Senate Republicans clashed Wednesday with a federal judge who voiced concerns about the transparency of a 2011 ethics review of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas during a judiciary subcommittee hearing.
Sen. John Kennedy , the subcommittee’s top Republican, slammed the hearing as being part of a “perpetual political carousel” that makes him “want to gag” and questioned Judge Mark L. Wolf’s credibility as a witness.
“For the last dozen years, a lone federal judge, who is with us today, has been obsessed with complaining that the judicial conference got it wrong,” Kennedy said in his opening remarks. “Judge Wolf wasn’t getting his way from the head of the judicial conference or from Chief Justice Roberts himself.”
Several Democrats, including Sen. Richard J. Durbin , chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee who sat in for Wednesday’s hearing, came to Wolf’s defense, arguing that the hearing is not a “witch hunt” but an attempt to “rescue the reputation of the court.”Sen.
Wolf took issue with the transparency of the review. “The manner in which the Judicial Conference has interpreted and implemented the Financial Disclosure statutes has been shrouded in secrecy,” Wolf wrote in his opening statement. Wednesday’s hearing is Whitehouse’s latest attempt to examine the inner workings of the federal courts’s policymaking body following new revelations about the high court’s longest-serving justice. “Congress has a role in making sure that our courts are administering federal ethics fairly and as intended. If they aren’t, we need a robust record of what has gone wrong and what new laws might be needed to fix it,” Whitehouse said in his opening remarks.
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