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News / Opinion / Columns

Schram: Hunter Biden? What about court?

By Martin Schram

Published: April 30, 2023, 6:01am

You don’t have to be a Republican to recognize that there was, at the very least, an appearance of potential impropriety two presidents ago.

Those Ukraine natural gas company execs eagerly paid Hunter Biden a million or so dollars just to sit on their board — and be his dad’s son. Dad, after all, was America’s vice president — and chief coordinator for Ukraine. So Biden, concerned about his troubled son, let his son take the job but kept telling us he never talked Ukraine business with Hunter.

So Ukraine’s Burisma Holdings got the only thing it was paying for: the appearance of a Biden power-connection.

Today, it remains to be seen whether conservative Republicans will apply their well-honed sense of ethical outrage to more recent revelations about appearances of impropriety. And today we will be talking about a rare series in which movers, shakers and shapers appear to be courting power on our most powerful court.

We are looking at the Supreme Court’s ethics gap. In recent months, ProPublica, an investigative news organization, has disclosed real estate transactions, lucrative gifts and vacations that Justice Clarence Thomas got from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, who became a friend long after Thomas was a justice. Crow bought three Georgia properties from Thomas, including the home the justice’s mother lives in. Crow treated Thomas and his wife, Ginni, a conservative political activist, to lavish vacations on his private jet and superyacht. Thomas didn’t report the home sales on his disclosure forms, and didn’t disclose his vacations.

And most recently, Politico’s superb Supreme Court chronicler, Heidi Przybyla, broke the story that, just nine days before being confirmed to the Supreme Court in 2017, Justice Neil Gorsuch was part of a group that sold land and a home on the Colorado River it had been trying to sell for two years. The buyer was a huge law firm, Greenberg Traurig, that is often before the Supreme Court. On the federal disclosure form, Gorsuch reportedly left the box for the buyer’s name blank.

Both Thomas and Gorsuch are, of course, court conservatives. But, given the genuine outrage conservatives expressed about Hunter Biden, we expect that patriotic concerns will lead to bipartisan ethical expressions of outrage that will transcend sandbox politics.

The greatest outrage of all, however, is the fact that the Thomas and Gorsuch problems we just cited are not considered ethics problems by the Supreme Court. That’s because, shockingly, the Supreme Court is the only federal court that has no codified Code of Ethics.

Several senators have begun working on a law that will require the court to adopt a code of ethics. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. turned down a request from the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify about this gap.

Sen. Angus King, I-Maine is working on a bill with Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

“Here’s the key phrase,” King said. “Justices should avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety. … They rest upon the moral authority by the trust the people put in them as an institution. And that’s what is declining.

“I can’t imagine that Justice Roberts wants his legacy to be a catastrophic decline in public support … for the United States Supreme Court. And that’s why this ought to be easy.”

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