Category: USSupremeCourt

Clarence Thomas is the undisputed king of SCOTUS grift

Posted on by Joan McCarter

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is the gods’ gift to investigative reporters. The man has apparently not paid for a goddamned thing in his life since Ronald Reagan installed him in his first powerful government position. His grift goes so deep, according to a new report in from The Guardian, that his powerful network of former clerks had to pay for the privilege of attending his Christmas party.

According to Venmo records reviewed by The Guardian, several former clerks who are now powerful attorneys sent payments to Thomas’s aide, Rajan Vasisht, who was in the job from July 2019 to July 2021 for a 2019 Christmas bash with the justice. The amount of money each sent to Vasisht’s Venmo account wasn’t disclosed, “but the purpose of each payment is listed as either ‘Christmas party’, ‘Thomas Christmas Party’, ‘CT Christmas Party’ or ‘CT Xmas party’, in an apparent reference to the justice’s initials.” Given that Vasisht was Thomas’ aide, scheduling his personal and official calendar and handling his correspondence, there’s no other reason for these high-powered Washington, D.C., lawyers to be sending him money.

Among those who sent money is Patrick Strawbridge, a partner at Consovoy McCarthy, who just secured a big win at the Supreme Court representing the anti-affirmative action group Students for Fair Admissions in its suit against the University of North Carolina. He has also worked for the Trump Organization, the Trump family, and Donald Trump, including representing Trump in his failed bid to keep his tax returns from becoming public—his first oral argument before the court. He clerked for Thomas in 2008-2009.

The Consovoy in Stawbridge’s firm is Will Consovoy, who was a fellow Thomas clerk in the same term. Consovoy also worked for Trump, trying to shield his tax records from then-Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. Consovoy was originally lead counsel in the case overturning affirmative action, but withdrew from oral arguments at the court when he was diagnosed with brain cancer. He died earlier this year.

Other former Thomas clerks who sent party money include:

Kate Todd, who served as White House deputy counsel under Donald Trump at the time of the payment and is now a managing party of Ellis George Cipollone’s law office; Elbert Lin, the former solicitor general of West Virginia who played a key role in a supreme court case that limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions; and Brian Schmalzbach, a partner at McGuire Woods who has argued multiple cases before the supreme court.

Most of Thomas’ former clerks have landed in extremely influential positions thanks to their association with Thomas, and of course the Federal Society that helped them get where they are now. A raft of them—about two dozen—ended up with Trump-appointed jobs, either in the administration or in the federal judiciary. In private practice, former Thomas clerks end up in the vast right-wing network of firms that help dark money groups manufacture court cases to do things like overturn decades of precedent in abortion protections, affirmative action, environmental regulation, etc. The Thomas alum are with firms that regularly go before the court and in judgeships on the lower courts, where they can help tee up cases to go to SCOTUS. It’s a right-wing judicial swamp.

Thomas has bragged about how he has the most diverse clerks from all backgrounds. “They are male, they are female, they are black, they’re white, they’re from the West, they’re from the South, they’re from public schools, they’re from public universities, they’re from poor families, they’re from sharecroppers, they’re from all over,” he said in 2017 while talking to students at the University of Florida Levin College of Law.

Thomas’ wife Ginni has also written about how the former clerks are like extended family and she’s the “den mother” to the group. She’s organized big reunions (which the clerks probably ended up paying for) and coordinated them all on Facebook. That ended up extending into soliciting their help with the insurrection, for which she had to apologize. Not that there weren’t insurrectionists in the group: John Eastman is among them. He’s facing potential disbarment in California for his part in the attempted coup, and because he has “repeatedly breached professional ethics.” It’s noteworthy Eastman’s “family” from his days clerking for Judge J. Michael Lutting in the mid-1990s included 2020 elector objector Ted Cruz, one of the only senators to back the 2020 scheme.

Whether the powerful, well-connected group of lawyers who paid for Thomas’ Christmas party breached those professional ethics is murky at this point. Kedric Payne, the general counsel and senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, told The Guardian that it is possible that this was simply a pay-your-own-way kind of Christmas party rather than them paying Thomas’ expenses. That would be different from a scheme of lawyers paying for access to a Supreme Court justice. “But the point remains that the public is owed an explanation so they don’t have to speculate.”

Yes, we are owed that explanation, and it’s not likely to be forthcoming. At the heart of this is Thomas’ unbounded propensity for grift, his never-ending grudge against everything, and his sense of entitlement—you see, he’s owed the lavish lifestyle his “friends” have provided him. If that includes making his extended “family” of clerks—more like a crime family—pay for the Christmas party he is hosting for them, so be it. He actually has a lot in common with Trump, doesn’t he?

This is precisely what the founders created impeachment for: Clarence Thomas. It is definitely time for Democrats to draw up those impeachment charges, even though it’s not going to happen. It can’t happen because Republicans are just as corrupt as he is. They aren’t going to let a little corruption between friends stand in the way of overturning progress case by case. But by keeping his scandals front and center, Democrats can make Republicans own him and his corruption.

