Another U.S. Supreme Court scandal is brewing in the wake of alleged corruption involving nearly every conservative member of the current Roberts Court, or their spouse.
The wife of Justice Samuel Alito leased a 160-acre Oklahoma property to an oil and gas firm while her husband wrote the recent majority opinion greatly restricting the work the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is allowed to do. Should that land produce oil and gas, Martha Ann Bomgardner Alito would earn just under a quarter of all revenue from that property, The Intercept reports.
“Last year, before the lease was activated, a line in Alito’s financial disclosures labeled ‘mineral interests’ was valued between $100,001 and $250,000. If extraction on the plot proves fruitful, the lease dictates that Citizen Energy will pay Alito’s wife 3/16ths of all the money it makes from oil and gas sales,” according to The Intercept. “Because Citizen Energy III isn’t implicated in any cases before the Supreme Court, Alito’s holding in Oklahoma doesn’t appear to pose any direct conflicts of interest. But it does add context to a political outlook that has alarmed environmentalists since Alito’s confirmation hearing in 2006 — and cast recent decisions that embolden the oil and gas industry in a damning light.”
It also poses ethics concerns.
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“’There need not be a specific case involving the drilling rights associated with a specific plot of land for Alito to understand what outcomes in environmental cases would buttress his family’s net wealth,’ Jeff Hauser, founder and director of the Revolving Door Project, told The Intercept,” the news outlet’s Daniel Boguslaw reports. The Revolving Door Project says it “scrutinizes executive branch appointees to ensure they use their office to serve the broad public interest, rather than to entrench corporate power or seek personal advancement.”
Hauser added, “Alito does not have to come across like a drunken Paul Thomas Anderson character gleefully confessing to drinking our collective milkshakes in order to be a real life, run-of-the-mill political villain.”
His remarks did not end there.
On Twitter, Hauser wrote: “Sam Alito could choose to be invested solely in vanilla Vanguard or Fidelity investment funds. Instead, he and his wife cultivate conflicts of interest because he believes that he and his pals ARE the law. The latest? The Alitos are into natural gas production.”
This latest look at the financial dealings of the conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court follows numerous reports, including decades of undisclosed luxury vacations gifted to Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni Thomas by a conservative billionaire megadonor, along with a generous real estate transaction for his mother’s home and an education for the couple’s grandnephew. Then there was Justice Samuel Alito taking an undisclosed Alaska vacation with a conservative billionaire who repeatedly had business before the court, and a free trip to Rome where he delivered a secret speech days after writing the majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. Justice Amy Coney Barrett having ties to the leader of the group that funded Alito’s Rome trip, including selling her personal home to “a recently hired Notre Dame professor who was assuming a leadership role” at that organization. Justice Neil Gorsuch selling land to the head of a law firm with cases before the Court, while not disclosing his name. And Chief Justice John Roberts’ wife making millions by placing attorneys into high-powered law firms that routinely have business before the Supreme Court.
Political and legislative strategist Murshed Zaheed, a senior advisor to Take Back The Court, responded to The Intercept’s report via Twitter, saying: “There appears to be no limit to the culture of corruption from the extreme right wing judges on the #SCOTUS. This is not sustainable if we want to have a functioning democracy. #expandSCOTUS.”