The frauds at the Supreme Court have decided maybe congress was right and although we still completely disagree they have any authority over us we will make a tidy little code of ethics:
The Supreme Court on Monday adopted its first code of ethics, in the face of sustained criticism over undisclosed trips and gifts from wealthy benefactors to some justices, but the code lacks a means of enforcement.
The policy, agreed to by all nine justices, does not appear to impose any significant new requirements and leaves compliance entirely to each justice.
Indeed, the justices said they have long adhered to ethics standards and suggested that criticism of the court over ethics was the product of misunderstanding, rather than any missteps by the justices.
So it’s voluntary and lacks enforcement and up to scouts honor. It’s fucking insulting is what it is. They gotta be caught with gold bars- oh, wait, that wouldn’t matter, either, now, would it?
Back to Game of Thrones-rewatching has been as much fun the first time through, and in some ways better.
BellyCat
Fuck these assholes.
Adam L Silverman
Villago Delenda Est
And as of this writing Thomas has already broken it.
prostratedragon
“misunderstanding”
Cherce!
piratedan
and any resemblences to Justices past or present is purely coincidental….
Odie Hugh Manatee
You’re right John, it’s a fucking insult and it’s an intended one IMO. That they have the balls to say that this would dispel the “misunderstanding” that the court has no ethic code is just pure bullshit. Just like the police policing the police, this is completely worthless and self-serving.
The Sleazy Six on the court need to quit their day job and become comedians because while they suck at comedy they are better at that than as ethical jurists.
Anoniminous
America’s Great National Pastime
SiubhanDuinne
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Exactly. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Alison Rose
This Vox video is super interesting and well-produced:
And the guy who produced/narrates it is named Adam Cole, so maybe he’s your long-lost cousin.
This is on-topic because I would like to submit the conservative Justices to the crushing force of gravity inside planets and stars.
danielx
Misunderstanding….is such a flexible word.
Rose Weiss
@Alison Rose: “This is on-topic because I would like to submit the conservative Justices to the crushing force of gravity inside planets and stars.”
Gave me a good laugh in its truthfulness! Yeah, pretty much every working person has a code of conduct they have to follow. As a hospital nurse, I had many rules to be constantly mindful about. Apparently the Supremes feel they don’t need to be mindful of anything.
dmsilev
@Alison Rose:
I have a colleague who works in this area. His lab equipment includes a cannon. Because, if you can take data Really Quickly, shooting a very dense projectile at a target is a great way of reaching pressures beyond what you can get to using slightly less violent approaches like ‘squeeze between the poles of two diamonds’.
I work with the latter approach, though not on the ‘simulate Earth’s core’ project. I tend to care more about cooling things down to near absolute zero and then squeezing them to generate Weird Quantum Stuff.
SomeRandomGuy
I saw one article that quoted one of the muckety-judges saying “We’re the supreme court; there is no higher authority to impose an ethics code on us.”
So: yes, this is a middle finger to us. And the thing is, it’s not true that they can’t be held to an ethical standard. It’s just, they have to hold themselves to it. They have to have at least that much honor; a Clarence Thomas should have resigned long ago, and that he didn’t proves that there’s no honor on the court. (Obviously, I do not mean to impugn each and every member of the court – but the court, as a whole, has no honor, and I suspect it’s by a 6-3 margin.)
TriassicSands
Clearly, Alison Rose, you are biased and cannot be trusted with disciplining the justices. I, on the other hand, am not biased, so if given the necessary authority and budget, I will launch them into sun. Denied the funding, I guess I’ll have to resort to a wood chipper.
The lack of enforcement makes the “code” a joke. Thomas still gets to decide if he needs to recuse himself. Yeah, we can trust Clarence, since this is supposedly the code they’ve all been adhering to, and Thomas has done such a great job!
Note: I don’t really want to cause them physical harm. I’d much rather they spend their remaining days in prison.
Alison Rose
@TriassicSands: I mean…I’d like to cause them a little physical harm. Nothing fatal. Just like…every single day, they each step on a minimum of five Legos while barefoot. Hit their funny bones while holding a hot cup of coffee. Get those really violent hiccups once a week for about an hour.
Other MJS
L’éthique, c’est moi.
Another Scott
The SCOTUS can never be wrong, except occasionally for examples 100 years previous, therefore they can never be wrong now. Therefore, who needs enforcement? Just letting the masses know that they were misinterpreting things is obviously all that’s needed.
Obviously.
(groucho-roll-eyes.gif)
Fight for 15!!
