Problems with the Supreme Court

[TSherbs]

Now I read that Gorsuch also did not declare business having been done with a person having litigation in front of the court. How much will this pattern spread through these justices? I guess we'll find out, since reporters are now combing back through thousands of cases and business databases.

[TSherbs]

WaPo article (gifted) on two different bills that have been put forth to require the Supreme Court to impose clearer standards on itself and police itself and report findings to Congress and to the public.

AKing (my senator) and LMurkowski have authored the more recent (and less stringent) bill....

https://wapo.st/41Lqkl5

[Chip]

The US supreme court’s alleged ethics issues are worse than you probably realize

Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have both been accused of ethics violations – and John Roberts refuses to discuss the matter with Congress

Opinion by Moira Donegan
Apr 2023

It was a short letter. John Roberts, chief justice of the US supreme court, was brief in his missive to Democratic senator Dick Durbin, who chairs the Senate judiciary committee. Citing “separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence”, Roberts declined to appear before the committee to discuss disturbing recent revelations of ethics violations at the court.

Congress is meant to exert checks on judicial power – to investigate or even impeach judges who abuse their office or interpret the law in ways that violate its spirit, and to affirm that the elected branches will hold more sway over policy than the appointed one. But the chief justice’s show of indifference to congressional oversight authority reflects a new reality: that there are now effectively no checks on the power of the court – at least none that Democrats have the political will to use – and that the justices can be assured that they will face no repercussions even if they act in flagrant violation of ethical standards. It seems that they intend to.

The committee summoned Roberts to testify because it appears that he’s not exactly running a tight ship. On 6 April, an investigation by ProPublica found that Justice Clarence Thomas had, over decades, accepted millions of dollars’ worth of private plane flights, “superyacht” trips and luxury vacations from the Texas billionaire and conservative megadonor Harlan Crow – and that, in alleged violation of federal ethics law, he had not disclosed almost any of it.

Subsequent reporting revealed that Crow had in fact bought Thomas’s childhood home in Savannah, Georgia, where the justice’s elderly mother still lives, along with several plots on the block. After paying Thomas for the real estate, the billionaire cleared local blight, made significant renovations to the house and allowed Thomas’s mother to continue living there, rent-free.

None of those transactions had been detailed on Thomas’s ethics forms, either. In addition to the soft influence Crow would have been able to buy with his extensive largesse, the billionaire’s generous gifts also seem to have created a direct conflict of interest for Justice Thomas: Crow’s firm had business before the US supreme court at least once, and Thomas did not recuse himself from the case.

It is not Thomas’s first time in ethical hot water. He was famously accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, including Anita Hill, during his time in the Reagan administration as head of the employee-rights protection watchdog, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He has been accused of having perjured himself in his subsequent testimony about his behavior toward Hill at his confirmation hearings.

During his long tenure on the court, he has repeatedly had trouble filling out his financial disclosure forms correctly. Once, he failed to report more than half a million dollars in income that his wife, the conservative activist Ginni Thomas, received from the rightwing Heritage Foundation. He said at the time that he had misunderstood the forms. That was also his excuse regarding Harlan Crow’s largesse. Thomas claims that he was advised that he did not have to report “hospitality”. It is a loophole in the ethics code that is meant to relieve judges of having to report, say, barbecue dinners at the homes of their neighbors – not, as Thomas claims he took it to mean, luxury yacht tours of Indonesia.

Roberts’ curt rejection of the committee’s invitation to testify speaks to an evident indifference to ethical standards

Although Thomas may be uniquely prolific in his alleged ethical violations, the problem isn’t unique to him. Politico revealed this week that just nine days after his confirmation to the US supreme court in April 2017, Justice Neil Gorsuch sold a log cabin in Colorado to Brian Duffy, the chief executive of the prominent law firm Greenberg Traurig. Before Gorsuch’s confirmation, the justice and the other co-owners of the home had tried for two years to sell it, without success.

Since the sale, Duffy’s firm has had business before the court at least 22 times. Gorsuch did disclose the income from the sale on financial disclosure forms, but failed to mention that the buyer was a big shot at one of the country’s largest law firms who would regularly bring cases before Gorsuch at his new job.

It’s certainly possible that Duffy simply liked the house, and that the convenient timing of his purchase so soon after Gorsuch’s confirmation to the court was a mere coincidence. And it seems reasonable to believe Thomas and Crow when they say that they are sincere friends, if less reasonable to believe Thomas when he claims that he misunderstood his disclosure obligations. But corruption need not be as vulgar and direct as a quid pro quo: it can be the subtle machinations of influence and sympathy that occur in these relationships, inflected both by money and by closeness, that lead the justices to see cases as they otherwise wouldn’t, or act in ways contrary to the integrity of their office and the interests of the law.

Bad intent by the justices need not be present for the mere appearance of corruption to have a corrosive effect on the rule of law, and both Gorsuch and Thomas have allowed a quite severe appearance of corruption to attach itself to the court. Both have claimed that they are such intelligent and gifted legal minds that they should be given lifelong appointments of unparalleled power, and also that they have made innocent mistakes on legal forms that they are too dumb to understand.

The claim strains credulity. What it looks like, to the American people who have to live under the laws that the supreme court shapes, is that Thomas has long been living lavishly on the dime of a rightwing billionaire who wants rightwing rulings, and that Gorsuch conveniently managed to sell a house he didn’t want at the precise moment when he became important enough to be worth bribing.

The chief justice doesn’t seem very worried about this appearance of impropriety. In light of these alarming ethics concerns, Roberts’ curt rejection of the committee’s invitation to testify speaks to an evident indifference to ethical standards, or a contempt for the oversight powers of the nominally coequal branches. Ironically enough, his nonchalance has made the reality even more plain than it was before: the court will not police itself. The other branches need to show the justices their place.

