Why Samuel Alito Shuns the State of the Union

He found the partisan spectacle distasteful even before Obama’s inaccurate declamation about the Supreme Court in 2010.

By David B. Rivkin, Jr., and James Taranto

March 6, 2024, in the Wall Street Journal

Justice Samuel Alito’s first State of the Union address was a happy occasion, but things went downhill after that. “The Supreme Court now has two superb new members,” President George W. Bush told the nation on Jan. 31, 2006. Justice Alito had been confirmed that same day, Chief Justice John Roberts four months earlier. Both were in the audience—justices get front-row seats—and both eventually came to regard the annual ritual as a burden. Justice Alito hasn’t attended one since 2010.

“Unless you’re there on the floor, you don’t really appreciate what’s going on,” Justice Alito told the Journal in an interview last spring. “The members [of Congress] are extremely vocal. . . . I remember during one where President Bush was speaking, and the leaders behind us were saying, ‘Bulls—! That’s bulls—!’ They’re always making these comments, and loud enough so you could hear it two or three rows away.”

That’s awkward for members of the court, whose official role requires them to rise above partisanship. Applause lines are even trickier, since silence can seem like dissent. “We sit there like potted plants, and then we look out of the corner of our eye to see whether any of our colleagues are going to stand up, or the Joint Chiefs are,” Justice Alito said. “There are some times when you have to stand up. Like, ‘Don’t we honor the brave men and women who are fighting and dying for this country?’—you can’t not stand up for that. But then you say, ‘Isn’t the United States a great country’—you stand up—‘because we are going to enact this legislation’—maybe you have to sit down.”

In January 2010, the court itself became the target of a presidential declamation. “With all due deference to separation of powers,” President Barack Obama said, “last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections.”

As Democratic lawmakers arose behind the justices and clapped, TV cameras caught Justice Alito shaking his head and mouthing the words “not true.” He was right, as even the New York Times’s Linda Greenhouse acknowledged. Citizens United v. FEC didn’t touch the Tillman Act of 1907, which to this day prohibits corporate campaign contributions. It struck down provisions of a different law, enacted in 2002, and overturned precedents dating only to 1990 and 2003.

Justice Alito was surprised by Mr. Obama’s error. “I imagine the State of the Union speech is vetted inside out and backwards,” he told us. “Somebody should have seen that this statement was inaccurate.” He also failed to realize he was on camera: “My mistake was that I didn’t think about the fact that the text is distributed to the media ahead of time. They knew that the president was going to talk about the Supreme Court, so they had their cameras on us. . . . That’s why it’s a sore point.”

Justice Alito isn’t the first member of the court to shun the State of the Union. John Paul Stevens never attended. Antonin Scalia last went in 1997, Clarence Thomas in 2006. “It has turned into a childish spectacle,” Scalia said in 2013. “I don’t want to be there to lend dignity to it.”

Chief Justice Roberts was only a little less pointed in March 2010, six weeks after the Obama-Alito kerfuffle. “The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering, while the court, according to the requirements of protocol, has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling,” he told students at the University of Alabama Law School. “To the extent the State of the Union has degenerated into a political pep rally, I’m not sure why we’re there.”

The chief justice has nonetheless continued to attend and is expected to do so again on Thursday night. As with those applause lines, you can’t even abstain without making a statement.

Mr. Taranto is the Journal’s editorial features editor. Mr. Rivkin practices appellate and constitutional law in Washington.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-samuel-alito-shuns-the-state-of-the-union-obama-supreme-court-polarization-6e1ed0a9

Why the Supreme Court Had to Hear Trump’s Case

By David B. Rivkin, Jr., and Elizabeth Price Foley

February 29, 2024, in the Wall Street Journal

Many observers thought the Supreme Court would decline to consider Donald Trump’s claim that presidential immunity shields him from prosecution for his conduct on Jan. 6, 2021. But on Wednesday the justices announced that they will hear the former president’s case in April. Mr. Trump could eventually face a trial on those charges, but the justices had little choice but to take up this question because the lower court’s ruling was so sweeping and dangerous.

