The Supreme Court is adopting a code of ethics, it announced Monday.
The nine justices unanimously signed on to a Code of Conduct that will “gather in one place the ethics rules and principles” that guide their conduct, according to a statement from the court. Democrats have for months pressured the Supreme Court to adopt a code following reports alleging ethics violations by conservative justices, proposing legislation that would require the justices to adopt a code. The court had been the subject of a campaign by left-wing activist groups, who targeted conservative justices for their relationships with wealthy individuals.
“For the most part’: The Court has long had the equivalent of common law ethics rules, that is, a body of rules derived from a variety of sources, including statutory provisions, the code that applies to other members of the federal judiciary, ethics advisory opinions issued by the Judicial Conference Committee on Codes of Conduct, and historic practice,” the justices wrote in a statement. “The absence of a Code, however, has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.”
“To dispel this misunderstanding, we are issuing this Code, which largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct,” the statement continues.
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