Article III, Section 1:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.

The U.S. Constitution provides for a Judicial Branch including one supreme Court. It also appears to assume that the Supreme Court will include a Chief Justice, stipulating that the Chief Justice shall preside over any Presidential impeachment trial in the Senate. However, the Constitution is silent on other matters, such as the size and composition of the Supreme Court, the time and place for sitting, and the Court’s internal organization … leaving those questions to Congress.

In addition to setting the size of the Supreme Court, Congress also has determined the time and place of the Court’s sessions, as well as the salaries of its justices. Supreme Court decisions establish that the Exceptions Clause grants Congress broad power to regulate the Court’s appellate jurisdiction.

Annual pay per justice as of January 1, 2023, is $274,200 … except for the chief justice, who receives $286,700.By no means paltry sums.

The Supreme Court currently comprises nine justices: the Chief Justice of the United States and eight Associate Justices. The justices are nominated by the president and confirmed with the “advice and consent” of the United States Senate, per Article II of the United States Constitution.

Congress also has significant authority to determine what cases the Court has jurisdiction to hear. The Constitution only grants the Supreme Court original jurisdiction over the relatively narrow categories of Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party.” In all the other Cases subject to federal jurisdiction, Article III grants the Court appellate Jurisdiction … with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as Congress shall make.

According to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, “Like all Federal judges, Supreme Court Justices serve lifetime appointments on the Court, in accordance with Article III of the United States Constitution.”

Show me, please, where it says that in the Constitution.

As with guns, words – i.e., “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” – have been taken out of their original (and implied) context and prostituted to assume other, subsequent meanings.

Take corruption, for instance.

Corruption may involve many activities including bribery, influence peddling and embezzlement. Political corruption occurs when an officeholder or other governmental employee acts with an official capacity for personal gain.

Which brings us to where we find ourselves today.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is facing more questions about his finances, with a new report about thousands of dollars of income he’s reporting from a real estate firm with ties to his wife, Ginni Thomas. On his financial disclosure forms, Thomas reported rental income totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars from a firm called Ginger, Ltd., Partnership, The Washington Post reported.

That Nebraska firm no longer exists, having been closed 17 years ago.

The latest revelation about problems with Thomas’s legally-required financial disclosure forms raises questions about how seriously he took his obligation to disclosure his finances to the public. Public officials are required to fill out such forms to show if they have any conflict of interests between their personal finances and public duties.

Thomas is facing calls for an investigation and his resignation.

The supreme court justice claims he was advised that he did not have to disclose luxury trips paid for by GOP megadonor Harlan Crow because Crow and his wife are “personal friends,” said Thomas in his first statement on the matter.

Before then, conservative activist Ginni Thomas has “no memory” of what she discussed with her husband during the heat of the battle to overturn the 2020 presidential election, according to congressional testimony.

Ginni Thomas recalled “an emotional time” in which her mood was lifted by her husband and Mark Meadows, then Donald Trump’s chief of staff, a transcript of her deposition with the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol shows. Thomas has been a prominent backer of Trump’s lies that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

At 74, her husband is the oldest and most conservative member of America’s highest court, which has played a crucial part in settling disputed elections.

Speaking of wives of the supreme court justices, two years after John Roberts‘s confirmation as the Supreme Court’s chief justice in 2005, his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, made a pivot: After a long and distinguished career as a lawyer, she refashioned herself as a legal recruiter, a matchmaker who pairs job-hunting lawyers up with corporations and firms.

Roberts told a friend that the change was motivated by a desire to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest, given that her husband was the highest-ranking judge in the country. “There are many paths to the good life,” she said. “There are so many things to do if you’re open to change and opportunity.”

And life was indeed good for the Robertses, at least between 2007 and 2014.

During that eight-year stretch, according to internal records from her employer, Jane Roberts generated $10.3 million in commissions paid out by corporations and law firms for placing high-dollar lawyers with them.

That eye-popping figure comes from records in a whistle-blower complaint filed by a disgruntled former colleague of Roberts, who says that, as the spouse of the most powerful judge in the United States, the income she earns from law firms that practice before the Court should be subject to public scrutiny.

Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 confirmation to the Supreme Court was embroiled in controversy when multiple women accused him of sexual assault. One of them, Christine Blasey Ford, testified before Congress about the alleged attempted rape she suffered at his hands in high school. The 2023 film Justice is a horrifying and infuriating inquiry into those claims, told largely by friends of Ford, lawyers and medical experts, and another of Kavanaugh’s alleged victims: Deborah Ramirez, a classmate of his at Yale.

Most damning of all, it features a never-heard-before audio recording made by one of Kavanaugh’s Yale colleagues—Partnership for Public Service president and CEO Max Stier—that not only corroborates Ramirez’s charges but suggests that Kavanaugh violated another unnamed woman as well.

As Democrats remember with still smouldering fury, when Mitch McConnell was majority leader, he refused to grant Merrick Garland–now Attorney General of the United States–even a token hearing after he was nominated to the Supreme Court by Barack Obama in March 2016 to fill the late Antonin Scalia’s seat. The day Garland was tapped, McConnell declared, “It is a president’s constitutional right to nominate a Supreme Court justice, and it is the Senate’s constitutional right to act as a check on a president and withhold its consent.”

Garland was never granted a hearing, a slap in the face to democracy and to America’s first black president.

Another supreme court justice, Samuel Alito said the decision he wrote removing the federal right to abortion made him and other US supreme court justices “targets of assassination” but denied claims he was responsible for its leak in draft form.

Alito wrote the ruling in Dobbs v Jackson, the Mississippi case that overturned Roe v Wade, which established the right to abortion in 1973. His draft ruling was leaked to Politico on 2 May last year, to uproar and protest nationwide. The final ruling was issued on 24 June.

A nearly $2 million sale of property co-owned by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch to a prominent law firm executive in 2017 is raising new questions about the lax ethics reporting requirements for Supreme Court justices.

Property records from Grand County, Colorado, show that the Walden Group LLC–a limited-liability company in which Gorsuch was a partner–sold a 40-acre property on the Colorado River to Brian Duffy, chief executive officer of the prominent law firm Greenberg Traurig. Duffy and his wife, Kari Duffy, paid $1.8 million for the property on May 12, 2017–just one month after Gorsuch was sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court.

The financial disclosure report filed by Gorsuch for calendar year 2017 lists a sale by the Walden Group LLC for a profit of between $250,000 and $500,000. However, the section where a buyer should be listed is blank. It’s unclear if that’s a violation of ethics rules.

And, so, these questions and doubts beg to be settled by Justice League overseers.

The Justice League is an all-star ensemble cast of established superhero characters from DC Comics’ portfolio. Although these superheroes usually operate independently, they assemble as a team to tackle especially formidable villains.

The cast of the Justice League usually features a few highly popular characters who have their own solo books, such as Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, alongside a number of lesser-known characters who benefit from the exposure. The Justice League was created to boost the profiles and sales of its characters through cross-promotion and helped to develop the DC Universe as a shared universe, as it is through teams like the Justice League that the characters regularly interact.

Beyond comic books, the Justice League has been adapted to several television shows, films, and video games included.

More recently, it has been shadowing the United States Supreme Court.