Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said Friday on MSNBC’s “Katie Tarr Report” that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito had violated federal law “lawlessly.”
Tur said, “Justice Alito has not commented on the ‘flag that calls to heaven,’ but it was his wife who flew the flag upside down at their Virginia home in a dispute with a neighbor. I’m now joined by Rhode Island Senator and Judiciary Committee member Sheldon Whitehouse, who, along with Dick Durbin, has sent a letter to Chief Justice Roberts requesting a meeting with him to ask that Justice Alito recuse himself from the January 6th proceedings. Thank you for joining us. Will Chief Justice Roberts meet with you?”
Whitehouse said, “We’ll see what happens. As Chief Justice, I hope that’s the case. He also serves as the chairman of the Judicial Conference, which is the executive branch that oversees the judiciary. It was established by Congress to enforce the laws that Congress passed. So it would put him in a strange position to say to the chairman of an agency that Congress itself established that he can’t talk about how the agency is implementing the laws that Congress passed. So I think, and I hope, we can get through it.”
He added, “I think he’s in a very difficult position. He’s been so lenient with Justices Thomas and Alito that they appear to be completely arbitrary. So, he’s not doing a good job. That’s one of the reasons we want to meet, to see what the Judicial Conference and he, the chairman of that conference, the Chief Justice, can do about these judges who are really arbitrary. They’re clearly violating the rules of the Supreme Court, they’re violating the ethics code for all federal judges, they’re violating federal law. I can’t stand that. I can’t stand that in any institution. What about the United States Supreme Court?”
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