The only solution to the problem of Thomas is a political one: Beat the Republicans and fix this. That means expanding the court to nullify his presence and ending lifetime appointments to the court so the likes of Thomas can’t happen again.

‘Red flags’ were raised over Clarence Thomas disclosures going back to 2011

Posted on by Joan McCarter

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been thumbing his nose at his colleagues, the Senate, and the nation since at least 2011. Back then, watchdogs discovered he had not disclosed household income from his wife, Ginni Thomas—at least five years’ worth of income from her partisan political work the Heritage Foundation and the Tea Party astroturf group she founded. Thomas belatedly filed 20 years’ worth of amended disclosure forms, and then did not change his nondisclosing ways.

There aren’t many ethics rules Supreme Court justices have to observe, but there is a federal law they are bound by: the Ethics in Government Act of 1978. That law applies to the chief justice of the Supreme Court and all the associate justices, along with most other high-level government officials and employees and, in some cases, the spouses and dependent children of those officials, too. Thomas has not abided by that law and has not done so for years.

In 2012, U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf “raised red flags” over the review conducted under the auspices of the Judicial Conference of the United States, Bloomberg News reports based on newly disclosed information. Wolf “repeatedly expressed concern” that the committee assigned to investigate Thomas didn’t disclose its findings and actions to leaders of the conference, the federal judiciary’s policymaking body. The committee independently determined that Thomas had not “willfully” failed to comply, and that his omission of 20 years’ worth of household income in the hundreds of thousands of dollars was a “routine” matter.

Wolf raised enough hell about having been kept in the dark on the matter that the conference did adopt a small change: The committee that looks into disclosure problems has to report to the full conference about them. What the Judicial Conference—comprising the Supreme Court chief, the chiefs of all the judicial circuits, and a district judge from each regional circuit—decides to do with the information is up to them.

Since well before 2011, Thomas has been in the pocket of Texas billionaire Harlan Crow and failed to disclose everything from that relationship including expensive gifts, luxurious travel, profitable real estate deals, and private school tuition for the nephew he was raising as a son. Thomas kept on not disclosing, which is all the evidence needed to surmise that what the Judicial Conference headed up by Chief Justice John Roberts decided to do about it was nothing.

That’s not to say Thomas and pals learned nothing from the experience. His friend Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society founder and dark money maven who has reshaped the federal judiciary, learned that it was better to leave Ginni’s name off of payments for her extreme partisan work. “No mention of Ginni, of course,” Leo instructed when he was arranging for her payment through a third party. If her name isn’t on any of the paperwork, then what would her husband have to disclose?

It’s not just financial disclosures, by the way, where Thomas has failed in any semblance of ethical behavior. He never recused himself from any of the cases before the court that involved Ginni’s political activities. He has recused in other cases involving his son and his employers, so it’s not a matter of Thomas misunderstanding what’s supposed to be done. Thomas is holding himself above those requirements.

He’ll continue to do so as long as Roberts—along with the rest of the court—looks the other way. That’s exactly what Roberts intends to do. He made that clear via his refusal to even talk to Congress about ethics in the court. Because he can get away with it, Thomas will remain defiant, continue to decide cases he shouldn’t be active on, and will probably continue to enjoy the largesse Crow has on offer.

He won’t resign, and as long as the House is in Republican control (and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell draws breath in the Senate) Thomas can’t be impeached, even while he’s a textbook case for impeachment.

Thomas and the whole court are declaring themselves above the law. The only recourse Democrats have in this situation is political. They’ve got to keep Thomas’ corruption—enabled by Republicans—in focus. Democrats must keep having hearings about court reform, they must keep investigating those gifts, and they must keep talking about how every extreme, unpopular partisan decision is brought to you by Republicans.

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Dimitri of WarTranslated has been doing the essential work of translating hours of Russian and Ukrainian video and audio during the invasion of Ukraine. He joins Markos and Kerry from London to talk about how he began this work by sifting through various sources. He is one of the only people translating information for English-speaking audiences. Dimitri’s followed the war since the beginning and has watched the evolution of the language and dispatches as the war has progressed.

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Don’t let Mitch McConnell win. Don’t let him destroy democracy

Posted on (Updated by Joan McCarter

It’s hard to argue that there’s just one person responsible for the Republican Party having gone entirely off the rails of democracy. It’s been in process for decades, after all, arguably predating Richard Nixon’s resignation but definitely fueled by that in the past half-century. But if you want to find the person most responsible for using and abusing the levers of the systems the founders put in place to undermine democratic rule, look no further than Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

His handiwork has reduced the Senate to the massive roadblock to progress that it is today. He was the first lawmaker to decide that something as once unimaginable as threatening to breach the debt ceiling could be used as a bargaining chip. He has made the filibuster business as usual for the Senate, forcing every single piece of regular legislation—however uncontroversial—to go through the arduous process of multiple procedural votes just to be considered on the floor. He refused to do one of the most sacred duties of the Senate—seating a U.S. Supreme Court justice—because he could.

