Lawmakers urge action after report of other Supreme Court leak
WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said his panel is reviewing “serious allegations” in a report that a former antiabortion leader knew in advance the outcome of a 2014 Supreme Court case involving healthcare coverage of contraception.
The report Saturday in the New York Times followed the stunning leak earlier this year of a draft opinion in the case in which the high court overturned Roe vs. Wade, ending constitutional protections for abortion. That decision was written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who is also the author of the majority opinion in the 2014 case at the center of the new report.
In the New York Times story, the Rev. Rob Schenck said he learned the outcome of the Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby Stores case weeks before the decision was made public. In a 5-4 decision, Alito wrote that some companies with religious objections can avoid the contraceptives requirement in President Obama’s healthcare legislation.
Schenck, who previously headed the group Faith and Action, has said in other recent stories in Politico and Rolling Stone that he was part of a concerted effort to forge social and ministry relationships with conservative justices.
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In the New York Times story, Schenck said the information about the Hobby Lobby decision came from Gail Wright, a donor to his organization who was part of the outreach effort to the justices and who had dined with Alito and his wife. In an interview with the newspaper, Wright denied obtaining or sharing any information.
The New York Times also published a letter Schenck said he wrote Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in July alerting him to the alleged breach years ago. Schenck wrote that he thought the information might be relevant as part of a probe into the leak of the abortion decision.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement Saturday that the committee is “reviewing these serious allegations,” and he called on fellow members of Congress to pass a bill that would require the high court to adopt a code of ethics.
Two fellow Democrats, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia, who chair courts subcommittees, issued a statement calling the New York Times report “another black mark on the Supreme Court’s increasingly marred ethical record” and said they “intend to get to the bottom of these serious allegations.” They too urged passage of a code of ethics.
The newspaper’s story included an emphatic denial by Alito that he’d disclosed the outcome of the case. The court released Alito’s full statement to the Associated Press:
“The allegation that the Wrights were told the outcome of the decision in the Hobby Lobby case, or the authorship of the opinion of the Court, by me or my wife is completely false. My wife and I became acquainted with the Wrights some years ago because of their strong support for the Supreme Court Historical Society, and since then, we have had a casual and purely social relationship.
“I never detected any effort on the part of the Wrights to obtain confidential information or to influence anything that I did in either an official or private capacity, and I would have strongly objected if they had done so. I have no knowledge of any project that they allegedly undertook for ‘Faith and Action,’ ‘Faith and Liberty,’ or any similar group, and I would be shocked and offended if those allegations are true,” it said.
Schenck’s Faith and Action group became Faith & Liberty after becoming part of the Liberty Counsel in 2018.
Alito was appointed to the high court in 2006 by President George W. Bush.
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