The US Supreme Court's reputation is tarnished not without reason

For several years, I have been explaining in these pages that the Supreme Court is the most corrupt major US national institution. The religious extremism in the court’s majority has now been compounded by levels of self-dealing by Justice Clarence Thomas warranting an unprecedented Justice Department criminal investigation. The whole judicial branch of government is thus in utter crisis. On the ideological side, Mr Thomas recently ruled for the court that "bump stock" kits don’t convert semi-automatic weapons into machineguns, when that's all that they are for. The court is in the process of scandalously legalising the practically unregulated ownership of fully automatic assault rifles designed only to kill many people efficiently. Mr Thomas's noted extremism is being outdone by Justice Samuel Alito. First, it was revealed that an upside down US flag was flown at his home shortly after the January 6 insurgency. That shocking misuse of the flag was widely associated with the pro-Trump insurgents seeking to abolish US democracy. This ought to be grounds for resignation. But Mr Alito has blamed his wife, insisting "I am not fond of flying flags", but she is. Even if he's telling the truth, he has certainly surpassed grounds for recusal on 2020 election-related cases. But he refuses to consider recusing himself, even though any reasonable person would have rational grounds to doubt his impartiality in such cases – which is the standard. Unfortunately, unlike all other courts in the country, the Supreme Court is effectively immune from any ethics enforcement, and the extremist right-wing majority is taking heavy advantage of that to continue unheard-of ideological and financial shenanigans. Mr Alito was audio taped by a journalist posing as a conservative supporter – a distasteful and arguably unethical tactic – enthusiastically agreeing that it was time for Americans to return to "godliness", in civic life. The US, however, is not a Christian or "godly" country but one that upholds the neutrality of government on religious beliefs. This is clearly illustrated by the US Constitution itself, in the notes on its composing convention by founding American statesman James Madison, and in some of the young republic's earliest treaties – most notably the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, composed under George Washington and ratified under John Adams, the second US president. The US Supreme Court's current five-vote radical religious majority – all Catholic extremists – rejects this proud tradition, precisely as Mr Alito confirmed to his unscrupulous interlocutor. The questionable tactics of a self-appointed investigator is of little national significance. But the stated radicalism, fully borne out by his other comments in the past and, especially, rulings coming from him and his four religiously extremist colleagues, is deeply alarming. The attack on reproductive freedom, which appears poised to extend itself at the national level to sweeping restrictions, if not outright prohibitions, on contraception and in vitro fertilisation (as in Alabama, whose Supreme Court Chief Justice invoked God's will and religious dogma as his main argument in a recent ruling, pushing hard in that direction), is plainly based entirely on religious sentiments and not law. The five Catholic extremists who stripped American women of this long-standing constitutional right were plainly motivated by their own personal spiritual convictions, which ought to have no place in constitutional jurisprudence. This is faith-based dogma, not constitutional law. Mr Thomas has even written that the court ought to revisit all privacy-based rulings from the past half-century that derived from the original reproductive rights ruling, Roe V Wade. This puts into question all manner of laws pertaining to LGBTQ Americans, in addition to a range of restrictions on government-enforced religious observance in schools and elsewhere, and even the invalidity of laws prohibiting interracial marriages (such as Mr Thomas's own). Mr Thomas has long cast a pall of financial misdeeds over the court with his history of unreported "gifts" from wealthy right-wing benefactors with broad-ranging stakes in any number of existing and potential cases. It has been recently revealed that over the past 20 years Mr Thomas received at least 103 "gifts" valued at more than $2.4 million, mostly in the form of luxury vacations, loans that may or may not have been repaid, and other largesse. That is not strictly speaking illegal, but failing to report such "gifts" is, since the public has a right to know about them. Mr Thomas has accumulated a vast track record of "overlooking" to report as required huge amounts of money from very ideological wealthy right-wing activists. And, like Mr Alito, Mr Thomas has refused to recuse himself from 2020 election-related cases, even though his wife, the Republican activist Ginni, was a well-connected and ardent proponent of any number of schemes to prevent Mr Biden from duly taking office despite his election victory. Both men insist that they are not their wives, which is true, that they never discuss such matters with their wives, which is highly unconvincing, and that there is no basis for recusal. The opposite is true. Both Mr Alito and Mr Thomas have no business ruling on any case even remotely related to the outcome of 2020 election by the standards that would be enforced on any other judge in the country. Mr Thomas's pattern of concealing almost $2.5 million in undisclosed gifts from wealthy benefactors is so extensive and prolonged it warrants a criminal investigation by the Justice Department. This is not a matter of a few oversights. It is a pattern of corruption and self-dealing that calls into question the integrity of the court and the judicial system. Not since before the Second World War has the US been confronted with a highly aggressive and extremist court majority that’s badly out of step with the national viewpoint, and, even more disturbingly, at least one justice who may well have crossed the line into outright corrupt criminality. Chief Justice John Roberts, a relatively moderate conservative who is said to be focused on the institutional health and legacy of the court he leads, has long since lost control of it and doesn’t seem to have been doing much to stanch the bleeding. What was patently true years ago is now far more obvious: the Supreme Court appears to have emerged as simultaneously the most extreme and the most corrupt major national institution. For the US, that's a historic disaster.