The outgrowth of his brazen dismantling of norms is seen in what’s been happening in Wisconsin for the last several years, where a number of appointees of the former Republican governor, Scott Walker, are simply refusing to recognize Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and are refusing to step down, months after their terms have expired.

Vote Forward has an ambitious goal of sending 10 million letters in October to Democratic-leaning voters in the swing states. You can write these on your own time, in the privacy of your home. Click here to sign up or log into your Vote Forward account.

Mary Williams’ term on the Technical College System Board expired in May 2021 and Evers named her replacement. But the former Republican state representative refuses to leave. So do two other members appointed by Walker: Kelly Tourdot and Becky Levzow. Asked about it, Williams said, “All you have to do is see what the Supreme Court did.” When asked why she is squatting in the job when others have left, she answered, “Because everyone’s an individual. Now I’m going to hang up, and I don’t want you to call me again.”

She, and a number of other Republican appointees on her board and others, are taking the route of Frederick Prehn, who has remained on the state’s Natural Resources Board—at the urging of Walker—despite the fact that his replacement was named months ago. He’s sticking because the state Supreme Court’s conservative majority said he could. Sound familiar?

The court ruled that sitting members can stay on these boards until their successors have been approved by the state Senate. Which is controlled by Republicans. There are 164 Evers nominees who have not received Senate votes. Republicans, who assume they will hold the Senate, have been holding off on these 164 nominees on the assumption that they will keep the Senate and that Republican candidate for Gov. Tim Michel will win in November. At which point all of those nominations would be withdrawn.

It sounds very familiar, doesn’t it.

“There’s two different things going on here,” Miriam Seifter, an associate professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “One is the situation where individuals assert the power to stay in office after the term has expired. The other is the Senate refusing to confirm appointees. If either of those things happen in isolation or rarely, neither one is democracy-altering. If these happen systematically and across the board … you would start to see the constraints of gubernatorial power.”

And you see the erosion of democracy, where the will of the people, the voters, is ignored. “Gov. Evers appointed highly qualified, dedicated Wisconsinites for the (Technical College System) and DNR Boards, and Republicans’ continued efforts to prevent basic, fundamental functions of our democracy is radical partisanship at its most dangerous,” said Evers spokesperson Britt Cudaback.

It’s the McConnell playbook in action, and a cautionary tale for 2022. There’s little reason to believe that Republicans in any state in which they gain majorities and take governors seats—and state supreme courts—won’t do the same. There’s little reason to believe they wouldn’t take the next step and do everything they could to make sure that Donald Trump was installed as president again in 2024.

For that matter, there’s little indication to believe McConnell would really fight that eventuality, for all the attacks he’s endured from Trump. When he had the chance to cut off Trump’s path back to the White House with an impeachment conviction, he voted no. He urged his conference to vote no. He would do it again.

This is it. This is the election to stop Wisconsin extremism from infecting more states; to stop McConnell from taking the nation to that level with a Senate majority; to stop the House from going to Republicans who would threaten everything.

That’s why Daily Kos has engaged both broadly and deeply this cycle, with candidate slates at every level. You can learn more about all those endorsements here, and determine if there’s a slate—or even an individual candidate—that speaks to you, your volunteer time, your dollars.

It doesn’t matter how much you give, it matters that you do, and that you engage and help us defeat the fascists.

If you’d like to donate to every single candidate and ballot measure organization Daily Kos has endorsed this year all at once, just click here.

On this week's episode of The Downballot we get medieval on the traditional media for its appalling display of ableism in the wake of John Fetterman's recent NBC interview; recap the absolutely wild goings-on in Los Angeles, where City Council President Nury Martinez just resigned after a racist tirade was caught on tape; dive into the unexpectedly close race for governor in Oklahoma; and highlight a brand-new database from Daily Kos Elections showing how media markets and congressional districts overlap.

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Report of investigation into leaked draft of abortion decision is coming, Gorsuch says

Posted on (Updated by Joan McCarter

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch said Thursday that the investigation into the leak of the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, is still continuing and that investigators will issue a report of those findings, but he made no promises that the results will be made public.

Speaking at the 10th Circuit Bench and Bar Conference in Colorado Springs, Gorsuch said that the “internal committee to oversee the investigation” appointed by Chief Justice John Roberts “has been busy, and we’re looking forward to their report, I hope soon.” How soon he would not say, nor would he say if that report would be seen by anyone outside of the Court. The conference organizers barred reporters from questioning Gorsuch or other judges participating.

Gorsuch continued, saying, “Improper efforts to influence judicial decision-making, from whatever side, are a threat.” Yes, from whatever side. “They inhibit our capacity to communicate with one another,” he said, chilling the communication between opposing justices, which “improves our final products,” he said. “I very much hope we get to the bottom of this sooner or later.”

Justice Samuel Alito’s anachronistic screed against abortion was leaked in early May of this year, weeks ahead of the final opinion. It showed precious little input from any dissenting justice, and was virtually identical to the final opinion. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that in the weeks between the leak and the decision, there might have been alterations inspired by one of the three liberals. In another universe, with another set of extremist justices and someone who is not Alito.

