US Supreme Court Discussions

[Frelga]

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[N.E. Brigand]

New from ProPublica: "Billionaire Harlan Crow Bought Property From Clarence Thomas. The Justice Didn’t Disclose the Deal."

In 2014, Crow's "company bought properties for $133,363 from three co-owners — Thomas, his mother and the family of Thomas’ late brother," and:

The purchase put Crow in an unusual position: He now owned the house where the justice’s elderly mother was living. Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees. The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints.

A federal disclosure law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to disclose the details of most real estate sales over $1,000. Thomas never disclosed his sale of the Savannah properties. That appears to be a violation of the law, four ethics law experts told ProPublica.

[RoseMorninStar]

Wow. It just doesn't end, does it?

[N.E. Brigand]

Following the argument of Harlan Crow's defenders to its logical conclusion

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[N.E. Brigand]

It was quite right for Fortas to resign. But since that happened in 1969, the Supreme Court has never had a majority of its justices be appointees of Democratic presidents, despite the fact that Democrats have held the White House for 22 of the next 53 years, i.e., for 41% of that period.

(And that's setting aside the facts that (1) the Republican President who appointed Fortas's successor and two more justices after that was a criminal who himself resigned from office five years later and also that (2) two more Republican presidents in that period, who served a combined 12 years and appointed another five justices, were elected despite their opponents getting more votes than them.)

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Returning to Justice Thomas: CREW, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has sent this letter to Chief Justice Roberts and Attorney General Garland asking for Thomas to be investigated. Probably won't happen.

[N.E. Brigand]

Has Thomas disclosed small gifts even has he failed to disclose the expensive vacation trips?

Yes. Or at least in 2015 when Clarence Thomas failed to disclose the property sales we learned about yesterday, he did disclose a bunch of items of lesser value, including "teaching fees, travel reimbursement, [and] a $530 stained glass medallion".

[N.E. Brigand]

1. Over the weekend, the Washington Post reported that "Clarence Thomas has for years declared income from a defunct real estate firm." However, that seems just to be a legitimate oversight: the company name changed and Justice Thomas simply didn't update that in his filings.

2. The Dallas News interviewed Thomas's benefactor, Harlan Crow, who says that he met Thomas by chance when he learned from a think tank in D.C. that the Justice would be speaking at an event in Dallas, so Crow offered him a flight on his jet. As one does.

This morning, CNN reported that:

3. Thomas will be amending his 2014 financial disclosures to note Crow's purchase from Thomas of his childhood home and some adjacent houses.

4. Just in the past hour, CNN reported that Justice Thomas's mother lives *rent free* in one of those houses that Crow bought nine years ago.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Thomas claimed that he didn't think that he needed to report the property sale because he "lost money". That is bullshit on so many different levels that I am not even going to try to express it.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'm going to put this here rather than in the abortion thread where we have been talking about this case, because it is more about ongoing Supreme Court politics. More and more it is appearing that there is three groups of three that make up the current court. We have the moderate/liberal group of Kagan, Sotomayer and Jackson on one side and the hardcore radical conservatives of Thomas, Alito and (usually) Gorsuch on the other, with Barrett and Kavanaugh more and more aligning with Roberts, highly conservative, but not as radically so.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The next one.

[N.E. Brigand]

It seems pretty obvious that Gorsuch deliberately obscured this transaction from scrutiny: "Gorsuch listed as the source [of this payment] only the name that he and his two co-owners gave themselves, Walden Group LLC. The report didn't indicate that there had been a real estate sale or a purchaser."

[N.E. Brigand]

I appreciated this reminder of previous reporting on one of Neil Gorsuch's billionaire friends, whose media company (the one which produced the Narnia films) apparently inspired the name of the property that Gorsuch sold to Brian Duffy.

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Yesterday Bloomberg reported that Clarence Thomas's benefactor Harlan Crow did in fact have some business before the Supreme Court: in 2005, the Court declined to hear an appeal from an architectural firm that had lost a lawsuit against a real estate company for $25 million. Crow had a stake in that company. It appears that Thomas didn't recuse from the Court's decision to turn away the appeal.

Of course, this is almost beside the point. Crow and Thomas will generally have been smart enough not to conduct their improper behavior so flagrantly. Crow benefits financially from all sorts of ruling the Supreme Court makes on general business matters. He could just tell Thomas how he wants him to rule on such cases if Thomas wishes to continue enjoying those fancy vacations. Or if that's too obvious: Crow has been on the board of the American Enterprise Institute for nearly 30 years, as Justice Thomas knows very well. AEI files amicus briefs with the Supreme Court regularly. When Thomas sees such a brief, surely he knows what Crow wants him to do.

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And speaking of Harlan Crow: it seems that he purchased dual citizenship from St. Kitts and Nevis. As good American patriots do.

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Edited to note that as I was typing, Chief Justice John Roberts declined a Senate request to testify about his colleagues' apparent corruption.

Subpoena him.

(While Senator Dianne Feinstein is out, they can't.)

[Voronwë the Faithful]

In most cases, Thomas does not really need an AEI brief to know how Crow would want him to rule.

[N.E. Brigand]

OK, this is funny:

[N.E. Brigand]

Edited to note that as I was typing, Chief Justice John Roberts declined a Senate request to testify about his colleagues' apparent corruption.

Subpoena him.

(While Senator Dianne Feinstein is out, they can't.)

I was wrong. On the Senate Judiciary Committee, proxy votes are permitted for subpoenas. (There's even video at that link of that very thing happening.) So unless Feinstein is in a coma, the Committee can indeed get her proxy vote and subpoena Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Thomas, and Justice Gorsuch.

[N.E. Brigand]

Justice Alito thinks the person who leaked the Dobbs decision last year was a clerk for one of the liberal justices, but he can't prove it. The interviewer apparently didn't ask Alito why he didn't testify under oath in the leak investigation.

Chief Justice Roberts's wife, Jane, is a legal recruiter who earned "$10.3 million in commissions from elite law firms" who have appeared before the Court, without Roberts recusing. And Congress has known this for months.

[Frelga]

When was the last time Supreme Court was a joke?

“We can all see Clarence Thomas but he belongs to billionaire Harlan Crow. And that’s what an NFT is." Roy Wood Jr. makes a dig at Clarence Thomas at this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner

The full set

[N.E. Brigand]

Some on the right are complaining that Democrats are ignoring liberal justices's failures to disclose free travel and housing:



For the record: I believe Justice Sotomayor absolutely should have disclosed this.