The Hill has published my new essay, explaining why the Twenty-First Century Courts Act would bring reforms to the Supreme Court, and why Republicans ought to get behind it. Here is the gist:
In a good first step toward depoliticizing the U.S. Supreme Court, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) recently introduced the 21st Century Courts Act of 2022 setting out procedural reforms that ought to attract bipartisan support. Although the Act’s co-sponsors so far are all Democrats, its two key provisions have no political implications, and there is no reason it cannot eventually be endorsed by Republicans.
The 21st Century Courts Act would not impose specific rules on the Supreme Court. It simply requires that the court, “after appropriate public notice and opportunity for comment, issue a code of conduct for the justices” within 180 days after passage of the Act. The justices themselves would have full authority to determine the scope, specificity and discrete provisions of their code, whether adapting an existing model or writing it from scratch.
There is nothing about this measure for Republicans to dislike. The Court’s current 6-3 conservative majority ensures that an eventual code will not have a theoretically liberal bias, if such a thing were even possible. And ethical lapses of the sort a code would address do not follow party lines.
The 21st Century Courts Act solves this problem by constituting the entire Supreme Court as a “reviewing panel for a motion seeking to disqualify a justice.” Individual justices, of course, would remain free to proactively recuse themselves whenever they see fit, but a party’s actual motion, if “accompanied by a certificate of good faith and an affidavit alleging facts sufficient” to support disqualification, would be referred to the full court, as are other procedural motions.
You can read the entire piece here.
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