Meanwhile, … TheHill.com:
[ womp, womp ]
It would be funny if the bomb-throwers take out Johnson too because he didn’t wave his magic wand and cut the non-defense budget by 30% as they demand. Rand is apparently scheming how he can threaten to delay passage in the Senate again, unless he gets the attention he craves, also too.
Buckle up. [/7veritas4]
Cheers,
Scott.
BlueGuitarist
The new bogus Scotus rules include some argle bargle about justices at legislative hearings that will turn out to mean that they can’t answer any questions from Democratic Senators, plus a green light for Federalist society events. Corrupt Republican partisan hacks. Fight for 15.
BlueGuitarist
@Another Scott:
gmta
dmsilev
@Alison Rose:
I hate to say it, but this statement from the vid description lies somewhere between ‘hyperbole’ and ‘utter bullshit’. The sort of effects shown in the video, pressure-induced structural phase transitions and metal-insulator transitions and the like, are well-understood in the abstract. The actuality is more complex, hence the need to actually ..do the experiments, but the basic framework we know. If you want real ‘break the laws of physics as we know them’, you have to go far beyond where the video stopped, to the cores of neutron stars and into black holes, places where not only atoms but subatomic particles and eventually (we think) space itself breaks. The problem is, that’s also far far beyond what we can make in any lab, laser, or particle accelerator, so it’s a bit harder to showcase in a video.
Raoul Paste
@Alison Rose: And that’s how Tony Stark created a new element.
Alison Rose
@dmsilev: Well, you’re no fun.
I mean…the video involves scientists who are actually doing this work, so calling it utter bullshit seems a bit much.
dmsilev
@Alison Rose: No, the work is fine. It’s the videographer or the writer who is overhyping it that I’m saying is spewing bullshit.
And, just to be clear, I work in this field. In statics, using diamond cells, not transient experiments with Big Lasers, but close enough that I really do have very specific expertise here.
Another Scott
@dmsilev: @Alison Rose:
Yeah, the text blurb under the video took me aback too. There’s a big difference between a scientist saying they don’t fully understand something and saying it “defies the laws of physics”.
Artistic license, but… :-/
We understand a lot about pressures inside the Sun. It was worked out in the early 1950s with the H-bomb work after all…
Cheers,
Scott.
Misterpuff
@SomeRandomGuy: This is where after falling back under the spell of Star Trek and its internet reach, I suggest that this would be a great place for a Gowron meme.*
The SCOTUS Six have no Honor!
*Have no skillz in this area.
Alison Rose
@Another Scott: Well, to my viewing, some of the things they describe as happening at those depths/pressures DO defy how physics generally function on the Earth’s surface. I didn’t take them to mean like, humans are able to swallow their own faces and see through their buttholes or something. Like, the thing about at a certain depth, the water is compressed into a solid but not the same thing as frozen water on the surface. The astrophysicists they interviewed said “In many ways, this is really a new field” and “we don’t fully know the rules yet”. And the video is explaining what that means in practice and the kinds of things they would be looking at.
Jay
@Another Scott:
so basically, you are saying that we don’t need to fire them into the sun,
we just need to get them into the middle of the core of an Hbomb, with out compromising the core?
Trivia Man
Apparently they included some very specific language so that Roberts’ wife doesn’t have to give up her high 6 figure income working for a firm that has frequent business before the SC. They just have to pinky swear that none of the dollars SHE is paid came from those specific cases.
wink wink
dmsilev
@Alison Rose: My point is that this isn’t new. We’ve known about different structures of ice under pressure for a long time; Kurt Vonnegut was joking about it when he wrote Cat’s Cradle sixty years ago. As techniques have improved over the years, we can push to higher pressures and see multiple structures. Similarly, we’ve gotten good at predicting from first principles (see, for example, this Wiki article). Today, one can plug in a set of atoms and a temperature and pressure into a (big) computer and get a decent set of predictions about what the structure will be. The predictions are often wrong in detail and sometimes dramatically off, which is why people go to a lot of effort to actually do the experiments, but if it was a regime where ‘the laws of physics have broken down’, even crude predictions wouldn’t be possible. To take one example from the video, the idea of metallic hydrogen at core-of-Jupiter conditions was initially predicted by theoretical calculations. Lots of effort has gone into trying to make the stuff in a lab environment.If we thought that physics-as-we-know-it didn’t work at those pressures, what would be the point of spending all that effort to validate a nonsense prediction?
Yes, the conditions at the core of the planet are very different from here on the surface, but that’s a very very different thing from saying that the laws of physics are breaking down under those conditions. The latter is just wrong.
sukabi
do the footnotes contain this disclaimer:
* LOL just joking, we’ll do what we fucking please, and you can’t stop us!
