The brouhaha over Justice Sonia Sotomayor using Supreme Court staffers to flog her books certainly throws a spanner into the liberal campaign to discredit the Supreme Court. The episode spotlights how the liberals’ new tactic — impugning the ethics of the individual justices — can be used against the left just as easily as the right. It reminds us all why the Framers insulated the high court from interference by the other branches.

The break from the whinging of left-leaning organs like ProPublica against conservative justices comes from the AP. It just issued a report on how Justice Sotomayor has “benefited,” to the tune of some $3.7 million, “from schools’ purchases of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of the books she has written over the years.” It alleges that her “staff has often prodded public institutions” hosting the justice to buy the books.

The report, the AP says, is based on “more than 100 open records requests to public institutions” and “tens of thousands of pages of documents.” One such cable from a Sotomayor aide to a public library noted that for “an event with 1,000 people” who “have to have a copy” of “Just Ask” to “get into the line, 250 books is definitely not enough.” It adds that “people will be upset if they are unable to get in line because the book required is sold out.”

No doubt some see the sales hustle as unseemly. We admire the capitalistic fervor shown by the left-leaning justice, even if an ex-federal judge, Michael Luttig, sees in such “promotional efforts” a risk of “damaging the Supreme Court’s public standing further.” It’s “one of the most basic tenets of ethics laws that protects taxpayer dollars from misuse,” Campaign Legal Center’s Kedric Payne says. 

The AP notes that Justice Sotomayor isn’t the only member of the Nine to benefit from selling books.  One editor at MSNBC, Zeeshan Aleem, says the justice’s hard sell exposes the court’s lack of “guardrails against exploitation of power.” One of the most hysterical court critics, Senator Whitehouse of Rhode Island, sees it as “yet another sign of why the Supreme Court needs a major cleanup.”

The AP laments that the high court “does not have a formal code of conduct, leaving the nine justices to largely write and enforce their own rules.” Yet the Supreme Court told the AP that its own “ethical guidance” says “a judge may sign copies of his or her work, which may also be available for sale” provided attendees aren’t “required to purchase books in order to attend.” In that respect, Justice Sotomayor appears to be completely in the clear. 

The AP’s effort to embarrass Justice Sotomayor, following the liberal push to palm off on our noble public the idea that our conservative justices are crooks, marks an escalation in the campaign to overturn Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, restore Roe v. Wade, and crimp the independence of the high court. We know this because, as we’ve often noted, the Supreme Court already has a code of ethics — the United States Constitution.

That Constitution permits the justices to serve only during good behavior. Congress can remove them any time it wants through impeachment, though Congress has the lowest approval rating of any branch of government — half that of the high court. No wonder the chief justice insists the court is committed “to the highest standards of conduct” and can handle this “consistent with our status as an independent branch of government.”