There really are not a whole bunch of formal rules for a sitting Supreme Court justice.
They are famously exempt from the ethics regulations that apply to other Federal judges.
That being said, there are a number of customs that have always been scrupulously observed.
One of them is not to make statements that appear to prejudge something that might come come before the court.
Well, Fat Tony just pissed on that one, and went one further, and made public statements on a case that is currently being decided by the court:
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told university students that key provisions of the Voting Rights Act had evolved from an emergency response to racial discrimination in 1965 to an “embedded” form of “racial preferment” that would likely continue indefinitely unless the court acts to end them.
Justice Scalia, speaking Monday night at the University of California Washington Center, elaborated on remarks he made in February during Supreme Court arguments over the act’s Section 5, which requires states and localities that historically discriminated against minority voters to obtain federal approval to change election procedures.
Section 5 functions as a racial entitlement because the federal government doesn’t take a similar interest in protecting the voting rights of white people from racial discrimination, Justice Scalia said.
Congress repeatedly has reauthorized the Voting Rights Act, most recently in 2006, when President George W. Bush signed a 25-year extension. At February arguments, Justice Scalia dismissed overwhelming congressional support for Section 5 as “very likely attributable to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement.”
Seriously. They heard the arguments, and they haven’t made a decision yet, and he is making public statements on this?
Is he nuts? Is it Alzheimer’s? Or maybe he realizes that he will never be Chief Justice, and he no longer gives a sh%$.
I do not know why he did this, nor do I care, but it is clear that he is no longer (if he ever was) fit to be a Supreme Court justice.