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Given all we’ve seen from the Court’s extremist, Trump-packed majority, it seems likelier than not that if the investigation determines the leak came from their camp, that report will never see the light of day. That’s how they like to do things, after all. Look at all the radical and democracy-breaking decisions they issued from the shadow docket, without holding any hearings, with no transparency, and in unsigned decisions consisting of one or two sentences.

But if the leak came from the minority—a clerk, a justice—or from support staff—a janitor—we’re a lot more likely to hear about it.

All we know about the investigation is that it heightened already existing tensions in the Court, according to long-time court reporter Nina Totenberg at NPR. Terrified clerks considered getting lawyers, after the court asked them to sign affidavits and open up their cellphones to the investigators. They were in a no-win situation. Assert their right to get a lawyer and not turn over their phone, and they would immediately be under suspicion, a potentially career-ending situation.

On the other hand, the justices themselves are basically untouchable. No one can demand of them that they turn over cellphones or even cooperate with investigators. If one of the justices was responsible for the leak, we will probably never know.

There’s no code of ethics governing the Supreme Court, and the only remedy for dealing with a rogue justice is impeachment. Impeachment, or court reform and expansion. It’s long past time that Congress applied the same code of conduct to the Supreme Court as to every other federal judge.

It’s also time to impose other reforms, including court expansion, to make correct the horrific imbalance Trump and Mitch McConnell created with their court packing.

The Supreme Court is now in the middle of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Congress needs to respond

Posted on (Updated by Joan McCarter

The Jan. 6 committee is reportedly preparing to call Supreme Court spouse Ginni Thomas to talk about just how deeply involved she was in the effort to help Donald Trump have a coup. Thomas told the Daily Caller, “I look forward to talking to them,” and that she wants to “clear up misconceptions.” Okay then.

The committee now says she’s going to get that opportunity. That’s one step closer to Congress taking seriously the threat that Thomas and her spouse, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pose to the republic.

A report in The New York Times Thursday combined with The Washington Post story put Ginni Thomas in the thick of John Eastman’s coup-plotting. There are emails between the two. There’s Eastman telling a pro-Trump lawyer and Trump campaign officials that he was aware of a “heated fight” within the Supreme Court: “For those willing to do their duty, we should help them by giving them a Wisconsin cert petition to add into the mix.”

RELATED STORY:  Trump attorneys claimed Supreme Court justices were considering joining scheme to overturn election

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Now, that could be Eastman lying about the situation in order to keep the team fighting for Trump or from some other reason—that’s law professor Steve Vladek’s interpretation. Or it could have been Ginni working Eastman up with tales from the inside to keep him happy.

Regardless, it is the spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice in the thick of a coup attempt. We don’t know where Clarence Thomas is in all this. We do know that he was the lone justice who wanted to keep the White House records around Jan. 6 away from the committee. Maybe now we have new information as to why he wanted that.

What we also know now, thanks to Thursday’s Jan. 6 committee hearing, is that Eastman (who was a Thomas clerk back in the day) knew that what he was promoting was illegal and told Trump so on Jan. 4, two days before the insurrection.

Eastman knew what he was pushing—with help from Ginni Thomas—was illegal. Following that to its logical conclusion, with the revelations of the last 24 hours, how does the committee not subpoena Ginni Thomas?

Furthermore, how do President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer not demand that Clarence Thomas resign? How do the House and Senate Judiciary Committees not turn their attention to Clarence Thomas and investigating just what Clarence and Ginni Thomas were cooking up together?

Here’s what retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig, a true conservative hero who was on George W. Bush’s short list for the Supreme Court, said: ”Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy. [...] I don’t speak those words lightly.”

Those allies and supporters include Supreme Court Clarence Thomas. The danger is coming from the highest court in the land and Congress has to deal with that. It’s time to begin the investigations leading to an impeachment of Clarence Thomas. No, this Senate would not convict with 50 Republicans, but after the work of the Jan. 6 committee and all of these revelations, they need to be forced to vote to protect him. They need to be making the case against Clarence Thomas, and then they need to start real work of reforming and expanding the Supreme Court.

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2020 was an election theft dry run for Republicans. Next time, they could succeed

Posted on by Joan McCarter

Every election starting now and into the foreseeable future is going to be the most important election of our lifetime. Until the Republican Party as we currently know it is ground to dust, scorched, and the earth on which it stands is salted, the threat of white nationalistic fascism will remain. Right now, in 2022, Republicans are running explicitly on undermining representative democracy, from the smallest local positions up through the state legislatures and all the way to Congress. They are converging behind the Big Lie and promising that they are going to fix it so that they don’t lose any more elections. So that Donald Trump (or his stand-in) will take the 2024 election.

They’re not even trying to be subtle about it—it’s explicit in so many campaigns for governor, attorney general, and secretary of state in plenty of battlegrounds, including the states that Trump tried to contest in 2020.

