Hillary Clinton Targets The Supreme Court

Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

(FixThisNation.com) – On Friday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined the people who are calling for an “enforceable” code of ethics for Supreme Court justices following the recent revelations regarding Justice Clarence Thomas not disclosing a number of gifts and deals in his financial disclosures over the past two decades.

During a conference for Vital Voices Global Partnership, a non-profit she co-founded with fellow former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, she noted that enforceable codes of ethics were something that those in the lower courts, circuit courts, Congress and running for office needed to abide by. She further added that the Supreme Court was the only place without an enforceable ethics code.

Following the recent ProPublica reports about Thomas and his wife receiving luxury vacations from Harlan Crow, a billionaire and GOP mega-donor, that was never disclosed in his financial disclosure forms there has been a growing number of political figures calling for the Supreme Court to have a code of ethics that is enforceable.

Currently, under federal law, justices are required to disclose most gifts, but there are some exceptions to that rule. Thomas in response to the ProPublica report, claimed that he had previously been advised that the trips would fall under the personal hospitality from a friend category and thus, would not need to be disclosed.

In more recent reports it was noted that Crow had also bought a number of properties from Thomas and that he had also covered the tuition for Thomas’ great-nephew to attend private boarding schools. None of these were disclosed in his financial disclosure forms.

Clinton argued that following these revelations, and other revelations about Justices it was clear that a set of ethics standards needed to be created for the Supreme Court.

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