SCOTUS

[Sparko]

Thomas was making an additional $750,000 a year from a company that doesn't exist. That was always my dream job. And sleeping through Supreme Court proceedings.

[jfish26]

Thomas was making an additional $750,000 a year from a company that doesn't exist. That was always my dream job. And sleeping through Supreme Court proceedings.

The Court had a legitimacy crisis before all of this. If Thomas has one ounce of actual principle, he will resign.

[Shirley]

Thomas was making an additional $750,000 a year from a company that doesn't exist. That was always my dream job. And sleeping through Supreme Court proceedings.

The Court had a legitimacy crisis before all of this. If Thomas has one ounce of actual principle, he will resign.

In the interest of sanity, or the pursuit thereof, I had mostly given myself the morning off from the news, and wasn't sure what you were referring to Sparko, so I went and looked. Sorry, but not surprised to see, that the WSJ editorial page came out in Thomas' defense. Not sure if it was before or after the latest revelation(s), but seriously?

“Any presumption in favor of Thomas’s integrity and commitment to comply with the law is gone. His assurances and promises cannot be trusted. Is there more? What’s the whole story? The nation needs to know,” said Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert at New York University."

[jfish26]

Thomas was making an additional $750,000 a year from a company that doesn't exist. That was always my dream job. And sleeping through Supreme Court proceedings.

The Court had a legitimacy crisis before all of this. If Thomas has one ounce of actual principle, he will resign.

In the interest of sanity, or the pursuit thereof, I had mostly given myself the morning off from the news, and wasn't sure what you were referring to Sparko, so I went and looked. Sorry, but not surprised to see, that the WSJ editorial page came out in Thomas' defense. Not sure if it was before or after the latest revelation(s), but seriously?

“Any presumption in favor of Thomas’s integrity and commitment to comply with the law is gone. His assurances and promises cannot be trusted. Is there more? What’s the whole story? The nation needs to know,” said Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert at New York University."

This would also be a very good time for some detail around how exactly Kavanaugh's debts were paid.

[Shirley]

This would also be a very good time for some detail around how exactly Kavanaugh's debts were paid.

Turns out, you're not the only person who's curious:

[Overlander]

And not just because they’re black.

Idiot

Yep, no doubt about it, your father should have pulled out earlier.

Are you 11 years old?

[jfish26]

This column takes a sober, nuanced look at what's really at stake here.

Clarence Thomas Doesn’t Have to Be Bribed to Shred Basic Rights and Democracy

Thomas probably didn’t change any of his votes after island-hopping with Harlan Crow, but that doesn’t make the jaunts any less troubling.

It would be bad enough if these trips were merely high points in a bromance between two old friends, but Crow regularly invites other powerful and wealthy Republicans on these jaunts, and those people get to bend Thomas’s ear about whatever matter is on their minds. This access was, incredibly, memorialized in a painting Crow commissioned that showed Thomas surrounded by conservative legal power brokers like Leonard Leo and Mark Paoletta (who just happens to be the former chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence). Imagine being so bold as to literally commission artwork of your secret cabal with a Supreme Court justice.

None of this is OK, but Republicans do not care. Thomas brings them victories. He believes guns should have more rights than pregnant people. He is a devout enemy of the LGBTQ community. He believes in “states’ rights” even when those states engage in discrimination against people of color and suppress their voting rights, and he is against affirmative action. The fact that Thomas happens to be Black and believes these things makes him all the more useful in the ongoing Republican attempts to set the law back to 1859: He’s the Black mascot Republicans eagerly parade about to excuse their racism.

[...]

Thomas does not have to be bribed to hate himself or American democracy. But the fact that Thomas believes [hard right things] for free is entirely beside the point. Bribes-for-Votes is not what I think the Republican undisclosed “gifts” are for. The conservatives hobnobbing with Thomas on island adventures are not paying to change his already-in-the-bag vote—but they might be paying to influence his opinions. That’s because, in the high-stakes world of Supreme Court opinion writing, even brief phrases or innocuous-sounding lines can have huge effects on the development of the law and legal outcomes. And Thomas has played a key role in seeding extremist conservative arguments in otherwise conventional (if wrong) conservative opinions.

For three decades, Thomas has set the extreme ideological edge of legal jurisprudence. In 1997 he wrote a concurring decision for a case called Prinz v. United States; the majority opinion said that state officials could not be forced to carry out background checks on potential gun owners, but Thomas went one further and inserted a line stating that the Second Amendment might confer a “personal” right to bear arms, a proposition that was a shot-across-the-judicial-bow at the time. Fast forward 11 years, and the Supreme Court did, in fact, invent a personal right to gun ownership in District of Columbia v. Heller.

Or look at US v. Lopez from 1995. In that case, Thomas invented an entirely new limiting principle for the Commerce Clause. At the time, it seemed like it came out of left field. But almost two decades later, in 2012, the Supreme Court adopted it in NFIB v. Sebelius, the Obamacare case. It’s not hard to understand why rich conservative donors might have an interest in limiting the government’s authority to regulate businesses under the Commerce Clause, or why they might pay good money to have the opportunity to tell Thomas about what judicial language would most help their interests.