Mr. Trump claims that his allegedly criminal actions were “official acts” taken as president. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that it didn’t matter if they were—that no president is entitled to immunity from “generally applicable criminal laws.” That decision violates the separation of powers, threatens the independence and vigor of the presidency, and is inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent.

The justices are unlikely to decide whether Mr. Trump’s actions were in fact “official acts.” Instead, they will consider the key legal question, “whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”

That’s a novel question, but in Nixon v. Fitzgerald (1982), the high court held that a president enjoys absolute immunity from civil suits predicated on his “official acts,” even if they fall foul of “federal laws of general applicability.” Justice Lewis Powell wrote that such immunity is a “functionally mandated incident of the President’s unique office, rooted in the constitutional tradition of the separation of powers and supported by our history.” Such lawsuits “could distract a President from his public duties, to the detriment of not only the President and his office but also the Nation that the Presidency was designed to serve.”

Mr. Trump maintains that he believed the 2020 presidential election was riddled with fraud and that his conduct on Jan. 6 was fully consistent with his constitutional obligations to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Whatever the merits of that claim, it raises weighty questions of law and fact that the D.C. Circuit was wrong to brush aside—most centrally, that the president’s power is granted by the Constitution, which, as the supreme law of the land, overrides ordinary, “generally applicable” statutes.

The D.C. Circuit decision opened the door to all manner of constitutional crises. A former president could be prosecuted for ordering a military attack on an American affiliated with a foreign terrorist organization, even though such an order is clearly within his authority as commander in chief. Aggressive prosecutors motivated by ideology or partisanship could use capaciously worded criminal statutes—including those regarding mail or wire fraud, racketeering, false statements and misrepresentations—to challenge almost any presidential action, including those related to national security activities.

As with civil suits, it isn’t enough to say that the former president would have the opportunity to mount a defense in court. The mere possibility of personal prosecution for official actions would chill future presidential decisions. The D.C. Circuit casually disregards this danger, asserting simply that the “public interest” in prosecuting crimes is weightier than the risk of chilling impartial and fearless presidential action. It asserts that a president wouldn’t be “unduly cowed” by the prospect of criminal liability, “any more than a juror” or “executive aide” would be. That analogy is inapt because the president’s responsibilities are much weightier than those of jurors or aides. He alone is the singular head of a constitutional branch of government. As the justices recognized in Nixon v. Fitzgerald, the “greatest public interest” isn’t in enforcing ordinary statutes against the president. Immunity is necessary to ensure he has “the maximum ability to deal fearlessly and impartially with the duties of his office.”

The D.C. Circuit dismissed as “slight” the risk that former presidents will be politically targeted because prosecutors “have ethical obligations not to initiate unfounded prosecutions” and there are “additional safeguards in place,” including the requirement of seeking an indictment from a grand jury. These arguments border on frivolous. Not all prosecutors are ethical, and even those who are may be overzealous. Many cases have featured prosecutorial misconduct or abuse. And the justices have surely heard the saying that a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich. Lawyers in civil cases are also bound by ethical obligations, but that didn’t vitiate the case for presidential immunity in 1982.

Jack Smith, the special counsel in the Trump cases, has asserted that federal prosecutors make decisions without regard to politics—but his conduct in this case belies that claim. His chief argument against Mr. Trump’s petition for a stay of the D.C. Circuit’s decision denying his immunity was that such a delay would cause “serious harm to the government—and to the public” because the case “presents a fundamental question at the heart of our democracy.” Many Supreme Court cases raise such questions, and Mr. Smith avoids saying what distinguishes this one. The obvious answer is the election timetable.

