Clarence Thomas should still recuse himself from all January 6 and 2020 election fraud cases, given that his wife was present at the "Stop the Steal" rally that day and is on-record with e-mails encouraging states to stand up slates of false electors. If you can't be forced to testify against a spouse in a trial, you shouldn't be able to sit in judgement in cases where your spouse was part of the events leading up to the case.
Windsor is obviously a shameless gadfly in the mold of O'Keefe, using parlor tricks to generate made-for-socials "gotcha" moments that provoke angst at the expense of our institutions.
But it is also true that the Federalist Society nexus spent decades and fortunes grooming ideological judges as part of an express plan to revitalize the conservative agenda through the courts, and when it comes time for a Republican president to nominate new judges, they typically start and end with a list from Leonard Leo.
Neither of these efforts promotes thoughtful, impartial jurisprudence in the best interests of the American people. Both work to reshape the courts into a priesthood.
As to the Federalist Society, I say so what? It’s a school of legal and government thought. Justices are not bound to a doctrine, only the law. The valid way to change the Court is appoint Justices that agree with your worldview. Not overthrow the legitimacy of the Court or its Justices.
This is a very generous (IMO biased) read of originalists and the Federalist Society. They ARE bound by ideological dogma, not the law; and intentionally so. The whole movement is an effort to cloak conservative activist judges under the pretext of Constitutional law. From the articles I linked:
>> In a 5-4 decision in 1992, SCOTUS ... upheld the constitutional right to an abortion. The three justices who wrote the majority’s opinion — Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter — were all Republican appointees. Here was the greatest challenge to the movement: Even an ostensibly conservative nominee could disappoint. So Leo and his allies set out to solve this recurring problem. They needed to cultivate nominees who would not only start out loyal to the cause but remain stalwart through all countervailing mainstream pressures. Leo and his allies concluded that they needed to identify candidates while they were young and nurture them throughout their careers ... That meant finding young, talented minds when they were still in law school, advancing their careers, supporting them after setbacks and insulating them from ideological drift. “You wanted Leonard on your side because he did have influence if you wanted to become a Supreme Court clerk or an appellate clerk,” said one conservative thinker who has worked with Leo. “He was very good at making it in people’s interests to be cooperating with him. I don’t know if he did arm-twisting exactly. It was implicit, I would say.”
>> In one email chain, a group of Bush Justice Department lawyers discussed how best to publicize a white paper promoting a controversial nominee to an appeals court. One lawyer said he was looking for an organization to “launder and distribute” the paper, presumably so it wouldn’t come from the Bush administration itself. “Use fed soc,” Viet Dinh, a Federalist Society member who was then a high-ranking official at the DOJ, replied.
>> In 2007, Leo gave the young Republican governor of Missouri, Matt Blunt, a career-defining test. A vacancy had opened up on the state Supreme Court. Missouri has had a nonpartisan process for picking new justices, in which a panel of lawyers and political appointees select candidates for the governor to choose ... but Leo pressed him to jettison it. Leo did not do this politely. To achieve that, Leo worked a back channel directly to Blunt. The outlines of Leo’s campaign are contained in the paper records of an old whistleblower lawsuit and in emails obtained by The Associated Press as part of a 2008 legal settlement with the Missouri governor’s office.
>> Leo and several other lawyers launched the Judicial Confirmation Network, a tax-exempt nonprofit that could spend unlimited sums without publicly revealing its donors. The group did something unusual for that time: It treated a confirmation battle like a political campaign ... Over the next several years, Leo, through the JCN, continued to back conservative candidates in Wisconsin, where judicial elections are, putatively, nonpartisan. In one 2019 race, JCN funneled over a million dollars into the contest in its final week; the Republican narrowly won.
>> “All of a sudden we started seeing what I would consider misleading and distortive” political ads, Robert Orr, a former Republican state Supreme Court justice in North Carolina, said in an interview. “We’d never seen those in judicial races" ... In 2022, a year generally unfavorable to Republicans, the Leo's group claimed credit for flipping North Carolina’s top court to a 5-2 Republican majority. Almost as soon as it was seated, the freshly Republican-dominated court did something extraordinary. In March 2023, the court reheard two voting rights cases its predecessor had just decided. The first was over gerrymandered districts that heavily favored Republicans. The second was over a voter identification law the previous court had found discriminated against Black people.
Is it simply a "school of legal and government thought" when the movement was literally founded in reaction to conservative, Republican-appointed judges prioritizing their legal analysis over their personal politics, with the express goal of creating a pipeline for ideologically consistent practitioners?
No one is unbiased. Anyone who claims to be unbiased is likely the most biased, either because they're deceiving themselves, or they're deceiving you.
All three stories have solid sources, ProPublica's in particular. Look at the quotes I pulled. Leo and his allies created this pipeline after conservative, Republican-appointed judges proved insufficiently ideological in 1992, choosing sound jurisprudence over personal politics. It's downhill from there.
100% in agreement. Everyone is biased. You and I and Mr. Leo. We all try to influence political opinions. I read the ProPublica story, and it consists of a lot of speculation (What the heck are planning documents and why aren't any of them shown?) and less incriminating facts than the stories about Joe Biden and his family profiting from influence peddling. It also insinuates that an attempt to protect states legislative rights is an attempt to negate civil rights legislation. No state has that agenda.
Conservatives are trying to even out the justice system. Now if they can just make inroads in the media and the education systems.
Eh, several states have that agenda. When you're closing down polling stations in one group's precincts, creating long queues, then banning volunteers from handing out water to people in line... this stuff has a precedent. There's a reason that in the 1960s, we had to pass federal laws that basically insist that states respect the amendments we ratified in the 1860s. And some don't, even today.
But still, yours is a fair assessment. It's more generous than mine, but I understand where you're coming from.
No state that I know of allows electioneering in voting lines. Anyone can donate water for distribution by election officials. Closing polling stations is a matter of economics. The nearest one to my home was closed in a county that votes 80% Republican. Forming long lines is a matter of choice. There is a month of early voting and a mail-in option. At my last county of residence there was an attended drop box available outside of polling hours. You will have to do better than just saying so to make a convincing argument. At least come up with factual reports of citizens who are denied a reasonable opportunity to vote - not just blather by democrat politicians.
The Supreme Court is very open (more so than any other branch of government) on any matters they decide to hear. Their decisions should be evaluated on a Constitutional basis - not on decisions of previous courts or future courts. Most amateur commenters, here and elsewhere, have very little competence to do that.
You listed a number of qualities the SC should have Steve; did i miss "ethics?" No mention of Crowe's largess bestowed on Thomas? 4 million dollars large he forgot to report initially? Is there anything, ANYTHING about that payday that strikes you as out of place? Come on bro, just between us eh?
I didn't care for Windsor's hit piece, i find that crap tacky at best. On the bright side of the ledger was Justice Robert's answer. Is he that much smarter than Alito? That much more aware of the potential traps being set? Or perhaps he is just a better justice who understands his job isn't to pick "winners and losers?"
And, as long as you got my heartbeat up this morning; how much longer do you think the SC can drag their feet on rendering a decision on an issue that they should never agreed to have heard in the first place? Presidential immunity indeed.
I don’t accept the $4 million figure as fact. It’s an estimate by Fix the Court, an advocacy group. It’s in their interest to max things out to the extreme. Thomas has been friends with Harlan Crowe for decades, before he was on the Court. I suppose the ethics rules could say you must give up your friends, but even John Jay did not do that.
Let me take this opportunity to hone in on my salient point. SCOTUS is not a priesthood. The Justices did not take a vow of poverty, or solitude. Billionaires roll in luxury without a thought to the value of their lifestyle for those who are not billionaires.
Now if Crowe had given cash to Thomas in exchange for rulings, that’s an ethics problem. But no cash changed hands. Crowe did not befriend a SCOTUS Justice to buy influence. He was rich AND friends with Thomas, both of which are incidental to Thomas’s job.
There’s a difference between “avoiding the appearance” of influence and eliminating any possible trace of it. The double standard is also evident as these rules haven’t been applied historically or to liberal Justices who are also friends with people in high (and rich) places.
The other Justices seem satisfied with Thomas and his ethics. As it should work, the Court polices itself. Nobody gets to play Inspector Javert over disclosures unless they have impeachable evidence of foul play. And then it’s the Senate’s job to try the case, as the Constitution provides.
> Thomas has been friends with Harlan Crowe for decades, before he was on the Court. I suppose the ethics rules could say you must give up your friends, but even John Jay did not do that.
Seems like a pretty important piece of your argument here, but from the info I can gather it’s false. When I google when they met, what I find points to them meeting in 1992, AFTER Thomas was already a Justice. He offered Thomas a free ride on his private jet and they got along really well.
Source, ProPublica, which gets the information from a linked Dallas Morning News interview with Crow:
If you are not predisposed to give him the benefit of the doubt, the relationship does not look good. Even if Thomas’ intentions are above board, are Crow’s? Would Crow have offered someone NOT on the SC a free ride on his private jet (thus initiating the friendship)?
The story of how they met has appearances of impropriety to me (though I’m not predisposed to give him the benefit of the doubt).
Let’s, for the sake of argument, accept the skeptical view of Crow’s intentions and Thomas’s acceptance of his gifts. Over the 32 years they’ve been acquainted, has the “investment” in Thomas paid off for Crow? Is there any evidence over all those years of Crow benefitting? I’d assume over 32 years, there’a got to be evidence. Bring that and let the Senate impeach him. If Pro-Publica or anyone else has a smoking gun, where is it?
Now you’re moving the goalposts. Your post, referencing the code of conduct states that they should avoid even the appearance of impropriety.
That said, the WP timeline article does provide some ideas of what Crow could have benefited from the relationship (mentioning some 5-4 decisions where Thomas was in favor of Crow’s presumed preferred outcome after Thomas received benefits from Crow).
Look, I’m no fan of Windsor and her tactics. Likening her to James O'Keefe doesn’t quite seem fair, but I not interested in defending her beyond that.
I think it’s a tall order to have to prove that a justice directly benefited someone after they showered him with gifts—we’re talking probably pretty likeminded people here anyways. But when such a conflict (either due to gifts provided or any other conflict of interest), there is a reasonable expectation that a justice should recuse themselves… and that basically just doesn’t happen anymore.
Your bringing up impeachment is silly in my mind. You can argue that impeachment remains a tool for addressing egregious offenses of justices, but practically speaking impeachment doesn’t exist. Can you imagine any scenario where the senate would remove a justice? I cannot.
Wow! Screw ethics if your friends are rich and can pay for your life of luxury...unless of course they are "buying" your vote. What the freak happened to the values conservatives used to embrace? Seriously, i mean that in the best way.
Clarence Thomas should still recuse himself from all January 6 and 2020 election fraud cases, given that his wife was present at the "Stop the Steal" rally that day and is on-record with e-mails encouraging states to stand up slates of false electors. If you can't be forced to testify against a spouse in a trial, you shouldn't be able to sit in judgement in cases where your spouse was part of the events leading up to the case.
https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-biden-us-supreme-court-clarence-thomas-arizona-9e6929dfc81fa53a9b5f9d70b2ba15e8
Two things can be true.
Windsor is obviously a shameless gadfly in the mold of O'Keefe, using parlor tricks to generate made-for-socials "gotcha" moments that provoke angst at the expense of our institutions.
But it is also true that the Federalist Society nexus spent decades and fortunes grooming ideological judges as part of an express plan to revitalize the conservative agenda through the courts, and when it comes time for a Republican president to nominate new judges, they typically start and end with a list from Leonard Leo.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/leonard-leo-federalists-society-courts/
https://www.propublica.org/article/we-dont-talk-about-leonard-leo-supreme-court-supermajority
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/07/31/texas-federal-courts-conservative-takeover-cornyn-abbott/
Neither of these efforts promotes thoughtful, impartial jurisprudence in the best interests of the American people. Both work to reshape the courts into a priesthood.
As to the Federalist Society, I say so what? It’s a school of legal and government thought. Justices are not bound to a doctrine, only the law. The valid way to change the Court is appoint Justices that agree with your worldview. Not overthrow the legitimacy of the Court or its Justices.
This is a very generous (IMO biased) read of originalists and the Federalist Society. They ARE bound by ideological dogma, not the law; and intentionally so. The whole movement is an effort to cloak conservative activist judges under the pretext of Constitutional law. From the articles I linked:
>> In a 5-4 decision in 1992, SCOTUS ... upheld the constitutional right to an abortion. The three justices who wrote the majority’s opinion — Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter — were all Republican appointees. Here was the greatest challenge to the movement: Even an ostensibly conservative nominee could disappoint. So Leo and his allies set out to solve this recurring problem. They needed to cultivate nominees who would not only start out loyal to the cause but remain stalwart through all countervailing mainstream pressures. Leo and his allies concluded that they needed to identify candidates while they were young and nurture them throughout their careers ... That meant finding young, talented minds when they were still in law school, advancing their careers, supporting them after setbacks and insulating them from ideological drift. “You wanted Leonard on your side because he did have influence if you wanted to become a Supreme Court clerk or an appellate clerk,” said one conservative thinker who has worked with Leo. “He was very good at making it in people’s interests to be cooperating with him. I don’t know if he did arm-twisting exactly. It was implicit, I would say.”
>> In one email chain, a group of Bush Justice Department lawyers discussed how best to publicize a white paper promoting a controversial nominee to an appeals court. One lawyer said he was looking for an organization to “launder and distribute” the paper, presumably so it wouldn’t come from the Bush administration itself. “Use fed soc,” Viet Dinh, a Federalist Society member who was then a high-ranking official at the DOJ, replied.
>> In 2007, Leo gave the young Republican governor of Missouri, Matt Blunt, a career-defining test. A vacancy had opened up on the state Supreme Court. Missouri has had a nonpartisan process for picking new justices, in which a panel of lawyers and political appointees select candidates for the governor to choose ... but Leo pressed him to jettison it. Leo did not do this politely. To achieve that, Leo worked a back channel directly to Blunt. The outlines of Leo’s campaign are contained in the paper records of an old whistleblower lawsuit and in emails obtained by The Associated Press as part of a 2008 legal settlement with the Missouri governor’s office.
>> Leo and several other lawyers launched the Judicial Confirmation Network, a tax-exempt nonprofit that could spend unlimited sums without publicly revealing its donors. The group did something unusual for that time: It treated a confirmation battle like a political campaign ... Over the next several years, Leo, through the JCN, continued to back conservative candidates in Wisconsin, where judicial elections are, putatively, nonpartisan. In one 2019 race, JCN funneled over a million dollars into the contest in its final week; the Republican narrowly won.
>> “All of a sudden we started seeing what I would consider misleading and distortive” political ads, Robert Orr, a former Republican state Supreme Court justice in North Carolina, said in an interview. “We’d never seen those in judicial races" ... In 2022, a year generally unfavorable to Republicans, the Leo's group claimed credit for flipping North Carolina’s top court to a 5-2 Republican majority. Almost as soon as it was seated, the freshly Republican-dominated court did something extraordinary. In March 2023, the court reheard two voting rights cases its predecessor had just decided. The first was over gerrymandered districts that heavily favored Republicans. The second was over a voter identification law the previous court had found discriminated against Black people.
I could keep going.
Is it simply a "school of legal and government thought" when the movement was literally founded in reaction to conservative, Republican-appointed judges prioritizing their legal analysis over their personal politics, with the express goal of creating a pipeline for ideologically consistent practitioners?
I say the three links you present are not the home of unbiased journalists.
No one is unbiased. Anyone who claims to be unbiased is likely the most biased, either because they're deceiving themselves, or they're deceiving you.
All three stories have solid sources, ProPublica's in particular. Look at the quotes I pulled. Leo and his allies created this pipeline after conservative, Republican-appointed judges proved insufficiently ideological in 1992, choosing sound jurisprudence over personal politics. It's downhill from there.
100% in agreement. Everyone is biased. You and I and Mr. Leo. We all try to influence political opinions. I read the ProPublica story, and it consists of a lot of speculation (What the heck are planning documents and why aren't any of them shown?) and less incriminating facts than the stories about Joe Biden and his family profiting from influence peddling. It also insinuates that an attempt to protect states legislative rights is an attempt to negate civil rights legislation. No state has that agenda.
Conservatives are trying to even out the justice system. Now if they can just make inroads in the media and the education systems.
Eh, several states have that agenda. When you're closing down polling stations in one group's precincts, creating long queues, then banning volunteers from handing out water to people in line... this stuff has a precedent. There's a reason that in the 1960s, we had to pass federal laws that basically insist that states respect the amendments we ratified in the 1860s. And some don't, even today.
But still, yours is a fair assessment. It's more generous than mine, but I understand where you're coming from.
No state that I know of allows electioneering in voting lines. Anyone can donate water for distribution by election officials. Closing polling stations is a matter of economics. The nearest one to my home was closed in a county that votes 80% Republican. Forming long lines is a matter of choice. There is a month of early voting and a mail-in option. At my last county of residence there was an attended drop box available outside of polling hours. You will have to do better than just saying so to make a convincing argument. At least come up with factual reports of citizens who are denied a reasonable opportunity to vote - not just blather by democrat politicians.
The Supreme Court is very open (more so than any other branch of government) on any matters they decide to hear. Their decisions should be evaluated on a Constitutional basis - not on decisions of previous courts or future courts. Most amateur commenters, here and elsewhere, have very little competence to do that.
