Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said Friday on MSNBC’s “Katy Tur Reports” that Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito went “rogue” violating federal laws.
Tur said, “While Justice Alito has not commented on the Appeal to Heaven flag, his wife is the one who flew the upside-down flag in the Virginia home in the dispute with their neighbor. Joining us now, Rhode Island Senator and member of the Judiciary Committee, Sheldon Whitehouse, who, alongside Dick Durbin, sent a letter to Chief Justice Roberts requesting a meeting to ensure Justice Alito recuses himself from January 6th cases. Thank you for being with us. Do you expect that Justice Roberts, the chief justice, will meet with you?”
Whitehouse said, “We’ll see, we certainly hope so as the Chief Justice, he also serves as the chairman of the Judicial Conference, which is the administrative body that oversees the Judicial Branch. That body is a body established by Congress, and it enforces laws passed by Congress. So he’d be in a peculiar position if he were to say Congress can’t speak to the chairman of an agency it established about how the agency is implementing laws Congress has passed. So I think we’ll be able to get by that, and certainly hope so.”
He added, “I think he’s in a very difficult position, and I think he has let Justice Thomas, and Justice Alito, he’s cut them way too much slack, and they seem to have gone completely rogue. So what he has been doing hasn’t been working. And that’s one of the reasons we want to meet, to see what it is that the Judicial Conference and the chair of that conference, him, the Chief Justice can do about justices who have really gone rogue, are violating the rules of the Supreme Court very plainly, violating the ethics rules for all federal judges, violating federal laws. You just can’t put up with that. You wouldn’t put up with that in any agency, my God, how about the United States Supreme Court.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN