It’s impossible to find the bottom these days. One outrageous story bleeds into another, and lies that pile up like cordwood obscure earlier mendacities that seemed like whoppers at the time but quickly gave way to even greater scandals. Such is the case with the recent revelation of Justice Alito’s luxury fishing trip, bought-and-paid-for by a rich Supreme Court litigant. While it may be shocking to the uninformed, it’s about as surprising as a sunrise to anybody paying attention over the last few decades.
Since memory fades, let’s recap. In 2004, Justice Scalia flew down to Louisiana on a government plane to go duck hunting with Vice President Dick Cheney, who had a case in front of the Supreme Court. Refusing to recuse himself, Scalia broke it all down to money:
[T]hough our flight down on the vice president’s plane was indeed free, since we were not returning with him we purchased (because they were least expensive) round-trip tickets that cost precisely what we would have paid if we had gone both down and back on commercial flights. In other words, none of us saved a cent by flying on the vice president’s plane.
Shockingly (or maybe not so shockingly), there was very little indignance about the more obvious question: Wait, a Supreme Court Justice goes duck hunting with the Vice President? Weren’t we taught something about the separation of powers in elementary school? And then Scalia played the victim card: “While the political branches can perhaps survive the constant baseless allegations of impropriety that have become the staple of Washington reportage, this court cannot. The people must have confidence in the integrity of the justices, and that cannot exist in a system that assumes them to be corruptible by the slightest friendship or favor, and in an atmosphere where the press will be eager to find foot faults.” In other words, if you catch us being unethical, it’d be better if you’d keep your mouth shut, or else the public will start to think that we’re unethical.
Well, time’s a wasting, so let’s skip ahead to our more recent scandals:
Chief Justice Roberts’s wife apparently bringing in more than $10,000,000 in commissions by headhunting for lawyers who would be appearing before her husband;
Justice Thomas’s dear friendship with right wing billionaire and Nazi artifacts collector Harlan Crow, which began in childhood, during college, as a lawyer after Thomas ascended the High Court and yielded free tuition for his nephew, home improvements, and extravagant vacations—you know, the sort of gifts anyone might accept with the understanding that there are no strings attached. How dare you suggest otherwise? And most recently…
Justice Alito’s undisclosed luxury fishing trip with a hedge fund billionaire who regularly has cases pending at the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, Poughkeepsie Bankruptcy Court the Supreme Court. Providing fodder for late night comics, Alito explained that there was no reason for him to report his travel on a private jet because he took “a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant.” This explanation is particularly galling: The billionaire might well have invited someone from the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation had Justice Alito been busy with… Court stuff.
Then there’s this last bit of news we learned about Alito’s fishing trip—he’s knowledgeable about wine. “As I recall, the meals were home-style fare. I cannot recall whether the group at the lodge, about 20 people, was served wine, but if there was wine it was certainly not wine that costs $1,000.” Who knew? On the bright side, this most recent scandal helps us forget last year’s allegations that Justice Alito leaked his opinions to right-wing leaders, and that Justices Alito and Scalia invited those same right-wing leaders to attend Supreme Court arguments in special seats: “We were invited to use seats from Nino and Sam. Wow!” Wow indeed.
But what does any of this have to do with the death penalty, you ask? Even though these justices might appear beholden to right-wing interests, and those right-wing interests have been keeping capital punishment afloat for years, the justices could still be analyzing, without fear or favor, each individual claim that comes before them. After all, an appearance of impropriety doesn’t mean that there actually is impropriety. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that Justices Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, and Alito consistently vote against indigent defendants appearing in the Supreme Court, especially when it comes to death penalty cases. Maybe. But we prefer the great writer Vladimir Nabokov when it comes to coincidence: “A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish—but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.”
