Justice Alito had told the newspaper that Congress has no authority to regulate the Supreme Court.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) has raised questions about Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s interview with The Wall Street Journal last year, calling it “improper.”
The comment came as congressional Democrats pressed Justice Alito to recuse himself in two pending Trump-related election subversion cases the justices are currently deliberating. One concerns whether former President Donald Trump enjoys presidential immunity for actions taken to dispute the 2020 presidential election; the other concerns whether an accounting reform law may be used to prosecute people who allegedly participated in the security breach at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, during lawmakers’ efforts to certify election results.
In the interview published on July 28, 2023, Justice Alito said, “No provision in the Constitution gives [Congress] the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period.” The conversation took place as the newspaper gave the justice a chance to respond to a then-unpublished ProPublica report that a Republican donor had paid for his fishing trip to Alaska.
In a June 7 letter to Justice Alito that the senator made public on June 10, Mr. Whitehouse wrote that the Supreme Court “is the only place in all of government where issues of this nature have no place or means of investigation or resolution.”
“So far, my questions … seem to have disappeared into a black hole of indifference,” he wrote
The senator wrote that during his confirmation hearing, Justice Alito said it would be “improper” and a “disservice to the judicial process” for a Supreme Court nominee to comment about issues that might come before the court.
However, in the newspaper interview, Justice Alito offered his opinion on “questions related to Congress’s authority over judicial, and more specifically Supreme Court, ethics concerns,” and “offered an improper opinion regarding a question that might come before the Court,” Mr. Whitehouse wrote.
The Senate Judiciary Committee “is undertaking investigative work into the facts about right-wing billionaires funding certain Supreme Court justices’ lifestyles,” he added.