Yutsano
I think Congress should call their bluff. Take the code, cut out the personal exemptions, add in sanctions for violation of the code, pass it into law, e presto!
Poe Larity
You keep using that word, Clarence. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Ealbert
I made this suggestion before, but like this comment, it was late at night and so was probably missed. Since we can’t enforce any ethics rules on the Supreme Court, I think the best solution is to work at it from the other side. Make it illegal for ANYONE to give ANYTHING to a Supreme Court justice. Maybe even provide them the equivalent of Camp David for their use and provide them with housing so they don’t have any excuse to accept anything from these billionaires.
RaflW
An early version of the WaPo story called it an Ethics Statement (IIRC), which I thought was more accurate: it says what the ethics should be, but lacks the trappings of “rules”.
TriassicSands
@Alison Rose:
Oh, I understand. What they deserve is the center of the sun or to be dropped on Jupiter.
If I could trade any level of pain for them with removing them from the bench and humiliation, I’d almost prefer that. Instead of stepping on Legos with bare feet, how about having people spit on them or in their direction every time they come out in public?
Honestly, if there were a way to make them simply disappear — Poof — I’d go for that.
TriassicSands
@Yutsano:
Yep! At the very least.
cain
Huge kudos to ProPublica for their coverage of all this. They show what an important role the press has to play in our democracy.
dirge
If the videographer is saying “physics as we know it”, I’m inclined to grant some slack, both because I’m just generous like that, and because by “we”, he probably means himself and most of his audience, who are generally familiar with Newtonian mechanics and vaguely aware that relativity and quantum mechanics are out there. So this is quite literally not physics as they know it.
By “we”, I think you mean yourself, your colleagues, and if I’m feeling ambitious, perhaps me, who don’t find much of this particularly surprising. But why would we expect a videographer to mean us when he says “we”?
TriassicSands
@Trivia Man:
Well, we certainly wouldn’t want to cut into the pay and wealth of the Chief Justice and his wife. After all, he is a members of the Supreme Court with a Chief Justice’s paltry salary. It is important for the Justices to be wealthy enough that they can no longer remember, if they ever knew, how the riff raff lives.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Alison Rose: Point of order: there are six “conservative” members of the Court. There are only three Justices (Justice Kagan, Justice Sotomayor, and Justice Jackson). The other six have forfeited the honorific.
Sister Golden Bear
@RaflW:
“The code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules.”
Dangerman
I am SO trying that with my Boss.
Thurgood Marshall is spinning so fast he could light up a small city over these arrogant, limp dick, pricks.
BellyCat
Judicial Omertà, plain and simple.
While grateful for the three sane justices, without a dissenting opinion from them supporting codification of ethics RULES, they are tacitly supporting the illusion that judges are above all.
Nobody shall guard the guards, other than the guards themselves. Or more accurately in this case, each guard guards themself.
JFC…
lowtechcyclist
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, LOLOLOLOLOLOL.
Fight for freakin’ 15.
lowtechcyclist
@Dangerman:
We should dig up Abe Fortas’ body to see if his head exploded.
Princess
@BellyCat: they’re not tacitly supporting it. They are supporting it. “Our” three are supporting a toothless figleaf.
BellyCat
@Princess: Agreed on your correction. Nothing tacit about it. Willful blindness is on full display by ALL nine for something something reasons.
Wilson Heath
All of the decisions of the Court defining down bribery and corruption really make sense in the rear view mirror. “If Bob McDonald can go to jail for just that . . .” is their version of “Oh, so now it’s illegal to rent a van and buy fertilizer.”
Sis
I knew before I even checked that there would be no enforcement mechanism. Sigh.
captain toast
I can’t enjoy a GOT rewind because of the enormous plot holes. I’m supposed to believe that the north can’t access the south except over one bridge? And no one knows how to build a bridge? So much for Caesar crossing the Rubicon.
linnen
I take it that “Fight for 15′ is to expand the current Supreme Court, yes? Fine and dandy.
Now what is the plan for ethics and the enforcement for this expanded court? Another expansion?
Matt McIrvin
@dmsilev: Such is the nature of pop-science hype.
The one that always bugs me is when they report baffling and shocking results concerning fundamentals of quantum mechanics. If you read it in detail, the results are always “the system behaved exactly like quantum mechanics predicts, and we think that’s weird”.
Comrade Misfit
That code is a fucking joke. It is less enforceable than the Boy Scout Law. It is nothing more than pablum for the gullible.