a threat to the appearance and reality of judicial integrity

[dajoki]

NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/opinion/20fri4.html?th&emc=th

Tripping Up on Trips: Judges Love Junkets as Much as Tom DeLay Does

By DOROTHY SAMUELS
Published: January 20, 2006

<<snip>>

I'm more perplexed than ever after reading all about Tom DeLay's outing in 2000 to the St. Andrews golf course in Scotland with Jack Abramoff, the former superlobbyist turned star witness in the sweeping public corruption inquiry now enveloping Mr. DeLay, the former House majority leader, and a still untold number of his Congressional colleagues. In addition to revealing the need to tighten Congressional gift and fund-raising rules, the episode has helped expose a tangle of other unethical transactions and has already robbed Mr. DeLay of his Capitol Hill clout. What was the Hammer thinking?

But it must be noted that Mr. DeLay's junket habit is something he has in common with the nation's judiciary, which he has criticized so many times for the wrong reasons. (Recall, for example, his threatening anti-judge screed in the aftermath of the Terri Schiavo case.) In 2000, the year of Mr. DeLay's lobbyist-financed St. Andrews trip, nearly 100 federal judges engaged in distressingly similar behavior. These judges attended all-expenses-paid private seminars for judges held at resorts offering excellent golf, tennis, skiing and spa services. The trips were underwritten by monied interests out to influence judges to rule in favor of corporate interests on issues like environmental protection and liability for harmful products.

Just as Mr. DeLay's Scotland trip with Mr. Abramoff was treated in official filings as privately sponsored "fact-finding," the judicial seminars are conducted under the innocuous-sounding banner of "judicial education." In reality, these slanted multiday sessions mock the ideal of an independent, impartial judiciary, and pose a threat to the appearance and reality of judicial integrity.

And it's not just judges from the lower federal courts who have deluded themselves into thinking that their trips will not undermine public trust. Just remember Justice Antonin Scalia's duck-hunting trip with Dick Cheney in 2004, shortly before the Supreme Court heard a big case of personal and political interest to the vice president. In September, Justice Scalia showed he'd learned little from the episode when he failed to attend the swearing-in of Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. because he was teaching a seminar for the Federalist Society at the exclusive Beaver Creek ski area in Colorado. Justice Scalia permitted the society, an influential conservative legal group, to promote the event to lawyers, some of whom may have matters before the Supreme Court now or in the near future, as "a rare opportunity to spend time, both socially and intellectually," with a justice. The pitch had all the dignity and subtlety of a capital fund-raiser for a senior Ways and Means Committee member.

[mom cat]

1. Junkets are for slime, especially junkets to golf courses and places to

kill tamed animals.