Supreme Court Ethics Run on the Honor System

Godlewski is one voice. The receipts she pointed to belong to a longer ledger. That ledger now covers four sitting justices. The story is not Godlewski. The story is not Roberts alone. The story is what happens when the highest court in the country writes its own ethics rules, polices its own recusals, and discloses its own gifts, and does so under no external review.

Roberts

Jane Sullivan Roberts, the Chief Justice's wife, has earned more than $20 million in commissions from elite law firms over her career as a legal recruiter at Major, Lindsey and Africa. The first $10.3 million was earned between 2007 and 2014, the figure that emerged from a former colleague's whistleblower disclosure to the Senate Judiciary Committee, reported in detail by Politico in January 2023 and first published as a dollar figure by Business Insider in April 2023. Senator Ron Wyden's continuing correspondence with the firm, supplemented by additional disclosures through 2025, has carried the running total past $20 million. The clients paying those commissions included firms with active business before the Supreme Court. Among them: Latham and Watkins, Gibson Dunn, and Sidley Austin, all of which argued cases before the Roberts Court during the period of payment. Chief Justice Roberts did not recuse from cases involving any of these firms. He disclosed his wife's employment as required, but not the identities of the paying clients, on the ground that recruiter commissions are paid by the hiring firm rather than by an individual attorney. The technicality is the point. The structure of the disclosure rule allowed eight figures of family income, sourced from litigants before the Court, to remain effectively invisible to the public.

Thomas

ProPublica reported in April 2023 that Justice Clarence Thomas had accepted, over more than two decades, undisclosed luxury travel from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow. The travel included private jet flights, yacht cruises in Indonesia, and stays at Crow's private resort in the Adirondacks. Thomas disclosed none of it on his annual financial reports. A subsequent ProPublica report documented that Crow purchased three properties from Thomas and his family in Savannah, Georgia, in 2014 for $133,363. One of those properties was the home of Thomas's mother, who continued to live there without paying rent. Thomas did not disclose the sale. Separately, text messages obtained by the House January 6 Select Committee showed that Ginni Thomas, the Justice's wife, urged Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Thomas did not recuse from Trump v. Thompson, 142 S. Ct. 680 (2022), which addressed the release of January 6 records, or from related cases. He cast the lone noted dissent in the order denying Trump's stay application.

Gorsuch

In 2017, nine days after Justice Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to the Supreme Court, Brian Duffy, the chief executive of the law firm Greenberg Traurig, put under contract a 40 acre Colorado property in which Gorsuch held a 20 percent interest; the sale closed in May 2017 for $1.825 million. The sale was reported by Politico in April 2023. Gorsuch disclosed receiving between $250,001 and $500,000 from the transaction on his financial form. He did not disclose the buyer. Greenberg Traurig has argued more than two dozen cases before the Supreme Court since the sale. Gorsuch has not recused from any of them.

Alito

ProPublica reported in June 2023 that Justice Samuel Alito accepted private jet travel from hedge fund manager Paul Singer for a 2008 fishing trip to Alaska. Alito did not disclose the travel. Singer's hedge fund, Elliott Management, was a party to Republic of Argentina v. NML Capital, 573 U.S. 134 (2014), decided 7 to 1 in Singer's favor. Alito did not recuse. Alito's response to the reporting, published as an op ed in the Wall Street Journal before the ProPublica story ran, asserted that the seat on Singer's jet would otherwise have been empty and that disclosure of the trip was not required under the rules then in effect. The Judicial Conference's guidance on personal hospitality has since been tightened. Alito has not amended his prior disclosures. The pattern of selective disclosure and failure to recuse continued. In May 2024 the New York Times reported that an inverted American flag, a Stop the Steal symbol, was flown at Alito's Virginia home in January 2021, and that an Appeal to Heaven flag, also associated with January 6, was displayed at his New Jersey vacation home in 2023. Alito declined to recuse from the Trump immunity case or from related January 6 matters before the Court.

The Self Policing Problem

In November 2023, the Supreme Court adopted its first formal Code of Conduct. The code is voluntary. It contains no enforcement provision. It establishes no external review body. A justice who violates it faces no sanction other than the justice's own conscience. Recusal operates the same way. Under 28 U.S.C. § 455, a federal judge must disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned. For Supreme Court justices, the decision to recuse rests with the justice alone. There is no appeal. There is no review. The Chief Justice does not have authority to compel a colleague to step aside. The Senate Judiciary Committee, under Chairman Dick Durbin, has issued subpoenas to Crow and to Leonard Leo and has corresponded with the Chief Justice requesting testimony. Roberts declined to appear, citing separation of powers concerns. Only one Supreme Court justice has been impeached in the Court's history. Samuel Chase, in 1804, on charges related to partisan conduct on the bench. The Senate acquitted him in 1805. The bar set that year, that political disagreement does not warrant removal, has held for 220 years. The current question is whether documented financial entanglement with parties before the Court is something else.

The Political Response Catches Up

Godlewski's October statement is not the first call for impeachment, but it is the first from a Senate candidate in a competitive race naming a sitting Chief Justice by name and citing the Politico reporting as the basis. Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez first filed articles of impeachment against Thomas and Alito in July 2024 and has continued to press the question on the floor and in committee through 2025 and 2026. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has called for a binding ethics statute with external enforcement. Three additional House Democrats have signed onto censure resolutions naming all four justices. The political vocabulary is shifting from concern to specific procedural action. The shift tracks the documentation, not the other way around.

What Extraction Looks Like in a Robe

The Extraction Model describes the upward flow of resources from the productive economy into the hands of those who control the rules. It is usually mapped through tax policy, regulatory capture, and asset price inflation. It applies with equal precision to a court whose justices accept gifts, travel, and family income from parties whose cases they decide. Every undisclosed flight, every undisclosed property sale, every commission paid to a justice's spouse by a firm appearing at oral argument is a transfer. The party paying receives access, and in some documented instances, favorable rulings. The party paying for the institution, the public whose taxes fund the Court and whose disputes the Court adjudicates, receives a Court whose impartiality cannot be verified. That is theft by another name. Not because any single ruling can be proven bought, but because the structure prevents the question from being answered.

The reform path is procedural and unsentimental. The Great American Plan's judicial pillar calls for binding ethics rules with external enforcement, mandatory recusal triggers based on documented financial relationships, and full disclosure of all gifts, travel, and family income from any party or counsel appearing before the Court. Project 25 Years adds the structural piece: term limits of 18 years for Supreme Court justices, staggered to produce one appointment every two years, removing the lottery element that turns each vacancy into a constitutional crisis. None of this requires impeachment. Impeachment is what happens when the lesser remedies are unavailable, and the lesser remedies are unavailable because the Court has refused to adopt them. The political class is now naming the consequence of that refusal. The documentation made the naming possible. The pattern made it necessary.

Originally published at henrygoodstone.com