“What we’re seeing right now is unprecedented,” Joanna Lydgate, co-founder and CEO of States United Action, told CNN’s Rod Brownstein. “To see candidates running on a platform of lies and conspiracy theories about our elections as a campaign position, to see a former President getting involved in endorsing in down-ballot races at the primary level, and certainly to see this kind of systemic attacks on our elections, this spreading of disinformation about our elections—we’ve never seen anything like this before as a country.”

RELATED STORY: Republican state legislators are laying the groundwork to overturn the next election

Brownstein reports on a study released last week—commissioned by the groups States United Democracy Center, Protect Democracy, and Law Forward—which determined that 13 states have already approved laws to make sure there will be partisan control over election administration, laws to intimidate election administrators, and laws requiring audits of the 2020 election, as if that is a thing. That’s beyond the orgy they’ve been having for the past decade with voter suppression laws, which hasn’t ended either. Thirty-three states have another 229 bills related to denying the results of the last election, and to limiting the electorate and predetermining the outcome of future elections.

“Taken separately, each of these bills would chip away at the system of free and fair elections that Americans have sustained, and worked to improve, for generations,” the groups concluded. “Taken together, they could lead to an election in which the voters’ choices are disregarded and the election sabotaged.”

“In the leadup to the 2020 election, those who warned of a potential crisis were dismissed as alarmists by far too many Americans who should have seen the writing on the wall,” Jessica Marsden, counsel at Protect Democracy, told Brownstein in an email. “Almost two years later, after an attempted coup and a violent insurrection on our Capitol, election conspiracy theorists—including those who actually participated in January 6—are being nominated by the GOP to hold the most consequential offices for overseeing the 2024 election.”

“It’s all connected,” Lydgate said. “The playbook is to try to change the rules and change the referees, so you can change the results.”

They’ve got a very powerful referee on their side in the form of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

A casual observer might reasonably conclude that Ginni and Clarence Thomas are working in tandem to lay the groundwork for the next coup—with Ginni taking up the politics and Clarence handling the legal side. The symmetry between their work is remarkable. https://t.co/wUh5TiHk4q pic.twitter.com/tooRedMQJk

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) May 23, 2022

Thomas won’t recuse himself from any of these cases, and as of now, a Democratic Congress doesn’t seem particularly interested in trying to force him to via the threat of investigation and impeachment.

“What’s past is prologue, and what was done sloppily in 2020 is being mapped out by experts for 2024,” Slate’s Stern and Dahlia Lithwick write. “It didn’t work in 2020 because the legal and political structures to support it weren’t in place at the time. Those pieces are being put into place as we type this.” That’s the story Brownstein is also trying to get to Democrats and the rest of the traditional media—anyone who will listen and can do something about it.

There are answers. There are ways to fix this. They start with electing enough Democrats to state offices to make sure the damage the fascists can do is limited. We can also elect enough Democrats to the House and to the Senate to make the two Republican-friendly, obstructionist Democratic senators irrelevant.

Then it’ll be a matter of convincing that Democratic majority and a Democratic president that none of this is blogger hysteria, but a very real threat to our freedoms that has everybody else’s hair on fire. Saving our representative democracy means expanding and reforming the court.

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Clarence and Ginni Thomas take center stage at House hearing on Supreme Court ethics

Posted on by Joan McCarter

The federal judiciary is on tap for the House Wednesday—specifically, the topic of reforming the federal judiciary. The House has a raft of suspension bills (legislation that doesn’t require the regular rules process on the floor) it will run through, including the bipartisan Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act, which the Senate already passed in February. While that’s happening, the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts will hold a hearing on Supreme Court ethics, or lack thereof.

That’s the juicy part of the day, with lawmakers spurred on by the disclosure of Ginni Thomas’ text messages showing the depth of her involvement in trying to promote a coup. As the spouse of a wildly partisan political activist, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at the very least should have recused from any cases related to the 2020 election and Donald Trump. Which of course he did not. This hearing will examine the lack of Supreme Court ethics and Congress’ role in dealing with that, including impeachment.

A memo obtained by The Hill from subcommittee chair Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) and sent to members ahead of the hearing outlines the existing codes of conduct that apply to other federal judges and summarizes legislative proposals that would extend the code to Supreme Court justices. As of right now, they’re exempt from it and are expected to discipline themselves—which, in Thomas’ case, doesn’t happen. The memo also outlines Congress’ impeachment authority as one of the tools at their disposal.

“Threats or inquiries of impeachment as a means of regulating the conduct of Supreme Court justices have had varying effects,” the memo said. Just one justice in the nation’s history has been impeached by the House, Samuel Chase in 1804. He was not convicted by the Senate. In 1969, Justice Abe Fortas resigned over an impeachment threat. The current crop of Republican justices pretty much thumb their nose at the idea of ethics, in contrast to the newest justice-designate, Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has preemptively recused herself from an affirmative action case before she’s even been officially seated on the court.

Markos and Kerry talk Ukraine and speak with Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler on how hitting back at Republicans helps win elections

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The memo makes it clear that this hearing is about the Thomases and the increasing calls for action  “following the reporting about text messages between the spouse of an associate justice and the then-White House Chief of Staff.”

