The Supreme Court ethics mess is today’s Watergate. Let’s treat it that way.

Abe Fortas may have died in 1982, but the former Supreme Court justice and friend and political ally of Lyndon B. Johnson is having a moment in 2023, more than a half-century after the scandal that forced Fortas to retire from the high court.

It’s naïve to say that 1969 — a peak year for the Vietnam War, the SDS, and the Black Panthers — was a simpler time in America, but it is clear in hindsight that the era’s views around judicial ethics were more robust than the anything-goes vibe of today’s Supreme Court. Fortas, bolstered by his close ties to LBJ, was both a powerful advocate for expanding justice (especially to young people) and a power broker with friends in high places.

One of Fortas’ friends was the most notorious shady Wall Street trader of the 1960s, a man named Louis Wolfson. Shortly after joining the Supreme Court in 1965, at a time when Wolfson was under investigation, the financier’s foundation made an arrangement to pay Fortas a $20,000 yearly retainer. Months later, the justice realized this was a really bad idea and paid the money back — but when Life magazine exposed the dealings in 1969, the pressure on Fortas was enormous.

The new, hardball-playing Republican president, Richard Nixon, had no qualms about ordering the Justice Department to investigate Fortas. Perhaps more importantly, outgoing Chief Justice Earl Warren, a friend and liberal ally, urged Fortas to resign — which he did, just days after the Life article appeared. A Supreme Court justice’s early retirement due to scandal was unprecedented.

And apparently, it may never be repeated — even as ethics on the nation’s highest court plunges to unthinkable lows.

While $20,000 was a lot of money in 1969, that figure is dwarfed by the apparently seven-figure spending spree by a right-wing Texas billionaire, Harlan Crow, around the friendship he struck up with sitting Justice Clarence Thomas in the early 2000s. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Crow spent on private jet travel, yacht outings, and luxury accommodations from the Adirondacks to Indonesia for Thomas and his wife, Ginni, Crow bought from Thomas and fixed up the Georgia home where his mother still lives, and even paid the private school tuition for a relative Thomas was raising as guardian. Such dealings might be legal under the court’s murky ethical standards, but Thomas was required by law to disclose them. He did not.

Like the Fortas scandal, the Thomas-Crow affair was revealed by a news outlet, ProPublica. That’s where the similarities end. There’s no sign yet that the Justice Department, led by the notoriously milquetoast Attorney General Merrick Garland, is investigating Thomas’ seemingly open-and-shut violation of disclosure laws. Chief Justice John Roberts not only has not called on Thomas to resign, but he refuses to appear before Congress to explain things like why the Supreme Court — unlike the rest of the federal judiciary — lacks even a simple ethics code.

Is there any basic instinct to protect and preserve the integrity of the high court (what’s left of it, anyway), let alone any sense of shame among the nation’s most powerful? We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.

Meanwhile, in one sense, today’s ethics scandal at SCOTUS is beginning to remind me of another epic scandal from 50 years ago — the Watergate affair that took down Nixon and his henchmen — in that, we’re starting to see competing journalists coming out with new bombshells, sometimes more than one in a day.

In the matter of Thomas, one could argue that his lucrative Crow arrangements — as bad as those look — aren’t even as potentially scandalous as the web of intrigue around the justice, his wife, and her highly paid outside work. Despite revelations that Ginni Thomas was deeply involved in efforts to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 election that led up to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, her husband has not recused himself in related cases. Last week we learned that in 2012, Leonard Leo — dark-money maestro behind the right-wing takeover of the court — directed pollster Kellyanne Conway to pay Ginni Thomas $25,000 but disguise the check.

» READ MORE: The giant U.S. scandal we don’t talk about | Will Bunch Newsletter

That’s a horrible look, but what’s even worse is that the Supreme Court’s ethical rot runs far deeper than just Justice Thomas. We now know that a network of other conservative activists has been wining and dining justices at fancy restaurants and their luxury homes and that Justice Samuel Alito reportedly leaked a key pending decision to these wealthy benefactors. Upon joining the court, Justice Neil Gorsuch unloaded a Colorado property he co-owns to the head of a law firm that frequently appears before the court. We probably don’t know the full extent of allegations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh because his FBI vetting was so shoddy. And why doesn’t Chief Justice Roberts crack down on all of this? Could it be embarrassment over his wife’s lucrative outside work, earning more than $10 million as a kind of headhunter for law firms with cases before her husband’s bench? The idea that SCOTUS will police itself is hopelessly innocent.

But here’s where times have radically changed since Watergate and Abe Fortas: in the lame response to these disclosures. There’s no indication that the Justice Department is investigating the improprieties of Clarence and Ginni Thomas — not even his clear-cut violation of disclosure laws. Impeachment of Thomas — the founders’ prescribed remedy for judicial misconduct, and seemingly warranted — won’t happen in a Republican House determined to deny Biden an opportunity to replace a conservative jurist with a liberal one.

The Democratic-led Senate Judiciary Committee did hold a hearing last week on Supreme Court ethics, and while Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.), our leading critic of judicial corruption, brought the fire — “The justices have been playing out of bounds,” he declared — there was little heat, given GOP intransigence and the unwillingness of Thomas or Roberts to appear before Congress and testify in person.

Democrats, or anyone else who cares about American democracy, need to turn up the knobs, considerably. For one thing, lawmakers, journalists, and the broader public need to understand that these ethical breaches aren’t coincidental, but all connected to a bigger conspiracy: the right’s determination to control the court as a check on democracy and our fundamental rights. Conservative kingmakers like Crow or the Federalist Society’s Leo want to offer like-minded justices — who make $285,400 a year — a billionaire’s lifestyle. These rainmakers want to keep Thomas and his fellow justices from either retiring or drifting leftward by enveloping them in a bubble of unthinkable opulence and personal wealth, where the only voices they hear are the pro-business prattle of the billionaire chewing on steak next to them.

Staying inside that billionaire bubble is what insulates the court’s majority from the pressure of public opinion — and what gives them strength as they rule against the will of the people in robbing women of their reproductive rights or taking away government’s power to protect the air that you breathe. We’ll probably see it again if the court strikes down the backbone of the government’s power to regulate Big Business — the so-called Chevron doctrine — and maybe even if a disputed 2024 presidential election falls into its lap. As U.S. democracy increasingly falters, the buying of the Supreme Court isn’t some sidebar. It’s the lead story.

We don’t need polite hearings. We need people to be screaming bloody murder. There should be a stepped-up and concerted effort by a majority of Democrats — not just the handful we’ve seen so far — to issue bold pronouncements that Thomas must follow the trail blazed by Abe Fortas and resign. When he doesn’t, Democrats in the House majority should bring an impeachment resolution to the floor and force Republicans on the record defending Thomas’ corruption. Introduce legislation mandating a Supreme Court code of ethics and outlawing the corrupt practices currently on display, and when Republicans won’t enact that, make it the centerpiece of a political campaign for congressional control in 2024.

The threat of legislative reform — including the possibility of radical change, such as term limits or expanding the size of the court — needs to loom large. That pressure could force Roberts to at least take some steps to get his own house in order. A show of political strength could even force Thomas to resign, although I wouldn’t hold my breath. More likely, as happened after the Jan. 6 hearings, a bolder approach could convince Garland and his recalcitrant Justice Department to do their jobs. The current gridlock and dysfunction in Washington, D.C., is no excuse for a bemused shrug to the worst scandal in the high court’s 234-year history.

In a forceful response to Watergate and the corrupting of the executive branch under Nixon, the system worked ... for a brief time. If we don’t treat the ethical meltdown of our judicial branch with the same vigor, the system will fail ... for good.

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