Ethics by association by Kingsley Cobb

Marsha Blackburn’s sudden concern for judicial ethics arrived this week wearing a tuxedo and clutching a Grammy ticket. The Tennessee senator demanded an investigation into Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson for attending an awards ceremony where artists criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Apparently, proximity to a microphone is now an impeachable offense, provided the wrong people are speaking nearby.

This is not about ethics. It is about theater. Blackburn’s outrage has nothing to do with preserving the integrity of the Court and everything to do with disciplining a justice who does not fit the ideological mold her party prefers. Attending a cultural event is not lobbying, not advocacy, not corruption and not even unusual. Justices have gone to operas, State of the Union addresses, lectures, dinners, and yes, award shows without the republic collapsing. The idea that a justice passively attending an event becomes responsible for every word spoken from the stage is absurd on its face.

What makes the performance especially galling is the selective blindness that accompanies it. This call for investigation comes from the same political ecosystem that has spent years circling the wagons around Justice Clarence Thomas as revelations piled up, luxury vacations funded by wealthy benefactors, real estate deals involving family members, gifts unreported for years and a refusal to recuse himself from cases touching directly on his wife’s political activism. If ethics are the concern, those facts would seem to merit more than a shrug and a talking point about “cancel culture.”

Instead, we are asked to believe that the true danger to judicial neutrality is a Black woman justice sitting in an audience while musicians criticize a federal agency. The contrast is not subtle. One justice accepts lavish hospitality from politically connected billionaires and faces no serious demands for accountability from Senate Republicans. Another attends a public, televised event and is accused of ethical misconduct by mere association. The message is loud even if the argument is thin.

This tactic fits a familiar pattern, weaponize “ethics” as a partisan tool rather than a principled standard. Ethics become urgent only when they can be used to delegitimize opponents or intimidate institutions that do not reliably deliver desired outcomes. When the same standards would implicate allies, those standards mysteriously dissolve into technicalities, traditions, or excuses about liberal media bias.

There is also a deeper discomfort at work. Cultural spaces like the Grammys are messy, political, and reflective of popular sentiment. They amplify voices that criticize law enforcement, immigration policy and entrenched power. For some politicians, that alone is suspect. By targeting Justice Jackson for merely being present, Blackburn signals that engagement with broader culture is itself a violation, unless that culture aligns neatly with conservative orthodoxy.

The danger of this approach is not to Jackson personally; she will endure the noise. The danger is to the Court and to democratic norms. If justices are expected to live in ideological quarantine, avoiding any public space where dissent might be voiced, the Court becomes less human, less connected, and more brittle. Worse, it becomes easier to bully justices through manufactured scandals whenever their rulings disappoint powerful interests.

Ethics oversight is necessary. The Supreme Court has needed clearer, enforceable rules for years, and the Thomas controversies underscore that reality. But ethics cannot be a cudgel swung only in one direction. They must apply consistently, transparently, and without regard to party, race, or jurisprudential outcome. Otherwise, “ethics” becomes just another word for “enemy.”

Blackburn’s demand is not a good-faith effort to clean up the Court. It is a distraction designed to shift attention away from unresolved, far more serious ethical failures while signaling to the base that cultural enemies are being confronted. It cheapens the very concept it pretends to defend.

In the end, this episode says more about its instigator than its target. It reveals a political strategy that thrives on outrage without proportionality and scrutiny without self-reflection. The Supreme Court should not be dragged into partisan food fights over pop culture. It should be protected by serious, evenhanded standards, not opportunistic crusades that erode trust while pretending to save it. That hypocrisy is obvious, corrosive and ultimately impossible to defend publicly.