House Democrats Call for Hearings on High Court Conflicts of Interest

Two top Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee called Friday for congressional hearings into “possible gaps in federal laws” that seem to allow U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to decide a case involving his duck-hunting partner, Vice President Dick Cheney.

Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the committee’s ranking Democrat, and Rep. Howard L. Berman of North Hollywood sent a letter to the Republican leadership saying that laws should be tightened to prevent apparent conflicts of interest when justices have relationships with people who have legal cases before the high court.

Specifically, they were referring to a trip in early January in which Scalia accompanied Cheney on Air Force Two to southern Louisiana to hunt ducks at a private camp owned by a local oil industry businessman.

The trip took place three weeks after the Supreme Court agreed to take up a case in which Cheney is trying to keep secret a list of energy officials whom he met with as part of the administration’s energy policy task force.

Scalia has told the Los Angeles Times that he doesn’t believe his impartiality in the case could reasonably be questioned.

Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has said that each justice must personally deem what conduct is appropriate.

“There appear to be inconsistent procedures for addressing judicial misconduct and recusal,” Conyers and Berman said in the letter to the committee’s Republican leaders, F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin, the chairman, and Lamar S. Smith of Texas, chairman of the panel’s subcommittee on the courts.

The Democrats added that “the recusal laws contain no process for potential conflicts to be reviewed by other judges.”

The request from the House members mirrors questions being raised by Democrats in the Senate, who also are concerned about the propriety of the hunting trip.