This is an opinion column.

I’m not sure when, but sometime back, I gave up hope the justice system could guarantee justice. I’ve seen too many guilty people go free and too many innocent people go to jail.

Justice was too much to hope for. Instead, I settled for answers and information.

Among the court records, depositions, inquiries and findings of fact, our courts could sometimes deliver the answers the public needs, if not the outcomes.

As it turns out, that might have been too much, too.

You don’t have to look far to see what I mean.

Consider the case of Chief U.S. Circuit Judge William Pryor and the court clerk he hired that set off a firestorm.

In 2021, Pryor picked a woman named Crystal Clanton to serve as one of his law clerks. These positions aren’t just some sort of internship. They are an express track to opportunity and jobs not unlike the one Pryor has. It’s a big deal to get one, especially with Pryor.The competition for these positions is fierce.

Which is why Clanton’s appointment was so surprising.

Four years prior, New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer had been looking at incidents of racism and bigotry within the ranks of Turning Point USA, a controversial conservative organization on college campuses that would later feed the MAGA movement. Clanton was a national field director until Mayer published screenshots of text messages provided to her by a source.

“i hate black people,” Mayer reported one of the texts saying. At the time, Clanton told Mayer she didn’t remember sending that text message and that it was not an accurate reflection of her beliefs.

“Turning Point assessed the situation and took decisive action within 72 hours of being made aware of the issue,” Turning Point Executive Director Charlie Kirk said then.

Clanton left Turning Point and soon went to work for Ginni Thomas, wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In recent years, Ginni Thomas has become well-known for her far-right activism and her enthusiasm for overturning a lawful presidential election.

From there, Clanton attended law school and Justice Thomas vouched for her when applying for her federal clerkships.

After Clanton was selected for her clerkships in 2021, members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee filed an ethics complaint against Pryor and U.S. District Judge Corey Maze, who Clanton would clerk for first. A panel of judges from the 2nd Judicial Circuit was charged with reviewing the hire.

Pryor told the panel that he had done his due diligence and the judges seem to have taken him at his word.

The panel dismissed the complaint.

The House members balked and again asked the judiciary to get to the bottom of what happened.

“Accordingly, as the facts now stand, these two federal judges hired an individual with a widely reported pattern of racist and bigoted conduct,” they wrote. “In the eyes of the public, she will be one of these judges’ closest advisors with special access to the judicial decision-making process. In the eyes of the law, her work will be treated ‘as one’ with their own.”

The House members appealed to another judicial entity, the Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability of the Judicial Conference of the United States.

That committee ordered the 2nd Circuit to reconsider its prior decision and conduct a more thorough review.

Which brings us to the present.

Earlier this month, the 2nd Circuit panel refused to revisit the case, saying that its previous order was final and the Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability lacked authority to overturn it.

Which, as the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus notes, is bizarre, as reviewing the conduct of federal judges is the job of the Judicial Conduct and Disability Committee.

But that might just be the end of it.

Which leaves us, the public, with an outcome.

But without answers.

Not only has this process proven less than substantial, it has been notably opaque. Much of the material in question, including Pryor’s evidence of due diligence, is not public. As Marcus noted, not even the names of the members of one of the committees involved are public information.

These committees, this process — they were created to enforce the integrity of the judiciary. They exist to ensure our federal judges are beyond reproach.

Instead, they’ve only proven to be beyond review.

When you hear of the decline of confidence in institutions, this sort of thing is where that comes from.

These judges can keep this process secret. They can refuse to look any further, to not pull the cover back and show us how this works on the inside.

But they cannot conceal what’s already been revealed.

That meritocracy is a myth.

That this young woman got this job because of who she knew — a Supreme Court justice who has done more than just about anybody else to undermine faith in the judiciary, and his wife, who has tried to undermine democracy.

This is country club politics. And members of the club look out for each other. Everyone else is expected to accept that.

How are we, the public, to have confidence in that?