Mr. Smith’s demand for fast-tracking the Supreme Court’s consideration thus contradicts the D.C. Circuit’s suppositions about prosecutorial ethical probity. Trying Mr. Trump, the all-but-certain Republican nominee for president, before the election is inconsistent with Section 9-27.260 of the Justice Department’s Justice Manual, which makes clear that prosecutors “may never make a decision regarding . . . prosecution or select the timing [thereof] . . . for the purpose or affecting any election, or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.”

The question of presidential immunity is an important one for our constitutional democracy of separated government powers, and the D.C. Circuit made a grievous error in disposing of it so casually. The justices were right to halt the proceedings until they can give the issue the careful consideration it deserves.

Mr. Rivkin served at the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations. Ms. Foley is a professor of constitutional law at Florida International University College of Law. Both practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-justices-had-to-hear-trumps-case-presidential-immunity-125803c6

Colorado Can’t Disqualify Trump

Applying the Insurrection Clause to the presidency would have given rogue states too much power.

By David B. Rivkin, Jr., and Lee A. Casey

February 7, 2024, in the Wall Street Journal

The case of Trump v. Anderson, in which Donald Trump asks the Supreme Court to reverse a ruling that bars him from Colorado’s presidential ballot, raises many complicated legal and factual questions. The justices should ignore them and decide a simple one: Does Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which disqualifies certain former officeholders who have “engaged in insurrection,” apply to the presidency?

As Michael Mukasey has argued in these pages, the answer is no. Those who are covered by the Insurrection Clause are specifically disqualified from serving as members of Congress or the Electoral College—not as president or vice president. They are also barred from state office and from “any office, civil or military, under the United States.” But “any office” refers to appointive posts such as judges, generals and cabinet secretaries, and “officers of the United States” are appointed, not elected.

This raises an obvious question: Why would the authors of the 14th Amendment exclude the presidency? For two compelling and practical reasons, which reinforce Section 3’s plain meaning.

First, by the time the amendment was ratified in 1868, the states had largely adopted a system whereby presidential electors, instead of being appointed by state legislatures, were chosen by popular vote after committing to a particular candidate. If no former Confederates (or more modern insurrectionists) could stand for election as presidential electors, there would be little chance of an insurrectionist president. (As Mr. Mukasey also observed, if the president were covered, there would be no reason to cover presidential electors, who wouldn’t be able to elect an insurrectionist if they wanted to.)

Second, there was no way to cover the presidency without violating the Constitution’s established federalism principles, which require states to act uniformly when dealing with federal laws and institutions. These principles are at the root of several constitutional provisions, including the equal representation of states in the Senate, the Supremacy Clause and the Full Faith and Credit Clause. These provisions are indispensable in making the federal republic functional.

Applying Section 3’s disqualification to the presidency would create exactly the uniformity problem the Supreme Court now faces—different states reaching different conclusions about what is and isn’t an insurrection in the context of a national election.

There is ample evidence that the 14th Amendment’s drafters paid great attention to federalism concerns. This is particularly true regarding the amendment’s first two sections, which dramatically reshaped the relationship between U.S. citizens and the federal and state governments by requiring states to respect federal constitutional rights. As legal scholar Kurt T. Lash recounted in “Federalism and the Original Fourteenth Amendment,” a 2019 article, radical Republicans, who favored stronger federal power, clashed with moderate Republicans determined to preserve states’ rights under the Constitution’s original Madisonian federalism architecture. It is implausible that they would have fought hard to protect federalism while permitting each state to determine presidential disqualification for itself.

In U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton (1995), the Supreme Court held that states couldn’t impose their own qualifications on members of Congress. Justice John Paul Stevens’s majority opinion discussed at length how elections to the national legislature involved the people of the U.S. rather than citizens of each state, requiring that qualifications be nationally uniform. This logic is even more compelling when it comes to the president, who is elected by the entire nation. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 68, the Framers made the “appointment of the president” depend “in the first instance to an immediate act of the people of America, to be exerted in the choice of persons for the temporary and sole purpose of making the appointment”—members of the Electoral College.

