#Durbin: Justices hitting Supreme Court’s reputation with ‘wrecking ball’

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on Friday said the Supreme Court “is in a crisis of its own making” as justices “continue to take a wrecking ball” to the court’s reputation.

Durbin made the comments in a Friday statement criticizing Justice Samuel Alito’s decision not to recuse himself from a case involving an attorney with whom he has previously sat down for interviews.

“Justice Alito, of the originalist school of thinking that empty seats on an airplane don’t count as gifts, surprises no one by sitting on a case involving a lawyer who honored him with a puff piece in the Wall Street Journal,” Durbin said in a statement on Friday. “Why do these Justices continue to take a wrecking ball to the reputation of the highest court in the land?” 

“The Court is in a crisis of its own making, and Justice Alito and the rest of the Court should be doing everything in their power to regain public trust, not the opposite,” Durbin continued.

Attorney David Rivkin, who has sat down with Alito for two interviews, is representing the plaintiffs in a case before the court this term. Durbin previously demanded Alito’s recusal from the case in a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts after The Wall Street Journal published the interviews.

“Senator Durbin’s request for my recusal is presumably based on the theory that my vote in Moore will be affected in some way by the content of the articles that resulted from the interviews, but that theory fundamentally misunderstands the circumstances under which Supreme Court Justices must work,” Alito wrote in response.