Court Jester. After months of pressure and scandalous headlines, the Supreme Court released its first official “code of conduct” on Monday. However, the new ethics rules were so porous—literally unenforceable—that they were immediately mocked.
Ian Millhiser, a SCOTUS expert and Vox correspondent, noted that the new code is “so weak that it serves to legitimize Clarence Thomas’s corruption,” and “is literally worse than nothing.” For instance, Millhiser wrote, the rules officially legitimize Justice Clarence Thomas’s nine-day all-inclusive vacation on billionaire megadonor Harlan Crow’s yacht, a trip which ProPublica valued at possibly more than $500,000. He noted that the measures also reflect “a codification of principles” Thomas adhered to when his $270,000 RV purchase was backed by another conservative financier.
Former federal prosecutor Shan Wu, writing in The Daily Beast, said the rules were “too little, too late.” Wu noted there is no independent enforcement mechanism for violations, and slammed the nine justices’ “patronizing” joint statement bemoaning “the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.”
“I would hazard a guess that the 74 percent of the American public that lacks confidence in the court couldn’t care less about how the justices ‘regard themselves,’” Wu wrote. “What we care about is the lack of an enforceable code of ethics and the lack of transparency about justices secretly living the lifestyle of billionaires.”
As Take Back the Court Action Fund, a liberal advocacy group, noted, the code uses the word “should” 53 times, and uses the word “must” six times. The code also defines a Justice’s family members in different ways in different contexts.
Regarding conflicts of interest and potential disqualification from cases, a family member is a person related to the Justice or the Justice’s spouse within the third degree of relationship—meaning immediate and extended family, including great grandparents, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, half blood relatives and “most step relatives.” (Canon 3, B(6)(a) in the code.)
In the code’s gift section, however—the flashpoint for much of ProPublica’s bombshell reporting on Thomas—the definition of family is different, giving the justices the individual power to define whether any gift-giver is a member of their family: “A ‘member of the Justice’s family’ means any relative of a Justice by blood, adoption, or marriage, or any person treated by a Justice as a member of the Justice’s family.”
Bye, George. Indicted Rep. George Santos (R-NY) said this week that he expects the House will soon expel him. But it’s worth considering the fact that one reason Santos is seen as a unique fraudster—aside from his monumental dishonesty—is that he managed to get elected. In reality, Santos has a lot of company in the political fraud department.
In parting shots delivered last week, Santos attempted to tap into this fact, trying to blur his own alleged wrongdoing with other members of Congress who are “more worried about getting drunk every night with the next lobbyist that they’re going to screw and pretend like none of us know what’s going on.” There’s at least a kernel of truth to that, as Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) was recently accused in divorce proceedings of carrying on an affair with D.C. lobbyist Liz Williams—who, a person with direct knowledge told The Daily Beast, also had an affair with convicted and pardoned Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA).
But the recent history of fraud among candidates who did not get elected is more broad.
There’s Beej Das, a Democratic House candidate in Massachusetts during the 2018 midterms who was convicted in October on campaign finance charges eerily similar to fact patterns in Santos’ case.
“To inflate his fundraising numbers, Das devised a scheme in or about December 2017 to solicit personal loans from friends and close associates in excess of the $2,700 legal limit,” DOJ wrote in a statement upon the conviction. Das personally solicited hundreds of thousands of dollars from different people, then transferred the money to his campaign under the guise of “personal loans,” falsely claiming it was from his own personal funds when it was “illegal conduit contributions to his campaign.” Das also converted campaign cash to personal use, using at least $267,000 “to pay outstanding debts for his hotel business relating to vendors, the hotel’s yacht and real estate taxes unrelated to his congressional campaign.”
Then there’s 2020 Idaho Republican primary congressional candidate Nick Jones. In June 2022, Jones was convicted of making false statements to the FEC and wire fraud after misusing COVID small business loans. Jones told his employees that they would earn normal pay if they also worked for his campaign, paying them in part with money Jones got through PPP loans. His campaign didn’t report that work as in-kind contributions.
The year before, Virginia Democratic House candidate Shaun Brown was sentenced to three years in prison for a fraud conspiracy, where she stole money out of $800,000 in USDA funds for a program to feed low-income children. When she began serving her sentence, Brown announced that she would be running for Congress again from prison.
When Karen Matthews Davis ran for Congress as a California Republican, she did so in the face of death threats. Or so she claimed. In 2017, Davis was convicted for lying to federal agents about two anonymous threatening letters she claimed to have received while running for office in 2014, going so far as to suggest three suspects. In reality, Davis wrote both letters herself.
In 2019, former Rhode Island GOP congressional candidate Russell Taub pleaded guilty to fraud and campaign finance crimes related to a PAC scam he’d run in 2018. Taub admitted that he’d raised money for two fake political groups, but never registered either entity with the FEC. Of the more than $1.6 million raised—in part repeatedly invoking a “former Ambassador and high-level military officer” without that person’s knowledge or permission—Taub used more than $1 million for “purely personal expenses.”
Still, Santos stands out among that motley crew—he has been accused of everything that they were: raising money for a fake political committee, stealing from his campaign, lying about personal loans, defrauding a government assistance program, and making dubious claims about death threats. And much, much, much, much, much, much more.
MAGAfied. As the Republican Party navigates the ever-expanding and overlapping internal fault lines caused by its varying degrees of Trump loyalty, an FEC ruling could signal potential new microfractures ahead—even something of a balkanization.
On Sept. 28, the Upshur County Republican Executive Committee asked the FEC to declare that it is independent of the West Virginia Republican Party, and therefore isn’t beholden to the same contribution limits.
Even by West Virginia standards, Upshur County, smack in the middle of the state, is MAGA country—“the Trumpiest place in America,” home to a hair studio called “Trump’s Salon,” a place where “Pentecostal churches are nearly as common as restaurants” and which has reliably voted more Republican than the state, even when West Virginia went Democrat.
The county party’s request indicated a rift between the two groups. Upshur’s counsel—MAGAworld stalwart Charlie Spies—wrote that the county has not given money to the West Virginia GOP and “has no plans to do so in the future.” And in a crucial line at the end of his request, Spies noted that “the current State Party leadership does not support Upshur County’s independence,” which, he said, “only further supports Upshur County’s contention that it is independent.”
On Nov. 20, the FEC agreed, saying that the two groups aren’t affiliated—for some politically striking reasons.
The FEC noted that local party committees are presumed to be under the direction and control of the state party per se, unless they prove otherwise. The Upshur County GOP proved this by showing two things: The county committee hasn’t received money from the state party or affiliates, and it makes contributions independently.
But that triggered other criteria, specifically ten “circumstantial factors” that help define the relationship. The FEC found that only two of the ten spoke to an affiliation between the groups—their governance, and the state party’s hiring authority—and both of them were weakened by other facets of the relationship.
The commissioners then noted this observation: “Additionally, Upshur County has demonstrated its intention to pursue its own objectives even when those objectives do not align with those of the State Party.”
In an era where gerrymandering has created hyper-radicalized MAGA pockets wildly out of step with even the most conservative lawmakers, it’s possible that more and more of those areas, like Upshur, will want more autonomy over their own fate within the GOP.