The Constitution authorizes state legislatures to determine how presidential electors are selected—and even to appoint them directly, as Colorado did in 1876—and the qualifications for serving as president are stated in the constitutional text. There is no indication that the states may interpret these for themselves. Stevens wrote that while states can adopt “election procedures” (his emphasis) that govern access to the ballot—such as signature requirements for independent candidates or “sore loser” provisions that bar a third-party run by a former candidate for a major-party nomination—they can’t set or revise qualifications for federal office.

Some of Mr. Trump’s opponents have pointed hopefully to Hassan v. Colorado, a 2012 decision of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in which then-Judge Neil Gorsuch upheld the state’s authority to bar from the ballot a naturalized citizen who wanted to run for president. Abdul Karim Hassan asserted an eccentric theory that the 14th Amendment vitiated the requirement that the president be a natural-born citizen. Judge Gorsuch ruled that “a state’s legitimate interest in protecting the integrity and practical functioning of the political process permits it to exclude from the ballot candidates who are constitutionally prohibited from assuming office”—not that state officials or judges could decide what the qualifications for federal office are.

The meaning of “natural-born citizen” is open to dispute in certain unusual cases involving would-be candidates born overseas to American parents or in unincorporated U.S. territories (where the Constitution doesn’t fully apply). If such a dispute arose and states responded to it differently, the federal courts would have to intervene quickly to impose uniformity. To avoid precisely that sort of situation, the drafters of the 14th Amendment left the presidency out of Section 3.

A Supreme Court decision to that effect would be consistent with the doctrine that judges should avoid deciding constitutional issues unnecessarily. Was the riot of Jan. 6, 2021, an “insurrection”? If so, what does it mean to have “engaged” in it? Does disqualifying someone from office require an act of Congress or a criminal conviction? These questions may be pertinent in future cases, but not in Trump v. Anderson.

Messrs. Rivkin and Casey practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington. They served at the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/colorado-cant-disqualify-trump-from-2024-election-c12a4bc9

The Justices’ Ethics Code Rebukes Their Critics

By David B. Rivkin, Jr., and Lee A. Casey

Nov. 17, 2023, in the Wall Street Journal

If you look at the Supreme Court’s new Code of Conduct as an attempt to appease the justices’ antagonists in Congress and the media, it is a total and predictable failure. But in substance it is an important rebuke to those critics. “Congress must continue its efforts to hold the judiciary accountable,” Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer tweeted in response.

The code and the justices’ accompanying commentary make clear that Congress has no such authority. The justices describe the court’s unique role in America’s constitutional system and affirm several important principles:

The Supreme Court isn’t merely a part of the judiciary; it is its head. The Constitution vests the judicial power “in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” Congress can no more subject the court to lower-court supervision, as some lawmakers have urged, than it can authorize a federal officer to review and reverse presidential decisions.

Moreover, aside from the impeachment power, the Constitution gives neither Congress nor the court as a whole disciplinary power over individual justices. The only substantive authority Congress has over the court’s judicial function is the power to legislate exceptions and regulations of its appellate jurisdiction.

The decision to recuse oneself from a case is an “inherently judicial function.” As such, it is at the core of the court’s constitutional function and can’t be regulated in any manner by the political branches.

The justices have a “duty to sit.” That means it’s improper for a justice to recuse himself from a case merely for convenience or to avoid controversy. As the justices state in the commentary, this duty is stronger for them than for lower-court judges: “The absence of one Justice risks the affirmance of a lower court decision by an evenly divided Court—potentially preventing the Court from providing a uniform national rule of decision on an important issue.”

The “rule of necessity” requires the justices to decide a case if most or all of them would ordinarily be disqualified under the code. Recusal requirements must give way when following them would deny the litigants a judicial determination to which they are otherwise entitled.

It’s significant that all nine justices signed the document. After Justice Samuel Alito told the Journal in a July interview that Congress lacks the authority to regulate the high court, legal pundits speculated that other justices might disagree. Now all the court’s members have made clear that they share the same basic understanding of their constitutional role and authority. Any justice who disagreed could have dissented, so the code and commentary carry the same institutional weight as a unanimous decision.

