US supreme court: campaigners to call for formal investigations into alleged corruption – live | US supreme court

Martin Pengelly

Calls for structural reform seem to have as little chance of success as calls for justice Clarence Thomas to resign or be impeached – calls perhaps likely to increase after the publication by the Times on Sunday of an investigation of the justice’s membership of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, “a cluster of extraordinarily wealthy, largely conservative members who lionised him and all that he had achieved”.

Republicans control the House and trail Democrats by two seats in the Senate, all but ensuring a block on any such move. Furthermore, Joe Biden is against major reform, such as changing the size of the court or imposing term limits.

Speaking to the former Biden White House press secretary Jen Psaki, congressman Ro Khanna told MSNBC:

Voters know that the court is just out of touch with their lives, that the court is taking away their rights, taking away women’s rights to control their own body, taking away students’ relief in terms of the student loans. The president forgave the loans. The supreme court took that money away.

[Voters] see these justices, they see all the ethical conflicts, and they’re saying, ‘Enough with it. Let’s have a clean slate and term limits.’

I’ve said everything should be on the table, but … it’s not an easy thing to do. Often people see that it is polarising or partisan. I guess term limits is an easier first step … and a judicial code of conduct of ethics.

The Senate judiciary chair, Dick Durbin, has promised a vote on ethics reform. Any measure would be highly unlikely to pass the Republican House.

Chief justice urged to testify for ‘good of democracy’

Martin Pengelly

The chief justice should testify before Congress about ethics scandals besetting his supreme court “for the good of democracy”, a leading Californian progressive said.

The justices are “so cloistered, they’re so out of touch”, the congressman Ro Khanna told MSNBC on Sunday.

They don’t have a sense of what life is like, so my plea to him would be for the good of democracy come testify. What are you afraid of?

The Democratic-controlled Senate judiciary committee has requested that Roberts testify about reports regarding relations between justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch and rightwing donors or, in Gorsuch’s case, the chief of a prominent law firm involved in a property purchase.

Questions have also been raised about the career of Roberts’ wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, who, according to the New York Times, “has made millions recruiting lawyers to prominent law firms, some of which have business before the court”.

In April, turning down the invitation to testify before the Senate judiciary committee, John Roberts cited concerns about the separation of powers.

Good morning, US politics blog readers. A diverse coalition of more than 100 advocacy groups called United for Democracy, which banded together last month with the aim of moving the needle on supreme court reform, will send a letter to Congress today calling for formal hearings and investigations into alleged corruption in the court.

The group includes Democratic power players such as Planned Parenthood and MoveOn, plus prominent labor unions and grassroots organizations. In the letter, the group argues that recent “revelations about ethics and corruption at the court have undermined public trust and made a mockery of the idea that every American should be treated equally under the law.”

The letter does not make mention of specific names or revelations, but comes amid reports that conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito had accepted previously undisclosed gifts and trips from wealthy stakeholders whose business interests at times clashed with cases before the supreme court.

The Democratic-controlled Senate judiciary committee has requested that the chief justice, John Roberts, testify about reports regarding relations between justices Thomas, Alito and Neil Gorsuch and rightwing donors or, in Gorsuch’s case, the chief of a prominent law firm involved in a property purchase.

Public trust in the court is at all-time lows. The outcry unleashed over the justices’ ethics scandals, combined with the widespread anger over decisions on abortion, affirmative action, student debt relief and anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, has intensified calls to reform the supreme court.

Here’s what else we’re watching today:

• Joe Biden is in London where he has met with Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and King Charles III. Biden will then head to Vilnius, Lithuania, for a critical Nato meeting – where Russia’s war in Ukraine will top the agenda – and finish his trip with a stop in Finland.

• The Senate will meet this afternoon to resume consideration of the nomination of Xochitl Torres Small’s nomination for deputy agriculture secretary. They will vote at 5.30pm. The House is out.