Sen. Amy Klobuchar called for “clear and enforceable” ethics rules for Supreme Court justices Sunday, as a new report found Justice Clarence Thomas has for years been claiming income from a real estate firm that no longer exists.
The Washington Post on Sunday reported that for the past two decades, Thomas has listed hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual income on financial disclosure forms from a Nebraska real estate firm started by his wife’s family, called Ginger, Ltd., Partnership.
But that company closed in 2006, the Post found, and a separate family firm was created in its place. But Thomas has not mentioned the newer firm, Ginger Holdings, LLC, in disclosures, the Post reported.
While the omission may be an administrative error, it raises more questions about Thomas’s financial transparency, following reports by ProPublica in recent weeks that he did not disclose years of major gifts from a conservative donor and that he sold property to that same donor, Harlan Crow, and did not disclose the sale.
In an interview Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Klobuchar called Thomas’s situation “serious.”
“When you have billionaires who are on boards with cases pending before the court, buying a justice’s mom’s home and renovating it, and then that justice doesn’t report it, this isn’t even an exception for personal friendships … This is a case where the law clearly says, you have to report these things,” the Minnesota Democrat said, according to an ABC transcript.
“It is time for ethics rules in the Supreme Court that are clear and enforceable,” she continued. “This should not be a double standard. Every federal judge in the country comes under these ethics rules. So, if they don’t do it, then the Congress should do it.”
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee last week asked U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to investigate Thomas’s actions, citing the “need to restore confidence in the Supreme Court’s ethical standards.”