The code makes plain that the justices recognize the importance of ethical constraints, but it also maintains the court’s independence, including the independence of its individual members, from recent efforts by Congress to aggrandize itself at the court’s expense.

Messrs. Rivkin and Casey practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington. They served at the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-justices-ethics-code-rebukes-their-critics-f147db25

Justice Alito’s First Amendment

By James Taranto and David B. Rivkin, Jr.

October 1, 2023, in the Wall Street Journal

One of America’s great First Amendment pieties holds that the Constitution protects “the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate.”

That observation comes from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s dissent in U.S. v. Schwimmer (1929). A subtly more sweeping variation—you might call it the anything-goes theory of the First Amendment—is that any limit on speech opens the door to broad censorship, and therefore if the courts protect speech that has no obvious value, we can be confident of their vigilance against limiting speech that really matters.

First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams appealed to that logic in a 2010 interview with the Journal. Amid the left’s denunciations of Citizens United v. FEC, he described his effort to persuade the American Civil Liberties Union’s board to continue opposing restraints on campaign speech.

“I said to them: Look, you bring cases, such as one to strike down a law of Congress which was aimed at ‘virtual child pornography’—not real children being filmed, but otherwise wholly pornographic,” Mr. Abrams recounted. “I said: You didn’t do it because you wanted to protect the folks who like to watch child pornography. You did it because you thought the government shouldn’t be trusted to make content decisions about who watches anything.”

If any recent member of the Supreme Court followed the anything-goes theory, it was Justice Anthony Kennedy, whom Mr. Abrams described as “all by himself on the court” as “the single most consistently protective jurist of First Amendment rights.” Justice Kennedy was the author of both Citizens United and Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002), the other case to which Mr. Abrams referred.

Justice Samuel Alito, by contrast, vigorously rejects the anything-goes theory. “The First Amendment was not intended to prohibit any regulation of speech,” he said in a Journal interview on July 7. On occasion that view has left him alone in dissent against a free-speech claim.

Even so, in the vast majority of cases he’s a strong defender of the freedom of speech. He accepts Holmes’s dictum and cited it in Matal v. Tam (2017), in which the court held that the government had violated a rock band’s constitutional rights by denying its trademark application for its racially insensitive name.

In oral arguments, Justice Alito has a knack for posing scenarios that reveal the untenability of speech restrictions, particularly on political speech. In Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky (2018), the court reviewed a statute banning “political” attire at polling places. Justice Alito asked if a National Rifle Association T-shirt would be permitted.

“No, it would not,” the state’s lawyer said.

“How about a shirt with the text of the Second Amendment?”

“I think that would be viewed as political.”

“How about the First Amendment?” The lawyer said that would be OK but couldn’t explain why. He lost the case.

When the court first heard Citizens United in 2009, Justice Alito asked Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart if federal campaign-finance laws applied to books. When Mr. Stewart said they did, Justice Alito got to the heart of the matter: “The government’s position is that the First Amendment allows the banning of a book if it’s published by a corporation?” Rearguing the case a few months later, then Solicitor General Elena Kagan admitted: “The government’s answer has changed.”

Yet Justice Alito has rejected free-speech claims when “what we were dealing with was speech that had little if any value, and there were established and cabined rules for saying that it shouldn’t be protected in those cases,” he says. He wasn’t yet on the court when it decided Free Speech Coalition but cites a “trilogy of cases” in which he dissented on this basis:

• In U.S. v. Stevens (2009), an 8-1 majority struck down a federal criminal statute against “knowingly selling depictions of animal cruelty with the intention of placing those depictions in interstate commerce for commercial gain.” Justice Alito saw such videos as analogous to actual child pornography (as distinct from the virtual kind), which entails committing a violent act “in the process of creating the speech.”

