Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) corrected NBC host Chuck Todd after he argued Congress does not have the power to regulate ethics rules for the Supreme Court.
"The work that we're doing on ethics in the court ought to be easy, and yet it's not; it's partisan also," Whitehouse said during a Meet the Press special program on the Supreme Court. "So I think that the first step is going to be for the judicial conference, the other judges, to put some constraints around the Supreme Court's behavior and treat the Supreme Court the way all other federal judges are treated, and that happens inside the judiciary."
"The Chief Justice has to make this decision, though, right?" Todd asked. "Separation of powers, whether, I mean, it's pretty established, Congress can't make a law that does that, right?"
Whitehouse informed the host he was mistaken about how the Constitution works.
"No, it absolutely can," Whitehouse laughed.
"Well, it doesn't mean it's constitutional," Todd quipped.
"Yes, it does," the senator explained. "It means it's constitutional because the laws that we're talking about right now are actually laws passed by Congress. The ethics reporting law that is at the heart of the Clarence Thomas ethics reporting scandal is a law passed by Congress."
"When Justice Thomas failed to recuse himself from the Jan. 6 investigation that turned up his wife's communications, he made the case that that was OK — he had no idea she was involved in insurrection activities," he continued. "The problem with the Supreme Court is that they're in a fact-free zone as well as an ethics-free zone."
