By James V. Grimaldi
WASHINGTON—The House Judiciary Committee passed bipartisan legislation on Wednesday to require federal judges to report more promptly their financial holdings and stock trades, sending the bill to the U.S. House floor less than a month after it was introduced.
Introduced in response to articles in The Wall Street Journal, the legislation is meant to address a longstanding problem: that judges’ financial disclosures aren’t online, are cumbersome to request and sometimes take years to access.
Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.), said the bill “is an important bipartisan effort to address an alarming lack of transparency in the personal financial holdings of federal judges, and the conflicts—or appearance of conflicts—those holdings can create in the cases those judges are asked to decide.”
The bill, which now goes to the House floor, passed on a unanimous voice vote.
The legislation would require judges to disclose stock trades worth more than $1,000 within 45 days and post their financial-disclosure forms online within 90 days of being received by the Administrative Office of the Courts.
“We all know that members of Congress have to do this,” said Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the ranking Republican on the committee, “so it seems that folks in the executive branch should have to do the same thing.”
The bill also would require for the first time that the judiciary post online a database of disclosures that is full-text searchable, sortable and in a downloadable format for access by the public. In the past, the reports in bulk have appeared only on websites run by nonprofit groups.
An identical bill in the Senate is likely to be considered this Congress by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee, a committee aide said.
The Judicial Conference, the federal courts’ policy-making body made up of the chief justice, chief judges of each federal district and other U.S. judges, hasn’t taken a position on the legislation, said David Sellers, a spokesman for the conference.
Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate introduced identical bills, entitled the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act of 2021, after a Journal investigation found that 131 federal judges violated federal law by failing to recuse themselves from lawsuits in which they had a financial interest in plaintiffs or defendants in the cases.
University of Pittsburgh law professor Arthur Hellman, a specialist in judicial ethics, said that if judges routinely made public their current stockholdings, then recusal violations would be rare because they would be caught early in lawsuits. “You would not have this spectacle of judges writing apologetically that they should not have heard the case,” he said.
The bills have a striking coalition of lawmakers across the ideological spectrum. The House bill is sponsored by Rep. Deborah Ross (D. N.C.) and co-sponsored by the ranking Republican of the courts subcommittee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R. Calif.)
“The Wall Street Journal’s recent investigation exposed the weaknesses of our current judicial ethics and recusal law,” Rep. Ross said at the hearing.
The Journal stories also have spurred lawmakers to give priority to considering a range of bills that would impose various reforms on the judiciary. Rep. Hank Johnson (D., Ga.), chairman of the courts subcommittee, and Rep. Issa said before the vote that they were considering legislation to create an inspector general for the judicial branch to investigate wrongdoing and ethics complaints.