In recent weeks, Justice Clarence Thomas has been the target of liberal media over his vacationing with family friends. Now, attorney Jenna Ellis says the left-leaning Associated Press is giving itself some cover by going after Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Through numerous public records requests, the AP recently revealed that Justice Sotomayor's staff is pressuring schools and other venues where she is slated to speak into buying hundreds, sometimes thousands of the justice's books as a condition of her appearance.
"I think with respect to Sotomayor, the reason that the AP does that is so that they can look even-handed when they go after Justice Thomas, when you can't really compare apples to oranges in that way, in terms of the actual conduct," Ellis submits.
The demands are netting Sotomayor thousands of dollars a year in royalties that are not counted against the $30,000 limit on outside income. And Sotomayor can get away with this because there is no standard of ethics in place for the nation's highest court.
"Lack of accountability for Supreme Court justices, I think, is well placed, and this instance of Sotomayor is just one in a whole litany of things that lawyers and other judicial officers and other nonprofits even who are concerned about judicial integrity have pointed to," says Ellis.
Meanwhile, every other officer in the judicial branch has a code of conduct they must follow, but she expects the Supreme Court justices to remain exempt.
"The justices have no reason to say, 'Sure, we're going to submit ourselves voluntarily to this code of judicial conduct,'" Ellis says. Still, she thinks they should.
