The Supreme Court formally adopted a new code of conduct on Monday. This comes after allegations of ethics lapses, aimed mostly at conservative justices.

The court announced that a 14-page document includes five canons of conduct on issues such as when justices should recuse themselves and what kind of outside activities they can participate in.

“The undersigned justices are promulgating this Code of Conduct to set out succinctly and gather in one place the ethics rules and principles that guide the conduct of the Members of the Court,” the justices said in an attached statement. All nine justices signed the statement.

The rules are mostly the same as they have always been but now they are in published form. The lack of a published code of conduct “has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the justices of this court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.” In other words, during the Biden administration, partisan Senate Democrats have been on a witch hunt against Justice Clarence Thomas, hoping to remove him from the Supreme Court and replace him with another Biden identity box checker. The problem is that the grousing against conservative justices like Clarence Thomas always results in going nowhere. That’s because Thomas and the others follow the rules.

Funny how Democrats weren’t so interested in codes of conduct and ethics violations before the court had a conservative-leaning majority. The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, who is often outspoken against conservative justices, says the code of conduct document is a start. It’s not enough, of course, because anything short of Thomas being removed from the court will not be enough.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who chairs the committee, said the Supreme Court’s actions were “important steps but they fall short of what we could and should expect,” including by leaving too many decisions up to individual justices.

“For now, I will note that the court’s adoption of this code marks a step in the right direction,” he added.

Others complained about a lack of information on how the code of conduct is to be enforced.

The new rules say nothing about how complaints about ethics lapses would be enforced, an omission that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., seized upon.

“This is a long-overdue step by the justices, but a code of ethics is not binding unless there is a mechanism to investigate possible violations and enforce the rules,” he said.

What he called the “honor system” of individual justices handling ethics issues has not worked, Whitehouse added.

Gabe Roth, executive director of ethics watchdog Fix the Court, had similar complaints.

“If the nine are going to release an ethics code with no enforcement mechanism and remain the only police of the nine, then how can the public trust they’re going to do anything more than simply cover for one another, ethics be damned” he said in a statement.

The ultimate goal of the Democrats is to stack the court by expanding it from 9 justices to 13. Democrats introduced such legislation in 2021 to do that. They were unsuccessful but their fever dream lives on in the progressive wing of the party.

The most recent kerfuffles against conservative justices happened in April and in June 2023. In April, Clarence Thomas was the subject of an article by ProPublica. It said that he had taken trips paid for by Harlan Crow, a Republican billionaire in Texas. Thomas did not disclose the trips. He wasn’t required to do so and there was no conflict of interest found. The same happened in June with Justice Samuel Alito. He didn’t report a trip to Alaska in 2008. Yep – a single trip in 2008. Again, no ethics violation was found.

The Senate Judiciary Committee isn’t finished with Mr. Crow, though. It was scheduled to vote on issuing a subpoena for Crow and for conservative lawyer Leonard Leo last week but that vote was abruptly postponed. Democrats said that Republicans on the panel filed dozens of amendments on the eve of the vote so there was not time to vote on issuing the subpoenas.

So, now there is a written code of conduct that has been published as a document. As I said, Democrats aren’t completely happy and won’t be until the court goes back to a progressive majority but it’s a start.