Having a Supreme Court justice who will get on your boat and listen to your friends is useful, even if you can’t directly buy that justice’s vote. We know it’s useful, because the attempt to influence Supreme Court justices through in-person appeals happens to be the foundation of the entire concept of “oral arguments.”

There’s no objective need for oral arguments. All the parties in a case submit written briefs to the justices—briefs that the justices are more than capable of reading on their own. The justices are further capable of doing their own research and thinking about the law, and the government provides them with a team of clerks, paid for by taxpayers, to do additional research and help the judges come to their opinions. There’s no need for lawyers to stand up for an hour and answer questions: All of the legal information a justice could possibly need is in the documents.

And yet, we send some of our most highly trained (and well paid) lawyers to court in the hope of (wait for it) influencing the justices. Nobody (smart) goes into oral arguments really thinking they’re going to change a justice’s vote: The goal is to shape the eventual controlling opinion so that it is more favorable to your side of the argument. Maybe you get a justice to add mitigating language to their ruling; maybe you convince a justice to rule on one aspect of a case but not another. Maybe the justice has a legitimate question about your point of view, and you can answer it to their satisfaction and thus give them more confidence to rule your way. Influence is the stock and trade of appellate law.

In Thomas’s case, we’ll never know for certain what influence went down in the room with the Nazi memorabilia where it happened, but that’s a big part of the problem. Crow may not have bought Thomas’s vote, but he sure paid for hundreds of hours of face time, during which he and his friends could have made oral arguments directly to Thomas—arguments to which the other side wasn’t invited. If you’re a rich Republican friend of the Crows, you had an opportunity to plead your case to the justice. I didn’t. Women (based on the paintings) didn’t. Parents of children who were murdered at school because of Thomas’s interpretation of the Second Amendment didn’t. Crow doesn’t invite those parents to his private resort when the justice is around.

If a regular person wants to get half an hour of Justice Thomas’s time, we have to file a case, hope the Supreme Court grants certiorari, wait a couple of years, and hope Thomas (who is famously reticent at oral arguments) asks us a question. If a rich Republican wants to get that half hour, it would appear that all they have to do is call up Harlan Crow, hop on a jet, and bring some nice cigars.

[twocoach]

And since he’s a Republican I say we get him and get him good! Yeah!!

If a Dem leaning Supreme Court justice breaks the law, I hope they are held responsible as well.

And not just because they’re black.

If you have examples of white Supreme Court justices getting away with things Thomas is being called out for then please, share your links. Otherwise fuck off with that BS.

[zsn]

So, basically they are saying that Thomas didn’t become a crook because he took money from Crow. He took money from Crow because he was a crook.

[twocoach]

Thomas was making an additional $750,000 a year from a company that doesn't exist. That was always my dream job. And sleeping through Supreme Court proceedings.

The Court had a legitimacy crisis before all of this. If Thomas has one ounce of actual principle, he will resign.

It has long been established that he does not.

[KUTradition]

shocked…shocked i tell ya, that the house JUDICIARY committee, which itself says that one of its purviews is of “matters relating to the administration of justice in federal courts”, appears uninterested in looking into clarence thomas’ financial dealings

[jfish26]

shocked…shocked i tell ya, that the house JUDICIARY committee, which itself says that one of its purviews is of “matters relating to the administration of justice in federal courts”, appears uninterested in looking into clarence thomas’ financial dealings

Just pay attention. This whole "I'm allowed to have friends" thing is going to be repeated when the details on what Trump shared, and with whom, come out.

[KUTradition]

shocked…shocked i tell ya, that the house JUDICIARY committee, which itself says that one of its purviews is of “matters relating to the administration of justice in federal courts”, appears uninterested in looking into clarence thomas’ financial dealings

Just pay attention. This whole "I'm allowed to have friends" thing is going to be repeated when the details on what Trump shared, and with whom, come out.

i don’t doubt it

[jfish26]

shocked…shocked i tell ya, that the house JUDICIARY committee, which itself says that one of its purviews is of “matters relating to the administration of justice in federal courts”, appears uninterested in looking into clarence thomas’ financial dealings

Just pay attention. This whole "I'm allowed to have friends" thing is going to be repeated when the details on what Trump shared, and with whom, come out.

i don’t doubt it

It's the spiritual successor to the red herring "no quid pro quo" defense to Impeachment Vol. I. It sounds like it should matter, legally, but it really doesn't.

[Shirley]

[jfish26]

[Shirley]

Yeah Lisa, we know how you feel. But please don't give us any more of that decades-long bullshit about how republicans loathe "activist judges", mkay?

[Shirley]

[Sparko]

The Supreme Court basically needs to be packed or ignored. It has almost no legitimacy left after it became a fundamentalist rubber stamp. It exists as the bridge between church and state. It has become a bizarre mirror opposite of the Constitution's intended judicial reviewer.

[zsn]

Yeah Lisa, we know how you feel. But please don't give us any more of that decades-long bullshit about how republicans loathe "activist judges", mkay?

What’s the over-under of when Susan Collins is going to be “very concerned”?