Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. ROSS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act. This commonsense, bipartisan, bicameral legislation would serve to fill a transparency void that plagues our current Federal judicial system as recently exposed in a Wall Street Journal series of reports.

According to these reports, 131 Federal judges broke the law by hearing cases where they had a financial interest. From 2010 to 2018, these judges failed to recuse themselves from 685 lawsuits involving firms in which they or their families held stock, and today the number could be much higher.

This failure has real-world repercussions for the American public and American families.

Take, for example, Jacob and Jeanetta Springer. They were foreclosed upon in 2018 after Jeanetta's ailing father missed one mortgage payment 3 months before his passing.

Upon inheriting the property, the Springers sought to challenge the foreclosure in Federal court, believing they were behind on fewer payments than the bank had claimed. The case was dismissed on the recommendation of the magistrate judge and again on appeal. But the Springers were soon notified by the court that their judge had purchased the bank's stock before issuing the ruling.

As a result, their case was reopened and assigned to a different judge. In frustration, Jacob Springer asked: ``How was I supposed to know the judge owned the stock?''

The Springer family's experience demonstrates the importance of ensuring both justice and the appearance of justice in our courtrooms. The impression of impropriety threatens the trust litigants place in judges to be impartial and disinterested arbiters of justice and the very institutional legitimacy of our judiciary.

The Springer family's experience was not the first time a litigant has had their faith in the promise of blind justice shaken by the lack of transparency in our judiciary. But today, we can move toward making it the last by passing the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act.

This bill will make Federal judges more accountable, transparent, and ethical, and restore confidence in our Federal courts. The legislation will ensure Federal judges face the same financial transaction disclosure requirements as members of the legislative and executive branches, eliminating an unwarranted transparency gap.

It also requires the online publication of judges' financial disclosures on a publicly accessible database. This online database will add another layer of protection from potential conflicts.

Litigants like the Springer family would be able to identify conflicts sooner instead of solely relying on the ineffective recusal processes that currently are in place. This bill does so without compromising the safety of Federal judges or their families because it incorporates existing confidentiality rules that enable judges to redact sensitive information. The database will simply streamline access to information already legally required to be available to the public.

I want to thank Judiciary Committee Chairman Nadler, Subcommittee Chairman Johnson, cosponsor and Subcommittee Ranking Member Issa, and Representative Chip Roy for working with me to introduce this crucial legislation. We must restore trust in the American promise of free and fair administration of justice in our courtrooms.

For this reason, I urge my colleagues to support this bill to increase transparency and accountability in our courtrooms.

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