You listed a number of qualities the SC should have Steve; did i miss "ethics?" No mention of Crowe's largess bestowed on Thomas? 4 million dollars large he forgot to report initially? Is there anything, ANYTHING about that payday that strikes you as out of place? Come on bro, just between us eh?
I didn't care for Windsor's hit piece, i find that crap tacky at best. On the bright side of the ledger was Justice Robert's answer. Is he that much smarter than Alito? That much more aware of the potential traps being set? Or perhaps he is just a better justice who understands his job isn't to pick "winners and losers?"
And, as long as you got my heartbeat up this morning; how much longer do you think the SC can drag their feet on rendering a decision on an issue that they should never agreed to have heard in the first place? Presidential immunity indeed.
I don’t accept the $4 million figure as fact. It’s an estimate by Fix the Court, an advocacy group. It’s in their interest to max things out to the extreme. Thomas has been friends with Harlan Crowe for decades, before he was on the Court. I suppose the ethics rules could say you must give up your friends, but even John Jay did not do that.
Let me take this opportunity to hone in on my salient point. SCOTUS is not a priesthood. The Justices did not take a vow of poverty, or solitude. Billionaires roll in luxury without a thought to the value of their lifestyle for those who are not billionaires.
Now if Crowe had given cash to Thomas in exchange for rulings, that’s an ethics problem. But no cash changed hands. Crowe did not befriend a SCOTUS Justice to buy influence. He was rich AND friends with Thomas, both of which are incidental to Thomas’s job.
There’s a difference between “avoiding the appearance” of influence and eliminating any possible trace of it. The double standard is also evident as these rules haven’t been applied historically or to liberal Justices who are also friends with people in high (and rich) places.
The other Justices seem satisfied with Thomas and his ethics. As it should work, the Court polices itself. Nobody gets to play Inspector Javert over disclosures unless they have impeachable evidence of foul play. And then it’s the Senate’s job to try the case, as the Constitution provides.
> Thomas has been friends with Harlan Crowe for decades, before he was on the Court. I suppose the ethics rules could say you must give up your friends, but even John Jay did not do that.
Seems like a pretty important piece of your argument here, but from the info I can gather it’s false. When I google when they met, what I find points to them meeting in 1992, AFTER Thomas was already a Justice. He offered Thomas a free ride on his private jet and they got along really well.
Source, ProPublica, which gets the information from a linked Dallas Morning News interview with Crow:
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-private-school-tuition-scotus
If you are not predisposed to give him the benefit of the doubt, the relationship does not look good. Even if Thomas’ intentions are above board, are Crow’s? Would Crow have offered someone NOT on the SC a free ride on his private jet (thus initiating the friendship)?
The story of how they met has appearances of impropriety to me (though I’m not predisposed to give him the benefit of the doubt).
ETA:
According to this WP story, they first met in 1996: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/04/clarence-thomas-timeline-harlan-crow/
I’m not sure if ProPublica was wrong or I misread it.
Let’s, for the sake of argument, accept the skeptical view of Crow’s intentions and Thomas’s acceptance of his gifts. Over the 32 years they’ve been acquainted, has the “investment” in Thomas paid off for Crow? Is there any evidence over all those years of Crow benefitting? I’d assume over 32 years, there’a got to be evidence. Bring that and let the Senate impeach him. If Pro-Publica or anyone else has a smoking gun, where is it?
Now you’re moving the goalposts. Your post, referencing the code of conduct states that they should avoid even the appearance of impropriety.
That said, the WP timeline article does provide some ideas of what Crow could have benefited from the relationship (mentioning some 5-4 decisions where Thomas was in favor of Crow’s presumed preferred outcome after Thomas received benefits from Crow).
Look, I’m no fan of Windsor and her tactics. Likening her to James O'Keefe doesn’t quite seem fair, but I not interested in defending her beyond that.
I think it’s a tall order to have to prove that a justice directly benefited someone after they showered him with gifts—we’re talking probably pretty likeminded people here anyways. But when such a conflict (either due to gifts provided or any other conflict of interest), there is a reasonable expectation that a justice should recuse themselves… and that basically just doesn’t happen anymore.
Your bringing up impeachment is silly in my mind. You can argue that impeachment remains a tool for addressing egregious offenses of justices, but practically speaking impeachment doesn’t exist. Can you imagine any scenario where the senate would remove a justice? I cannot.
Wow! Screw ethics if your friends are rich and can pay for your life of luxury...unless of course they are "buying" your vote. What the freak happened to the values conservatives used to embrace? Seriously, i mean that in the best way.