(Reuters) – The chair of the federal judiciary’s ethics committee on Tuesday acknowledged it has, at times, taken “too long” to release judges’ financial disclosures reports to the public and said a new electronic system for processing them was in the works.
But U.S. Circuit Judge Jennifer Elrod in written testimony for a Tuesday hearing before a U.S. House of Representatives’ panel gave no timetable for any new system, saying the judiciary was moving “slowly and cautiously” to make improvements.
The House Judiciary subcommittee’s hearing was prompted by a Wall Street Journal report that 131 federal judges failed to recuse themselves from 685 cases from 2010 to 2018 involving companies in which they or their family members owned stock.
At Tuesday’s hearing, Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia, the Democratic chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet, called the report “disturbing” and said it showed reforms were needed.
Representative Darrell Issa of California, the Judiciary Committee’s ranking Republican, agreed, saying the failures marked a rare instance where both parties agreed Congress must act as the judiciary had not, to “the peril of its legitimacy.”
Both representatives belong to a bipartisan group of House and Senate lawmakers that on Monday introduced legislation that would require judges to report stock trades over $1,000 within 45 days and force the judiciary to post disclosures online.
Judges’ disclosures are filed annually by May of the following year, but requests for copies of the disclosure forms can take months to fulfill. Requests for disclosure reports are sent to judges themselves to decide if anything needs redacted.
“We acknowledge that in some cases the release of reports takes too long,” Elrod, who sits on the 5th Circuit and chairs the U.S. Judicial Conference’s Committee on Codes of Conduct, said in her written testimony.
She said the judiciary released more than 13,000 reports in 2020. But she called financial disclosure reports “essential” to maintaining public confidence and said efforts were being made “to be more responsive to the public.”
Democrats are also considering broader proposals, and the panel questioned witnesses on whether Congress should apply any recusal and ethics reforms to the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court as well or bar judges from owning individual stocks.
Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, the government affairs manager for the Project on Government Oversight, testified that it was “preposterous” that judges do not have to abide by the stricter financial disclosure rules that apply to members of Congress.
“Without transparency in courts, you cannot have legitimacy in the courts,” he said.
Renee Knake Jefferson, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, said the judiciary’s recusal system is “broken” and recommended a publicly available list of judges who fail to recuse be created as a deterrent against noncompliance.
“Shame can be powerful,” she testified.
Asked by Issa if the judiciary could on its own enact the reforms being discussed during the hearing, Hedtler-Gaudette responded “absolutely.”