OPINION: ‘The calls are coming from inside the house’ in U.S. Supreme Court

A curious feature — perhaps stunning is a better word — of the modern conservative movement is its wholesale embrace of actions that damage democracy while proclaiming loudly that the behavior is really about preserving democracy.

Cognitive dissonance usually creates genuine mental discomfort as one becomes aware that an action or belief is inconsistent with demonstrated facts. As the social psychologist Daniel R. Stalder writes in Psychology Today, most of us are motivated to reduce the resulting discomfort because few relish being labeled a hypocrite or being caught in an obvious mistake.

It’s an unpleasant sensation, Stalder says, “or it’s supposed to be unpleasant.” Yet, he asks, “How do so many politicians fall prey to it and then manage to handle it without coming clean?”

Good question.

Therefore, let us consider the U.S. Supreme Court. A vast cascade of reporting over many weeks has underscored one of the greatest threats to American democracy — even considering a seditious former president — in our lifetimes: the rotting personal corruption that is destroying the credibility of the court.

When Pro Publica reported in April that Justice Clarence Thomas had, for more than two decades, accepted luxury trips and other gifts from Harlan Crow, a Dallas businessman with broad interests in conservative politics and jurisprudence, and had failed to disclose the gifts as the law demands, a normal reaction from normal politicians would have been shock, followed by demands for a change in Thomas’ behavior.

Just to remind you, as Pro Publica reported: Thomas “has vacationed on Crow’s super yacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.

“The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.”

It was subsequently reported that Crow purchased real estate from Thomas, fixed it up and allowed the justice’s mother to continue to live in the property. Crow also paid tuition at a private school — $6,000 a month — for a young man Thomas was raising. None of this was disclosed, as a post-Watergate statute requires.

“The most reasonable interpretation of the statute is that this was a gift to Thomas and thus had to be reported. It’s common sense,” Kathleen Clark, an ethics law expert at Washington University in St. Louis, told Pro Publica. “It’s all to the financial benefit of Clarence Thomas.”

There have since been similar stories about the expensive freebies Justice Samuel Alito received from rich conservatives, including a salmon-fishing trip in Alaska funded by a billionaire. The snarkiest member of the court was entertained at a $1,000-a-day fishing lodge and was flown there in a private jet that would have cost Alito $100,000 to charter.

Alito discounted the significance of the gifts even though his benefactor had a case before the Supreme Court. The leather seat occupied by the justice’s backside, Alito said, “​​would have otherwise been vacant” if he hadn’t, clearly in the line of duty, volunteered to fill it.

Literally no other federal employee would be permitted to benefit from such private largess, but those rules don’t apply to the nine members of the supreme tribunal.

And it’s not just the court’s conservatives who wallow through this ethical swamp. The Associated Press reported recently that liberal Justice Sonja Sotomayor had her staff pressure “public institutions that have hosted the justice to buy her memoir or children’s books, works that have earned her at least $3.7 million since she joined the court in 2009.”

That is a practice clearly off limits anywhere else in the federal government.

But back to the cognitive dissonance. Democratic lawmakers have called for what most sensible people would call for: reform of these gift and disclosure practices. Some insist the Supreme Court shouldn’t be unique in our system in lacking a formal ethics policy. Many experts in legal ethics insist that the court should simply start the reform by actually following laws already on the books.

Yet, Chief Justice John Roberts refused to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee at the request of Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., to answer questions about the court’s behavior. And Roberts clearly indicates he’s not going to lead his court in a new direction, apparently because he knows he can continue to thumb his nose at such corruption glaring in plain sight.

Since absolutely everything in our crazy political system is reduced to rank partisanship, no Republican challenges Roberts. And, of course, Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, who has made it his life’s work to pack the court with conservative ideologues, enters the fray with the Sgt. Schultz defense — “I see nothing, nothing.”

Nothing wrong with court ethics, says Sgt. McConnell; it’s all partisan politics.

“Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee,” McConnell wrote in the Washington Post, “are trying to tell a coequal branch of government how to manage its internal operations, ostensibly to clean up its ‘ethics.’ ”

Or, maybe some are worried that the ethical rot has so undermined public confidence in the court as to create a crisis.

In the same piece, McConnell argues that his activist court — the one that rolled over a 50-year-old precedent to reverse Roe v. Wade, ended affirmative action and did much to gut the Voting Rights Act — is really just a benign collection of elite lawyers with no agenda.

“When Democrats complain about a crisis at the court, the crisis they see is its refusal to reliably advance their party’s priorities,” wrote the man who used his raw political power to deny a Democratic president a vote on his nominee to the court.

Your cognitive dissonance is showing, senator.

You simply don’t defend democracy by ignoring actions that trample on common sense and by acting like nothing is wrong. Supreme Court justices — any judge — shouldn’t be taking expensive gifts from people who have a motive to influence the law. Period. It shouldn’t be a controversial issue.

You don’t defend democracy (which, by the way, is under rather sustained attack across the globe — the conservative government in Israel is trying to neuter the high court there, as just one example) by denigrating the norms and abandoning honorable, ethical behavior.

You don’t defend democracy by refusing to counter bogus claims of stolen elections or phony claims of “witch hunts” by a corrupt FBI or Justice Department.

You defend democracy by becoming uncomfortable with your own cognitive dissonance, particularly when that requires calling out your own side.

Johnson served as press secretary and chief of staff to the late former Idaho Gov. Cecil D. Andrus. He lives in Manzanita, Ore.