justices and instigate an assassination of one of the justices in order to stop Roe v. Wade from being overturned. But I mean, after finding out that Alito himself leaked the Hobby Lobby decision, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the Dobbs leak could have been done by him. I mean, there were reports that the leaked draft actually sealed Roe's fate, because if conservative justices backed down after they were expected to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, will the forced birther movement would eat them alive? So it's plausible to assume that the leaker was trying to solidify the decision by basically getting the majority of justices to harden their stance, which means there was a conservative priority here, a conservative justification for the leak. And since Alito, again, leaked cases before, you put two into together, it's not outrageous to assume it's him. But I mean, either way, it's evident that Alito has a victim complex and like all conservatives, he's trying to make it seem as if powerful people, people with power and authority, they're the real victims, like Supreme Court justices. And we're all just being really mean. It's not that they're victimizing us by taking away our rights and destroying worker rights and the planet. No, we're being too mean to them. That's his actual argument here. What a baby. But I mean, for all this talk of quote unquote unfair attacks being lobbed at the Supreme Court, let's just remember why people are concerned about ethical issues with regard to the Supreme Court. Remember, Thomas's wife, Ginny Thomas, is an insurrectionist who literally tried to overthrow the US government. That is no small thing. And Thomas didn't recuse himself from that case. Now, not to mention his sugar daddy, Harlan Crow, who was an admirer of Nazis, showered him with gifts for decades and that almost certainly had an impact on his decisions directly. For example, the lever reports that Thomas voted to end federal protections for tenants put in place during the pandemic after Harlan Crow's company complained that that was hurting his company's profits. And additionally, after Thomas voted to allow unlimited sums of dark money in US elections in the 2010 Citizens United decision, well, contributions from his sugar daddy, Harlan Crow subsequently rose by 862%. And as Americans for Tax Fairness explained in a Twitter thread, the Crow family has spent over $25.8 million trying to influence elections over the past 35 years. But nearly 80% of that spending has come in just the 13 years since Citizens United. That figure doesn't include donations to conservative organizations that don't have to be reported. So Thomas has made votes that conspicuously benefit his sugar daddy, never recused himself from those cases, never disclosed the lavish vacations that Harlan Crow took him on. But according to Alito, it is unfair to question the court's legitimacy. I mean, it's just a hilarious thing to say at this point. And while Thomas may be the most corrupt, he's not the only unethical justice. Neil Gorsuch, for example, failed to disclose that the buyer of a property that he co-owned was a law firm that frequently argues cases before the Supreme Court. And this matters because prior to his confirmation, the property sat there for two years without a buyer. But all of a sudden, once he's confirmed to the Supreme Court, nine days after specifically, he has this law firm who argues before the Supreme Court buy up this property. I mean, maybe it's a coincidence. But if you believe that I have a bridge to sell you, they were probably trying to butter him up. But see, justices are supposed to avoid the appearance of impropriety. And that right there, him not disclosing that is the appearance of impropriety. But the problem is that there's nothing that is legally binding them to avoid the appearance. And the way that they're avoiding the appearance is to just like not be transparent, not disclose these things. But furthermore, Chief Justice John Roberts has refused to hold justices to the same standard as even district and appeals court judges are held to by refusing to adopt a binding code of conduct. And on top of that, he's refusing to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, as I stated earlier. Oh, and if that wasn't bad enough, his wife, Jane Roberts, raked in $10.3 million in commission as a law recruiter between 2007 and 2017. And she got this job two years after her husband became the Chief Justice, and probably because her husband was the Chief Justice. And while there's no evidence that she placed lawyers with firms to deliberately influence her husband, it's likely the case that at least some of her clients landed at firms that had business before the Supreme Court. And the question is, would Roberts be more sympathetic towards their arguments if he knows that they're former clients of his wife, where she was paid extremely handsomely to get them their job? I mean, given how unethical the court has been, that is a real concern. Furthermore, Roberts mischaracterized his wife's income. As Truthout explains, in financial disclosures, John Roberts characterized his wife's compensation as salary rather than commission, which Kendall Price, a colleague of Jane Roberts, described in the affidavit as misleading. Pace University law professor Bennett Gershman went further and said that the alleged mischaracterization of the income is against disclosure laws. So if the Chief Justice to the US Supreme Court is potentially violating disclosure laws, needless to say, it's not unfair to call them out for being illegitimate, to call them out for these ethical issues that they continue to face. So none of them seem to feel the need to disclose gifts or purchases or potential conflicts of interest, and there's just an overall fundamental lack of transparency here. But putting aside the ethical concerns with regard to their own personal financial corruption, the court is also unethical in the sense that they are one of the most hyperpartisan pro-corporate theocratic courts in American history. The Roberts Court is responsible for Citizens United, McCutcheon, Overturning Roe, gutting the EPA, opening the door to prayer in schools, destroying worker rights. I mean, we're not even scratching the surface here. And also, they might possibly limit the authority of regulatory agencies that have the ability to protect us from environmental destruction. As Zach Schoenfeld of The Hill explains, the Supreme Court on Monday announced that will hear a case that could significantly scale back federal agencies authority with major implications for the future of environmental and other regulations, named the Court's decision in Chevron, USA, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Chevron deference has become one of the most frequently cited precedents in administrative law since the decision was first handed down in 1984. It involves a two-step test. First, judges decide if Congress has in the statute directly spoken to the precise question at issue. If it is ambiguous, courts defer to agencies as long as their actions are based on a permissible construction. And the justices in this case are being asked to explicitly overturn the Chevron case, which is bad, needless to say. And some justices have already kind of expressed concern about the sweeping nature of the Chevron case. In other words, they've expressed interest in doing just that, overturning it. So I expect them to do that and screw us over once again. But I mean, to be fair, the Roberts Court has given us some good decisions. It's not all bad, right? Domo has struck down gay marriage bans were also struck down. But ironically, those same bans could be reinstated by the same court that struck them down in the first place, proving that all justices are basically partisan hacks. And the ideological makeup of the court matters more than anything else, right? But getting back to Alito, if he's concerned about the legitimacy of the court and things that everyone is being too unfair by attacking them. Well, I mean, there's something that he can do that will easily remedy the situation. First and foremost, the court can adopt a binding code of conduct, but they won't do that. So they simply are required to avoid the appearance of impropriety. But again, that is when I say requirement, that's a bit of a misnomer because it's a recommendation. They don't actually have to comply with the code of conduct that lower court judges are forced to comply with. So if they want to be taken seriously and regain the legitimacy that they lost, they can adopt a binding code of conduct and also justices like him and Clarence Thomas can resign. That would help a lot as well. But given how they won't even recuse themselves from cases when there is a clear conflict of interest, I'm not going to hold my breath on that one. But he can't have it both ways, right? At the same time, he wants us to stop questioning the legitimacy of the court, while the justices are brazenly corrupt and refuse to disclose things that we should know about. But it doesn't work that way. So I mean, my message to Alito is either do better or shut the fuck up because you can't tell us to stop talking about your corruption if you're not going to stop being corrupt.