• In Snyder v. Phelps (2011), also decided 8-1, the justices ruled that the First Amendment shielded a fringe religious group from liability for staging a lawful but grotesque protest outside the funeral of a U.S. Marine. “I thought this was an example of the established tort of the intentional infliction of emotional distress,” Justice Alito says.

• In U.S. v. Alvarez (2012), the justices struck down the Stolen Valor Act of 2005, which made it a crime to claim falsely “to have been awarded any decoration or medal authorized by Congress for the Armed Forces of the United States.” “Alvarez involved speech that was false,” Justice Alito says. “You could prove the falsity of it to a scientific, mathematical certainty.” Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined his dissent, which said that such claims inflict “real harm on actual medal recipients and their families.”

As he deliberated over these cases, Justice Alito weighed the anything-goes approach. “I did think at the time of those decisions: You know, my colleagues might have something,” he says. “If we say that . . . free speech has to prevail even in these outrageous situations, maybe in a later case, when what’s involved is important speech, they’ll hold firm, they’ll resist the pressure to give in.”

But several of his colleagues who backed protection of outré speech in those cases have endorsed restrictions on core political speech in others. Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor voted to let Minnesota’s T-shirt ban stand. Four justices dissented from the pro-free-speech holdings in Citizens United, and Justice Alito’s vote was pivotal: His predecessor, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, had gone the other way in McConnell v. FEC (2003).

The ACLU was long a redoubt of free-speech absolutism, but today Justice Alito is a more resolute defender of core political speech. Mr. Abrams lost the internal debate over Citizens United as the board changed its position and endorsed “reasonable” limits on campaign contributions. “The ACLU doesn’t say what ‘reasonable’ means, so the government will doubtless supply the definition,” Mr. Abrams and two other ACLU dissenters wrote in an April 2010 Journal op-ed.

Then there’s 303 Creative v. Elenis (2023), in which the justices held 6-3 that the state of Colorado can’t compel a web designer to create sites celebrating gay weddings. “A lot of the dissent,” Justice Alito says, “involved providing public accommodations in the ordinary sense of the word—allowing someone to eat at a restaurant, allowing someone to rent a hotel room, or the sale of an off-the-shelf product.” Those aren’t expressive acts, and “the woman who operated the company said she didn’t discriminate in that way.”

He notes that both sides in the case “stipulated that this was pure speech.” The right to speak against same-sex marriage is important enough that Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion emphasized it in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), even as it declared that gay couples have a constitutional right to wed. But the ACLU filed a friend-of-the-court brief in 303 Creative siding with the state on the grounds that its application of the law imposed only an “incidental burden” the owner’s constitutional rights.

By now it’s unsurprising that the ACLU would take such a position. A more poignant rebuttal of the anything-goes theory is that at an earlier stage of the case, six legal scholars made the same argument to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The first signer of that April 2020 brief: Floyd Abrams.

Mr. Taranto is the Journal’s editorial features editor. Mr. Rivkin practices appellate and constitutional law in Washington. He served at the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-alito-view-of-first-amendment-aclu-offensive-speech-political-c760fe06

The Supreme Court and the ‘Duty to Sit’

By David B. Rivkin, Jr., and Lee A. Casey

September 16, 2023, in the Wall Street Journal

Justice Samuel Alito has refused a demand from Senate Democrats that he disqualify himself from a pending case because of an interview in this newspaper. One of us (Mr. Rivkin) is on the legal team representing the appellants in Moore v. U.S. and conducted the interview jointly with a Journal editor.

In a four-page statement Sept. 8, Justice Alito noted that other justices had previously sat on cases argued by lawyers who had interviewed or written books with them. “We have no control over the attorneys whom parties select to represent them,” he wrote. “We are required to put favorable or unfavorable comments and any personal connections with an attorney out of our minds and judge the cases based solely on the law and the facts. And that is what we do.”

