Another day, another hit piece on the Supreme Court, this time with ProPublica targeting Justice Samuel Alito.
A few weeks back, commenting on a substanceless media attack on Justice Clarence Thomas, law professor Josh Blackman commented, “Wait for the next empty shoe to drop.”
Well, here it is. And honestly it’s not much of a shoe. Nor even a flipflop.
Since the Supreme Court shifted right, media coverage has, well, flip-flopped from hagiography to hit pieces fast enough to make your head spin.
When the court was reliably liberal, things like Justice Hugo Black’s fomer Klan membership, or William O. Douglas’ history of sexual misbehavior and shady connections to Vegas “businessmen” didn’t matter.
Now that it’s leaning the other way, the press has stopped swallowing camels and started straining at gnats.
Last month we were told that it was somehow an ethics violation that George Mason Law School (one of the few conservative law schools in America) had Supreme Court justices as adjunct professors, even as its clinic filed friend-of-the-court briefs.
Then we were told that it was somehow a scandal that Clarence Thomas went on vacations with a rich friend.
Now, perhaps because black voters were starting to notice the press’ and the Democrats’ (but I repeat myself) hostility to Thomas, the focus has shifted to Alito for more of the same.
Once again, it’s Democratic Party mouthpiece ProPublica bringing the charges.
ProPublica’s role is to disguise oppo-research hit pieces as journalism.
It used to be coy about it, but now it barely tries to hide what’s going on.
When the journalistic motto is “where there’s smoke there’s fire,” you can expect a brisk trade in smudge-pots.
And ProPublica is one of the smudgiest.
As The Wall Street Journal notes: “Regarding ethics, the [ProPublica] story flatly asserts that Justice Alito violated disclosure rules, but he did not. At the time of the trip, the Justices were authoritatively advised that such ‘personal hospitality’ wasn’t reportable.
“Ray Randolph, a federal appellate judge who was on both trips, says he asked the judiciary’s disclosure office whether to report the trip on his 2005 form. Backed by his notes taken at the time, Judge Randolph said he was told he did not have to disclose.”
But Alito did disclose it, not in paperwork for the files, but in front of a large audience.
“As it happens, the fishing trip isn’t even a ProPublica scoop. Justice Alito was so intent on concealing the trip,” the paper jokes, “that he told a large audience of lawyers and journalists about it at a Federalist Society dinner in 2009.”
Back in the 1990s (so long ago it was considered a defense of Bill Clinton amidst his many scandals), Peter Morgan and I wrote “The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business and Society.”
The book had two major themes: One was how ethics charges are used offensively to turn minor transgressions into major partisan scandals.
The other was how the minutiae of ethics rules are used to conceal much bigger institutional misbehavior.
Both are present here.
ProPublica and other captive outlets of the Democratic Party are doing whatever they can to create “scandals” around the Supreme Court.
It’s not that they expect any particular faux-scandal to stick, but they hope that raising one after another will create a generalized perception that the court is corrupt, and its decisions — say, overturning affirmative action, or upholding gun rights — will thus be delegitimized, making it easier for Democratic officials to disobey them.
At the same time, the “ethics” attacks on the court serve as a smokescreen to conceal the much bigger ethical problems that go unaddressed.
ProPublica, for example, crusades against fully publicized matters like Alito’s trip, even as it rakes in millions of dollars from undisclosed donors.
Per the Washington Free Beacon: In 2020 and 2021, “ProPublica accepted $6.3 million from anonymous donors, and a quarter of the group’s revenues in 2022 came from two unnamed donors.”
Disclosure for thee, secrecy for me.
Progressive billionaires have been funneling money to leftist causes and institutions for years in ways designed to avoid scrutiny — check out the Tides Foundation — but somehow “investigative journalism” outlets like ProPublica don’t seem interested in exposing where that money comes from, or how it’s spent.
We are being lectured on ethics by scoundrels. Evaluate accordingly.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.