Simson is Macon Chair in Law and former dean at Mercer Law School, professor emeritus at Cornell Law School, and a member of the board of directors of Lawyers Defending American Democracy.
You don’t have to be a big fan of Chief Justice John Roberts to concede that he wouldn’t dream of jet-setting around the country at a conservative billionaire’s expense or hanging outside his home a favorite flag of 2020 election deniers or Christian nationalists. But then why, you must be wondering, was he so unwilling to even meet with the Senate Judiciary Committee when invited in April 2023 to discuss Justice Clarence Thomas’ seemingly conscience-free jet-setting and when invited last month to discuss Justice Samuel Alito’s perhaps even more ethically challenged flag-hanging?
One thing’s for sure: You won’t find the answer in either of the letters the chief justice wrote declining the committee’s invitations. Of course, he wasn’t so impolite as to give no reasons, but the reasons he gave were all stated in such a cryptic or conclusory way that they seemed designed mainly to send the message, “I’m not coming, and I don’t even have to convince you I’m right not to come.”
In both letters he broadly alluded to “separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence.” Separation of powers and judicial independence undoubtedly are principles fundamental to our Constitution, but neither was genuinely threatened by the chief justice meeting with the committee. Both principles have never been understood as absolutes. If they don’t leave room for Congress to question a chief justice when justices act in ways that cast doubt on the Supreme Court’s ability to render impartial justice, our entire system of government is in big trouble.
In one letter, Roberts called attention to “the practice we have followed for 235 years pursuant to which individual Justices decide recusal issues.” Very simply, he seemed to be saying, the Supreme Court since its inception has left it to each justice to decide whether he or she needs to recuse; therefore, it’s illogical to ask a chief justice to discuss another justice’s recusal decisions.
But the longevity and wisdom of a practice are two very different things. Even if we assume that giving individual justices complete autonomy over their own recusal decisions made sense 235 or even 35 years ago, that hardly establishes that it makes sense today, particularly in the teeth of the powerful evidence to the contrary supplied by Thomas’s and Alito’s decisions.
Surely that distinction wasn’t lost on Roberts. I strongly suspect, though, that he was willing to bite the bullet and live with Thomas’s and Alito’s ethically impoverished decisions because he believes that in general anyone not on the Supreme Court, including the many senators on the Judiciary Committee who are lawyers, can’t understand as well as a justice what’s at stake in justices’ recusal decisions.
Roberts undoubtedly recognized that Thomas’ and Alito’s recusal decisions can leave a lot to be desired. He must have been thinking, though, that in the long run the American legal system is best served by the Supreme Court keeping recusal decisions entirely in-house and rejecting any efforts, however well-meaning, of the other branches to review them.
That understanding of the chief justice’s thinking fits neatly with the message sent by the toothless Code of Conduct that the Supreme Court, after much prodding, finally released last fall. It’s also of a piece with the various majority opinions that the chief justice has authored or joined that reject agencies’ interpretations of the federal statutes they are charged with administering. Time and again, those opinions implicitly suggest that the justices are so intellectually gifted that they need not give any particular deference to agencies’ special subject-matter expertise.
Of course, I can’t say for certain that my rendition of the chief justice’s thinking captures what he was actually thinking. I have little doubt, though, that it captures well the message that his refusal actually sent, and it was a message of extraordinary hubris.
There’s simply no basis for his apparent assumption that justices’ recusal decisions are somehow beyond the ken of anyone not sitting on the court. Yes, Supreme Court recusals are unique in some ways. Most importantly, if a justice recuses, no other judge can be designated to sit in their place. To imply, however, as Roberts’ refusal to meet with the Judiciary Committee seemed to do, that senators are somehow incapable of factoring that difference into their thinking when assessing Thomas’ and Alito’s recusal decisions is insulting and wrong.
Public confidence in the Supreme Court is a precious commodity much in need of restoration. Rather than squandering it further by demonstrations of hubris, Roberts should exercise his leadership in ways that model for the other justices and communicate to the public a healthy sense of humility.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.