The recusal demand came in an Aug. 3 letter to Chief Justice John Roberts signed by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin and the committee’s other Democrats, excluding Georgia’s Sen. Jon Ossoff. It is part of a campaign against the court’s conservatives by Democratic politicians, left-wing advocacy groups and journalists whose goals include imposing a congressionally enacted code of ethics on the high court.

Although there already is a judicial ethics code, propounded by the U.S. Judicial Conference, it applies only to the lower federal courts, which Congress established. Proposals to create a Supreme Court code of conduct—including onerous and enforceable recusal requirements—raise fundamental issues of judicial independence and separation of powers. Chief Justice Roberts noted in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012) that the justices have a “responsibility to declare unconstitutional those laws that undermine the structure of government established by the Constitution.”

Congressional imposition of such rules would do precisely that. Justice Alito put the point strongly in the Journal interview. “Congress did not create the Supreme Court,” he said. “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period.” To be sure, Article III authorizes Congress to regulate the court’s appellate jurisdiction, and Justice Alito followed his observation with this caveat: “Now, they have the power of the purse, so they have the ability to take away all of our money if we don’t do what they want. So as a practical matter, they have a lot of authority. But as a constitutional matter, they don’t.”

The Supreme Court’s independence is critical to America’s constitutional structure. As James Madison observed in his notes of the Constitutional Convention, “if it be essential to the preservation of liberty that the Legislative Executive & Judiciary powers be separate, it is essential to a maintenance of the separation, that they should be independent of each other.”

The political branches—Congress and the president—have overlapping powers that bear on the same policy issues. They also have effective tools at their disposal to fight encroachments on their authority. By contrast, the Supreme Court has the authority only to “say what the law is,” as Chief Justice John Marshall put it in Marbury v. Madison (1803). For the rule of law to prevail, the court has to carry out its duties free of any interference from the political branches. Yet its status as a countermajoritarian institution with no popular constituency makes it vulnerable to political attack.

The Constitution protects the judiciary by conferring life tenure on the justices and other Article III judges. They can be removed from office only through impeachment and conviction, and Congress is prohibited from reducing their salaries. Although lawmakers have enacted statutes establishing procedural and evidentiary rules for the lower federal courts, there is no constitutional basis supporting such authority over the Supreme Court. And while Congress first enacted recusal rules for lower courts in 1792, it didn’t extend them to the Supreme Court until 1948.

Even with respect to the lower courts, Congress doesn’t have a free hand. Recusal involves a core judicial function—the exercise of judgment in the same manner as deciding other legal issues. All recusals are determined case by case, considering the litigants and issues raised. History supports the premise that this is an inherent part of “judicial power,” belonging exclusively to the courts. In British and colonial courts alike, recusal decisions were handled entirely by judges, with no legislative input.

Congress can no more regulate this core judicial function than it can direct the president’s exercise of his core functions. As the Supreme Court confirmed in Trump v. Mazars (2020), which involved competing presidential and congressional claims, the resolution of separation-of-powers questions must take into account whether one branch of government is using its power to “aggrandize” itself at another’s expense or to gain some “institutional advantage.” The current efforts by Senate Democrats, while clothed in a concern for ethics, are plainly designed to weaken the court and put it under Congress’s thumb.

There is no evidence that the Supreme Court needs new recusal rules or has an ethics problem at all. Corruption inherently doesn’t loom large as a problem for the federal judiciary. The president and members of Congress must run for election, which requires them to raise campaign money. Both political branches provide tangible benefits to private parties through the creation or administration of spending programs and the letting of government contracts. This creates possibilities for corrupt influence.

Federal judges, by contrast, have life tenure and, as per Article III, hear only “controversies” that are brought before them. Like the president and other executive-branch officials, they are subject to impeachment for bribery or other corrupt acts. But fewer than a dozen jurists have been removed from office in more than two centuries. Recent accusations of “corruption” against conservative justices mostly involve their social activities with friends who have no pending cases before the court and likely never will. The critics seem untroubled (and rightly so) by similar behavior from liberal justices.

