'That’s just insulting': Legal expert suggests SCOTUS ethics code an effort to 'gaslight' the public

During Sunday's episode of MSNBC's The Katie Phang Show, Phang spoke with Slate senior editor and law analyst Dalia Lithwick about the US Supreme Court's recently adopted ethics code of conduct over 200 years after its establishment.

The court long resisted enforcing a mandatory ethics code before changing its mind amid ongoing scrutiny.

Referring to the new code, Phang emphasized, "I don't buy this at all. I think that it's a gratuitous move. You know the real tell, I think, Dahlia, there's no enforcement mechanism. None whatsoever. So for me, it's like 'take it,' at this point, right? What are we doing with this?"

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Lithwick replied, "It's essentially a stack of pre-existing rules and statutes and cannons. If you remember, Katie, last April, when the court was under the same tremendous amount of pressure to do something about its complete lack of ethics rule, they pulled out this same stack, and they said, 'Here. This is all the stuff we adhere to' They all signed it. This is no different from that. This is the same move. It's just kind of cut and paste it in a different document. And it comes with a little preamble that — and here's the tell for me — it starts with the proposition that the absence of the code they write 'had led, in recent years, to the misunderstanding that the justices of the court, unlike other jurists, regard themselves as an unrestricted.'"

She added, "And then it goes on to say, 'That's because you're confused, American public, we were never confused. We have this stack of rules that we promise you — pinky promise — we adhere to, but because you're confused about the rules, here they are again.' So I completely agree with you, this feels like an attempt to gaslight us into saying, 'Oh, maybe these rules are binding and we were just confused. And that's just insulting."

Watch the video below or at this link.

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