This is not rocket science in the ethical world
I guess Neil Gorsuch doesn’t have a very fine-tuned sense of ethics.
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, President Trump’s Supreme Court appointee, is scheduled to address a conservative group at the Trump International Hotel in Washington next month, less than two weeks before the court is set to hear arguments on Mr. Trump’s travel ban.
Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University, questioned the justice’s decision to speak at the hotel, which is at issue in lower-court cases challenging the constitutionality of payments to Mr. Trump’s companies.
“At this highly divisive political moment, especially as many Trump decisions are likely soon to reach the court’s docket, one just days later, a healthy respect for public confidence in the court should have led Justice Gorsuch to demur,” he said.
You’d think he would say no for a lot of reasons. He shouldn’t be snuggling up to Trump that way, and he shouldn’t be helping Trump violate ethical standards by profiting from his hotel almost next door to his official residence. It’s tawdry any way you look at it.
The Times found a lawyer to say it’s ok.
Deborah L. Rhode, a law professor at Stanford, disagreed.
“This is not rocket science in the ethical world,” she said. “It doesn’t get much more basic than this.”
“It’s a terrible signal for this group to be holding their meeting at the Trump International Hotel and for a Supreme Court justice to legitimate it by attending,” she said. “It just violates basic ethical principles about conflicts of interest.”
And it looks skeevy as hell.
Seems to be your standard tag-line now, Ophelia. In my mind, ‘skeevy as hell’ and ‘business as usual’ have become interchangeable.
If he had a problem with looking skeevy, Gorsuch would not have accepted the nomination under the circumstances. And every other life-time judiciary appointment that they didn’t let Obama fill, well, they’ve got Trump to fill with men of the same caliber. (Or Pence – Pence wouldn’t be any different that way, so we haven’t got impeachment of the president to offer hope on that score.)
It’s hard to muster up optimism after reflecting on that one. Give them even two years of power and the damage is done for decades, quite apart from the rest of it.
When I used to be a federal employee and one of the rules of thumb they used to teach us was a kind of ‘go with your gut’ thing. If something makes you wonder if it’s unethical, if you think a report in the Washington Post would be embarrassing or shameful, then either say no or check with the Ethics Office before accepting.
I often said no to things (free lunches, gifts, prize drawings etc) that were offered to me by companies that we did business with, even when I was sure they actually were allowed under the rules (for example if the value of the gift was very low and not offered in return for choosing a particular vendor). I found it easier just to say no rather than keep running things past the ethics officers the whole time because I got offered this stuff a lot, especially at professional conferences. Sometimes the sales people would try and talk me round but I was bulletproof. I was a foreign national in federal service and I was not going to lose my job AND get deported for the sake of a free lunch at a fancy restaurant or a nice coffee mug with the company logo on it. They usually backed off after that.
These kind of ethics don’t have to be hard. But they do require a conscience, a willingness to say no under pressure and you have to be capable of shame. I have a tendency towards ethical rigidity, the reasons for which are complex, but I value my integrity above everything else. You can’t buy integrity and once it’s damaged it’s incredibly difficult to rebuild. Judge Gorsuch clearly is incapable of shame, but we knew that when he accepted the nomination to the Supreme Court. It doesn’t matter what happens now, his tenure will be forever tainted. But he doesn’t care because he doesn’t value his integrity as much as he values forcing his narrow view of the world on the rest of us. And unfortunately, it will probably come without consequences, other than the asterisk next to his name.
The fact that Gorsuch will be hearing the travel ban case bothers me less than the fact that there is an excellent chance that the Court will at some point hear one or more cases regarding the Emoluments Clause, at which the specific issue of the president profiting from the Trump hotel will be raised. Gorsuch has to know that.
So he might have to recuse himself.
It might be clearly, obviously, manifestly obvious that he should recuse himself. Alas, that does not mean he will.
I could be wrong, but I think a Supreme Court justice has less leeway to refuse than a president does. That may be just because of years of hearing news items that say Justice X was forced to recuse him [seldom her] self.
Hmm, sure enough, I’m wrong.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/opinion/the-supreme-courts-recusal-problem.html