Democrats increasingly violate democratic norms when it suits their political interests. Such an episode was on full display in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday when Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) rammed through subpoenas of private citizens whose only offense was being friends with conservative members of the Supreme Court.
Not only did Durbin block Republican amendments to the subpoena resolutions, but he also didn't allow them to speak. All but one Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), then walked out of the meeting, denying Durbin the quorum needed to conduct business. He held the vote anyway.
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Ostensibly, the subpoenas issued to Justice Clarence Thomas's friend Harlan Crow and Justice Samuel Alito's friend Leonard Leo seeking 25 years' worth of private information are needed by the Senate to help write ethics legislation for the court. A far-left activist group recently published a series of stories showing that Thomas has repeatedly gone on vacation with Crow and that Alito has a similar relationship with Leo.
Nothing criminal or impeachable has been alleged, however, and Democrats are free to bring impeachment proceedings if they have a case. The fact that they have not shows they have nothing.
Durbin's true purpose is to bully and harass conservatives in the legal world who, through democratic means, have helped reshape the federal judiciary into a bulwark against the Democrats' wholesale reimagining of the United States outside the bounds of the Constitution. If you are thankful that the Supreme Court did not find a 14th Amendment right to universal basic income for everyone or reparations for black people, your thanks should go to Leo, for he was instrumental in steering originalist and textualist judges to the high court.
Democrats hate him and his friends for this, hence the invasive subpoenas. The dead giveaway that the Democrats' campaign has nothing to do with Supreme Court ethics and everything to do with bullying can be found in the lack of curiosity about the friends of liberal justices.
Why no subpoena to examine Justice Elena Kagan's relationship with Neal Katyal? Or retired Justice Stephen Breyer's relationship with David Rubenstein? Or Justice Sonia Sotomayor's quid pro quo book-buying schemes? It is funny — peculiar, not ha-ha — how none of these are deemed worthy of investigation by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The Supreme Court recently issued a new code of conduct for justices. That should have been the end of the matter. But as Democrats were never really concerned about ethics, only about partisan political gain, their efforts to delegitimize the members of the court continue unabated.
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The subpoenas passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday are defective for a host of reasons, including the fact that Congress has no constitutional authority to pass binding ethics legislation on the judicial branch, that the committee lacked a quorum, and that Democrats need 60 votes on the Senate floor to give the subpoenas force of law. The subpoenas are functionally dead. But they served their purpose, which was to create headlines in the Democrats' lickspittle media, designed to undermine the legitimacy of the court further.
This short-term partisan thinking is hurting our democracy in the long term.