“The Supreme Court has long operated as though it were above the law. But, Justice Clarence Thomas’ refusal to recuse himself from cases surrounding January 6th, despite his wife’s involvement, raises serious ethical—and legal—alarm bells,” vice chair of the subcommittee Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY), said ahead of the hearing. “The need for strong, enforceable ethics laws is clearer than ever. We have to do more to hold the Court accountable and restore public trust through a binding code of ethics and recusal.”

“Recent reports that the text messages of a justice’s spouse urging the overturning of a free and fair election may have been at issue in a case in front the Supreme Court—but that the justice did not recuse himself from the case—is just the latest and particularly egregious example in an unfortunately long list of illustrations as to why Supreme Court justices need to follow a formal code of ethics,” Johnson told The Hill. “I have been calling for this sort of reform for years, and I am encouraged to see a large, bipartisan majority of the public in favor of this long overdue legislation.”

Republicans, and particularly Senate Republicans, are unlikely to agree because it’s their justices behaving badly. It is, however, important for Democrats to keep pushing that point and to keep up the drumbeat for reform. The threat of some kind of action from Congress—a SCOTUS code of ethics, court expansion, impeachment—is at this point the only leverage that exists against the rogue Supreme Court majority.

The legislation they will pass Wednesday (a slightly different version passed 422-4 in December) will help some toward that effort. It also demonstrates that even the most hardcore partisan Republicans—in this case the bill’s sponsor, Sen. John Cornyn—recognize that there has to be at least the gloss of accountability for the Supreme Court. The bill toughens financial disclosure requirements for federal judges, including Supreme Court justices. They will have to make financial holdings and stock trades publicly available online, in the interest of disclosing conflicts of interest that would warrant judges recusing themselves from related cases.

As it currently stands, the parties involved in a case can request to see the judge’s financial disclosures, as can members of the public, but the judges themselves get to decide how much information they release and when. They have sole discretion in redacting information and can take all the time they want to fulfill requests.

The legislation is a result of a report last fall in the Wall Street Journal that found more than 130 judges broke the law by hearing cases in which they had a financial interest instead of recusing themselves. The Journal found 685 lawsuits that were decided by judges with a financial stake, with the potential fallout of hundreds of cases being overruled.

When the Journal alerted the judges to these violations, “56 of the judges […] directed court clerks to notify parties in 329 lawsuits that they should have recused themselves. That means new judges might be assigned, potentially upending rulings.” Most of the judges gave lame excuses or played dumb. “I had no idea that I had an interest in any of these companies in what was a most modest retirement account,” said Judge Timothy Batten Sr. of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, who owned JPMorgan Chase stock and ruled favorably for the bank in several cases.

Under this legislation, everyone in the judiciary branch will have to follow disclosure requirements like those that apply to lawmakers, reporting within 45 days all stock trades of more than $1,000. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts will have to create an online database, searchable and publicly accessible, of judicial financial disclosure forms and will have to get those forms into the database within 90 days from when they’re filed. The new law will apply to Supreme Court justices as well as federal appellate, district court, bankruptcy, and magistrate judges. The database has to be online within six months of President Joe Biden signing the bill.

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The Supreme Court can’t be untouchable. Congress needs to investigate Thomas

Posted on (Updated by Joan McCarter

The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman is absolutely right: “The controversy over Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas, Clarence Thomas, and the Jan. 6 insurrection is demonstrating one profound difference between Democrats and Republicans: how they view the value of making a stink.”

Three years on, the ridiculous and entirely made-up Hunter Biden story is still a thing, more a thing than Donald Trump extorting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to try to get “dirt” on Biden. Because Republicans keep feeding it—because they know it will work.

Meanwhile, the spouse of a sitting U.S. Supreme Court justice was involved up to her eyebrows in the effort to overthrow the Congress and keep Donald Trump in office. The Donald Trump who was doing Vladimir Putin’s bidding in trying to withhold arms from Ukraine. Arms that Ukraine has desperately needed in its defense against Russia. That’s a pretty big thing! All definitely worth making a stink about. But thus far, Democratic leadership in Congress is not. The most they’ve done so far is say they think Thomas should recuse himself from any Jan. 6-related cases. Ineffectively.

That’s why Daily Kos and 16 other organizations have signed on to this Take Back the Court letter, demanding that Congress open a formal investigation into Clarence Thomas’ misconduct. We’ve written to Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the chairs of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, “to request that the House and Senate Judiciary Committees open a formal investigation into Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ misconduct in his handling of cases regarding the January 6 insurrection, the 2020 presidential election, and other cases involving his wife’s political activities.”

“Justice Thomas’ unethical conduct from the bench is within the purview of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, and we urge the committees to investigate that conduct fully, in cooperation with the January 6 Select Committee as needed,” the groups write.

Even though Supreme Court justices have chosen not to abide by the same code of ethics that other all federal judges must adhere to, they are bound by a federal statute that bars them from hearing cases in which their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” or in which their spouse has “an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.”