As Justice Alito’s statement notes, “recusal is a personal decision for each Justice.” Justices may look to the Judicial Conference’s Code of Conduct for guidance when considering whether to recuse themselves from a case. Although the federal statute requiring recusal in certain defined circumstances applies to the high court, the justices have never ruled on whether that application is constitutional.

The law, known as Section 455, incorporates standards anchored in traditional common law, so that they are arguably consistent with the original public meaning of Article III’s term “judicial power, exercised by the Supreme Court.” They mostly involve financial or family interests in a particular case. A judge might recuse himself, for instance, if a relative or a company in which he owns stock is a party to a case. Justices interpret and apply the law’s provisions in a flexible enough way to preserve judicial independence.

That flexibility is illustrated by U.S. v. Will (1980), in which the justices rejected the proposition that Section 455 obligated the entire court to recuse itself from hearing an appeal of a lawsuit, brought by 13 federal district judges, challenging the validity of statutes that repealed previously enacted cost-of-living pay increases for the judiciary. The decision by Chief Justice Warren Burger invoked “the ancient Rule of Necessity”: Because every judge had a financial interest in the outcome, a ruling by disinterested judges was a logical impossibility. Although Justice Harry Blackmun recused himself, the court held 8-0 that the repeal was constitutional only when it took effect before the increase did.

Even a single justice’s recusal can be harmful. Justice Alito’s statement related to Moore v. U.S. cited his “duty to sit,” a principle Justice William Rehnquist elucidated in a memorandum rejecting a motion to recuse himself from Laird v. Tatum (1972). Rehnquist noted a consensus among federal circuit courts of appeals “that a federal judge has a duty to sit where not disqualified which is equally as strong as the duty to not sit where disqualified.” That duty, he argued, is even stronger for a justice, whose recusal “raises the possibility of an affirmance of the judgment below by an equally divided Court. The consequence attending such a result is, of course, that the principle of law presented by the case is left unsettled.”

When a judge serving on a lower court is recused, another judge is assigned to the case and the litigation goes forward. That’s impossible when a member of the high court is recused. No one can sit in for a justice. Thus, while lower federal judges generally resolve doubts by recusing themselves, the opposite presumption is appropriate for the Supreme Court.

In addition, if the duty to sit were weakened, there is a real danger that litigants would use recusal motions strategically to affect the outcomes of cases. Public-policy litigation often comes before the court through test cases, in which litigants have been selected with a view toward the current or likely position of the federal circuit courts with jurisdiction over their place of residence or operations. In contentious areas of the law, those positions may be markedly different, reflecting the balance of judges with different judicial philosophies on the circuits.

A circuit split is one of the principal reasons why the Supreme Court will agree to hear a case. In this context, two justices’ recusals could turn a losing case into a winning one. A single recusal and a tie vote would leave the split unresolved, so that different parts of the country would be governed under different interpretations of federal law. The Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal and Transparency Act, which Mr. Durbin’s committee advanced along party lines in July, would subject the justices’ recusal decisions to review by either their colleagues or a panel of lower-court judges, creating temptations within the judiciary itself to game the system.

Liberals should be as concerned as conservatives with maintaining the court’s integrity and independence, and at least on the bench they appear to be. All nine justices have signed a “Statement on Ethical Principles and Practices,” which affirms, among other things, that the justices have a duty to sit and that the decision to recuse or not is up to each individually: “If the full Court or any subset of the Court were to review the recusal decisions of individual Justices, it would create an undesirable situation in which the Court could affect the outcome of a case by selecting who among its Members may participate.”

None of this is to deny that the justices should clearly define their recusal standards or that they should make public the reasoning for their decisions, as the Statement on Ethical Principles and Practices says they are free to do. There is value in assuring the public that these decisions are taken based on rational standards, honestly applied. But that is a matter for the justices, not Congress.

Messrs. Rivkin and Casey practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington. They served at the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administration.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-supreme-court-and-the-duty-to-sit-recusal-standards-ethics-durbin-alito-93c4dbb6