The fact remains that even if Alito and Thomas were not compromised in 12 different ways, the six-justice supermajority would continue to strip away voting rights, environmental protections, agency authority and the congressional authority to grant it, and reproductive freedoms and the rest of the trappings of modern governance. Witness the ways in which the supermajority votes even knowing Alito and Thomas are committing ethics violations: The fact that they know and don’t care amply illustrates that ethics are not the problem, the hard-right supermajority is. Those who are angriest at Martha-Ann Alito’s religious zealotry as expressed at last week’s Supreme Court Historical Society dinner should understand that not a word captured there comes close to the language in her husband’s Obergefell dissent, and that language pales in comparison to his touchdown-dance remarks in Rome after he overturned Roe. Instead of raging that the justices have stopped behaving like impartial oracles, we should acknowledge that they never were, and that the only fix to that problem transcends ethics reform, and looks to a massive course-correction that would return the judicial branch back to coequal size.