Thomas has already violated that statute. He’s ruled in multiple cases surrounding the 2020 election and the insurrection—including being the lone dissenting vote requiring Trump to provide records to the Jan. 6 committee, records that may very well include communications from Ginni Thomas. “Justice Thomas clearly violated this provision when he refused to recuse himself from a case directly implicating his wife’s activities in support of the January 6 insurrection, and it is incumbent on Congress to respond,” the groups write.

Thomas’ rulings on cases in which his wife was directly involved go back at least two decades. In December 2000, the court heard Bush v. Gore, the only time in history in which the Supreme Court selected a president. While the case was pending, Ginni Thomas was collecting résumés for potential Bush administration positions. Twelve years later, he heard the challenge against the Affordable Care Act, NFIB v. Sibelius. Ginni was then heading up a group called Liberty Central, which was agitating for the law to be declared unconstitutional. Back then, a group of 74 members of Congress asked Thomas to recuse from the case. He did not. He heard the case and voted in dissent when the court upheld the law.

So we know how polite requests for recusal are going to pan out. Thomas is not going to recuse out of any sense of propriety or ethics. That’s abundantly clear. There’s only one way it happens and that would require a formal investigation.

It’s not just his refusal to recuse from cases, either, that raises ethics concerns aboutThomas. “Justice Thomas has repeatedly failed to disclose employers who paid his wife hundreds of thousands of dollars, as required by the Ethics in Government Act of 1978,” Take Back the Court points out. “This raises serious questions about what, if anything, Justice Thomas is trying to hide, whether any other undisclosed payments exist, and what possible judicial outcomes such hidden details relate to.”

“Allowing Justice Thomas to avoid scrutiny will surely cause the American people’s faith in our judicial system to deteriorate further—perhaps beyond repair. Americans know that Justice Thomas cannot act impartially in cases related to his wife’s political activities,” the groups write. “It’s up to your committees to ensure that he is held accountable for abusing his power and pretending otherwise.”

Nothing is going to happen to Thomas without Democrats kicking up a stink. An investigation into Thomas will sure stink for the Supreme Court, and for Chief Justice John Roberts, who seems to care about his legacy as much as anything else. Yes, it needs to happen.

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As momentum builds in Congress to do something about Thomas, impeachment needs to be an option

Posted on (Updated by Joan McCarter

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is a problem for the court, for the nation, and for democracy in general. That’s been true for decades, as long as his deep ties to the dark money swirling around the judiciary, and doesn’t even take into account the extremely partisan activities of his “best friend” and wife Ginni. Since those activities now include attempting to overthrow the government, the problem of Clarence Thomas just got a whole lot more glaring—and congressional leadership has been caught just a bit flat-footed.

Stepping into the void, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the first to use the “I” word. “Clarence Thomas should resign,” she tweeted. “If not, his failure to disclose income from right-wing organizations, recuse himself from matters involving his wife, and his vote to block the Jan 6th commission from key information must be investigated and could serve as grounds for impeachment.”

By all means, the House should start talking about impeachment. That’s what Thomas deserves: the ultimate censure. That’s where to start: the maximum. There’s no real other leverage the other two branches have over the Supreme Court than pressure in the public eye and the threat of action. Chief Justice John Roberts has been aware enough about his personal legacy in his career thus far to make blowing up the Thomas scandal in public—and keeping it there with discussion of impeachment—a smart tactic.

Would the 50-50 Senate convict him? No, but that’s a valuable weapon for Democrats in the upcoming election. Republicans are protecting the Supreme Court justice who has refused to recuse himself from cases involving his wife’s efforts to overthrow the government.

The good news is that Democrats are inching toward something a little more concrete than demanding that Thomas recuse. That’s where they started. A group of House and Senate Democrats, spearheaded by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), wrote to the Supreme Court requesting that Thomas recuse himself from any future Jan. 6-related cases, as well as provide a “written explanation for his failure to recuse himself” in previous cases.

“[G]iven the recent disclosures about Ms. Thomas’s efforts to overturn the election and her specific communications with White House officials about doing so, Justice Thomas’s participation in cases involving the 2020 election and the January 6th attack is exceedingly difficult to reconcile with federal ethics requirements,” says the letter obtained by The Washington Post.

The lawmakers also called on Roberts to commit to creating “a binding Code of Conduct for the Supreme Court—the only court in the country not currently subject to a judicial code of ethics—that includes (1) enforceable provisions to ensure that the Justices comply with this Code and (2) a requirement that all Justices issue written recusal decision.” They ask that he do so by April 28.

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Which is a fine and appropriate next step, since Thomas will surely refuse to recuse. “He absolutely should recuse himself,” Jayapal told Politico. But, she added, “Clearly the Supreme Court is in need of ethics reforms.”

Jayapal is on the House Judiciary committee, so the ethics reform thing is another possibility. In fact, legislation to impose the Judicial Code of Ethics on the Supreme Court—which is currently exempt from it—would be a good concurrent step for Congress to be taking along with the public pressure campaign to get him to resign. That legislation exists in a bill written by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and should start moving through committee immediately.

