Self Regulation is to Regulation as Self Importance is to Importance

Which is why, as Pro Publica so pithily notes, the self policing of the judiciary, "Doesn’t Work."

It does not work for product safety, it does not work for the environment, it does not work for workplace safety, it does not work for doctors, nor does it work for lawyers.

Self regulation does nor work here nor there,
Self regulation does not work anywhere.

Self regulation does not work with roof repair,
Self regulation does not work while flying in the air.

I do not like it Sam I Am.  

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But I digress:

For decades, judges have relied on a select group to make sure the judiciary adheres to the highest ethical standards: themselves.

The Judicial Conference, a secretive, century-old council of federal judges led by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, oversees the ethics and financial disclosures for more than 1,700 federal judges, including the nine justices of the high court. Those financial disclosures, submitted yearly as a list of assets and gifts, are often the only window into whether judges with lifetime appointments have conflicts of interest as they rule on the country’s most consequential legal cases.

The judiciary's leaders argue that the conference has been an effective watchdog over America's third branch of government. The conference’s authority plays an important role in judicial controversies and has been at the center of some defenses of the court following ProPublica’s reporting on possible ethical breaches. With its “sound structure of self-governance,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in 2021, “the Judicial Conference has been an enduring success.”

In reality, the Judicial Conference has instead often protected, not policed, the judiciary, according to interviews and previously undisclosed internal documents. For decades, conference officials have repeatedly worked to preserve judges’ most coveted perks while thwarting congressional oversight and targeting “disloyal” figures in the judiciary who argued for reforms.

This is what happens in all cases where the fox guards the henhouse.

It is all about protecting the prestige of their institutions, and their phony baloney jobs.

Only being a federal judge is not a phony baloney job.

In the mid-1990s, two judges — a member of the Supreme Court and a judge on the conference — arranged to obscure a legal publisher’s role in underwriting meetings for an awards ceremony attended by judges at lavish resorts in locales like the Virgin Islands and Hawaii.

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And when the judiciary clarified its rules on federal judges’ disclosures earlier this year, the final version was watered down, according to internal documents obtained by ProPublica. The goal behind some of the proposed edits, a staff attorney explained in an email to a subordinate, was to avoid “drawing bright lines.”

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Across the federal government, financial disclosures and potential conflicts of interest are self-reported. But experts say the judiciary has the least oversight of all three branches.

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Even one of the Financial Disclosure Committee’s main functions — making sure judges’ self-reported income, assets and gifts comply with the law — is designed to help judges, not hold them accountable, according to nine federal judges and current and former staffers. Most of that daily work is farmed out to an obscure government agency known as the Administrative Office.

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Last month, the Supreme Court adopted its first-ever code of conduct but stopped short of defining an enforcement mechanism. That, coupled with the Judicial Conference’s record, has led some observers to assert that the new rules will ultimately change little.

That’s the way some judges like it.

I don't care if the judges like or not.

I want them to not be corrupt.  That does not appear to be too much to ask for, does it?