After an ill-conceived dismissal of the issue on Monday by Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin, who suggested there’s no urgency to the Thomas problem, there’s now some momentum there. Durbin had a day to think it over and is now joining Warren in saying lawmakers need to act. Durbin told CNN’s Manu Raju that imposing the ethics code on the Supreme Court is “long overdue.” Warren told him the legislation should include limits on stocks and “rules about other kinds of personal conflicts.” The Senate Democrats are expected to discuss Murphy’s legislation in their conference luncheon Tuesday, Raju reports.

That’s all fine and needs to move apace. At the same time, House Democrats should not rule out pursuing impeachment, which has to initiate in that chamber. Once again, Ocasio-Cortez is pushing Democrats to go there. Remember, she said, that pushing for impeachment of Trump on his extortion of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was initially deemed “unrealistic,” and the “debate was fierce & opposition real.” But, she argues, “When we look back at the decision to impeach Trump over Ukraine today, could you imagine if the naysayers and those claiming to be ‘politically savvier’ won? WE would be explaining why we allowed it to happen instead of the Senate explaining why they acquitted.” That’s on the Senate Republicans.

“Subpoenas, investigations, and impeachment should absolutely be on the table. We shouldn’t have to think twice about that,” she concluded in the thread. “We must go where the facts take us. A failure to act puts the imperiling of democracy squarely on *our* shoulders. It’s our duty to defend it.”

Let the Senate lead on the code of ethics legislation. How are Senate Republicans going to argue about that? The House needs to start those investigations toward impeachment. Both chambers should also be talking now about legislation to expand the court, and to put pressure on President Joe Biden to join as well. If there’s going to be any change, any accountability at the court, it’s not going to come without a big public stink. It’s the only way it’s going to happen.

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Hawley injects QAnon conspiracy theory into Jackson SCOTUS nomination. Democrats should shut it down

Posted on by Joan McCarter

Noted insurrectionist and treason-curious Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has decided to bring some QAnon seasoning to the disgustingly and blatantly racist appeals for opposition to Judge Ketanji Brown Jackon’s Supreme Court nomination. In a long and slimy Twitter screed that does not merit linking to, Hawley suggests that Jackson isn’t just “soft on crime”—the dog whistle Republican narrative—but has coddled sex offenders and in particular pedophiles.

Hawley went so far as to say that “her record endangers children,” a charge that has probably already been picked up on by the worst of the worst QAnon conspiracy theorists who feed the right-wing media. Expect it to show up on Fox News any minute now.

That makes Sen. Dick Durbin’s attitude a little too dismissive. The Judiciary Committee chair told Politico: “I don’t believe in it being taken seriously … I’m troubled by it because it’s so outrageous. It really tests the committee as to whether we’re going to be respectful in the way we treat this nominee.”

Yes, yes it does. Particularly when Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—after that screed from Hawley was posted—lied through his teeth, telling conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that “I think Judge Jackson will be treated respectfully. I think the questions will be appropriate.” No. The questions will not be appropriate. Hawley just proved that, and McConnell needs to be pressured into holding him to account for that.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates responded appropriately. “This is toxic and weakly-presented misinformation that relies on taking cherry-picked elements of her record out of context—and it buckles under the lightest scrutiny.” The full statement:

Judge Jackson’s is a proud mother of two whose nomination has been endorsed by leading law enforcement organizations, conservative judges, and survivors of crime. This is toxic and weakly-presented misinformation that relies on taking cherry-picked elements of her record out of context—and it buckles under the lightest scrutiny. It’s based on a report unanimously agreed to by all of the Republicans on the US Sentencing Commission, on selectively presenting a short transcript excerpt in which Judge Jackson was quoting a witness’s testimony back to them to ask a question, and on omitting that her rulings are in line with sentencing practices across the entire federal judiciary regarding these crimes. In the overwhelming majority of her cases involving child sex crimes, the sentences Judge Jackson imposed were consistent with or above what the government or U.S. Probation recommended.

There is the problem that when you are explaining, you are losing. But what Bates says is all true, and it’s what Democrats need to bring to next week’s hearing for Jackson: the facts. But they have to bring those facts with anger and fire and ferocity. They have to be prepared to humiliate the worm Hawley (and Ted Cruz, and Tom Cotton, and Marsha Blackburn—the very worst of the Republicans are on this committee) to the utmost.

That means some discipline and some coordination among Democrats, which is far too often missing in these hearings. They’re generally too enamored with the sound of their own voices and the rare opportunity to carry on in front of national television cameras to actually be effective.

They can take some inspiration from Twitter. For example, using this:

Clarence Thomas wanted to strike down a law allowing federal courts to order civil commitment for sex offenders. I look forward to Hawley's forthcoming articles of impeachment against this soft-on-crime, child predator-coddling justice. https://t.co/yV8QB1lYUQ https://t.co/aW7ZOB9yqE

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) March 17, 2022

This shit has to be called out for what it is. Forget the “comity” of the Senate hearing room. Forget the pomp and circumstance of the hearing room. When the likes of Hawley tries to advance this kind of malevolent bile, Democrats need to be united in attacking back and exposing it.

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