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...e_iOSApp_Other

[Chip]

More crony corruption and Federalist Society subversion. What's next?

How Scalia Law School Became a Key Friend of the Court

George Mason University’s law school cultivated ties to justices, with generous pay and unusual perks. In turn, it gained prestige, donations and influence.

Steve Eder and Jo Becker
April 30, 2023

In the fall of 2017, an administrator at George Mason University’s law school circulated a confidential memo about a prospective hire.

Just months earlier, Neil M. Gorsuch, a federal appeals court judge from Colorado, had won confirmation to the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the death of Antonin Scalia, the conservative icon for whom the school was named. For President Donald J. Trump, bringing Judge Gorsuch to Washington was the first step toward fulfilling a campaign promise to cement the high court unassailably on the right. For the leaders of the law school, bringing the new justice to teach at Scalia Law was a way to advance their own parallel ambition.

“Establishing and building a strong relationship with Justice Gorsuch during his first full term on the bench could be a game-changing opportunity for Scalia Law, as it looks to accelerate its already meteoric rise to the top rank of law schools in the United States,” read the memo, contained in one of thousands of internal university emails obtained by The New York Times.

By the winter of 2019, the law school faculty would include not just Justice Gorsuch but also two other members of the court, Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett M. Kavanaugh — all deployed as strategic assets in a campaign to make Scalia Law, a public school in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, a Yale or Harvard of conservative legal scholarship and influence.

The law school had long stood out for its rightward leanings and ties to conservative benefactors. Its renaming after Justice Scalia in 2016 was the result of a $30 million gift brokered by Leonard Leo, prime architect of a grand project then gathering force to transform the federal judiciary and further the legal imperatives of the right. An ascendant law school at George Mason would be part of that plan.

Since the rebranding, the law school has developed an unusually expansive relationship with the justices of the high court — welcoming them as teachers but also as lecturers and special guests at school events. Scalia Law, in turn, has marketed that closeness with the justices as a unique draw to prospective students and donors.

The Supreme Court assiduously seeks to keep its inner workings, and the justices’ lives, shielded from view, even as recent revelations and ethical questions have brought calls for greater transparency. Yet what emerges from the trove of documents is a glimpse behind the Supreme Court curtain, revealing one particular version of the favored treatment the justices often receive from those seeking to get closer to them.

The documents show how Scalia Law has offered the justices a safe space in a polarized Washington — an academic cocoon filled with friends and former clerks, where their legal views are celebrated, they are given top pay and treated to teaching trips abroad, and their personal needs are anticipated, from lunch orders to, in Justice Gorsuch’s case, house hunting.

By law, justices may earn outside income from a limited number of sources: book advances and royalties, investments, and teaching. The judicial code of conduct specifically encourages teaching. Many justices have augmented their government salaries, which now hover beneath $300,000, by holding classes at schools including Harvard, Duke and Notre Dame.

But Scalia Law quickly moved to the front of the line, in part by offering generous benefits. For teaching summer courses that generally ran for up to two weeks, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh each made salaries that approached the legal cap on certain outside income, roughly $30,000 in recent years. The school also creates bespoke programs for the justices in far-flung locations. Justice Gorsuch has traveled to Iceland and Italy to teach; Justice Kavanaugh has taught in Britain. During the first pandemic summer, both justices pressed on with their classes, teaching at stateside resorts. (Only Justice Thomas has routinely held his classes on campus, with two of his former clerks as co-professors.)

“When a justice is with us, we do everything we can to engage the justice with our students,” the law school’s dean, Ken Randall, said in a statement. He added, “Law schools serve students, and their education is undoubtedly enhanced by the justices teaching or visiting or speaking with students.”

At times, the justices’ teaching has intersected with their positions on the court. Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas regularly used employees in their chambers to coordinate their outside academic duties, despite a judicial advisory opinion — which the justices say they voluntarily follow — that staff members should not help “in performing activities for which extra compensation is to be received.” And in a number of instances, the justices’ co-professors filed amicus briefs, trying to sway the court on pending cases, the records show.

A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court declined to comment for this article.

Some of the records reviewed by The Times were obtained through a public-records request, which the university fulfilled only after the court was allowed to review the documents. Many of them were held back or arrived heavily redacted. In a statement, Scalia Law said the court had been consulted for security reasons. (In addition, The Times examined records obtained years ago by the activist group UnKoch My Campus.)

By any number of metrics, Scalia Law’s closeness to the justices has coincided with a striking upswing in its fund-raising and academic standing. The number of graduates receiving prestigious clerkships has steadily increased, and that has helped the school attract higher-caliber students. Scalia Law is now tied for 30th place in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, a big jump in a relatively short time. In the process, it has become something of a hub of conservative legal thought, and legal society, in the capital.

Scalia Law has hit its stride in part by capitalizing on the conservative outcry against “woke” elite institutions of higher education. Having a robust conservative alternative like Scalia Law “adds to the debate,” said C. Boyden Gray, a major donor to the school who held senior positions in both Bush administrations. “It is very healthy.”

Yet to a lesser degree, the school has also been able to entice the court’s liberals: Justice Elena Kagan, who has called for the court’s conservative and liberal wings to rediscover “common ground,” joined Justice Gorsuch as a distinguished guest when he taught his summer course in Iceland in 2021. Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke on a Scalia Law panel with him the same year.

In late 2019, Justice Kagan emailed a George Mason professor who had clerked for Justice Thomas. “George Mason,” she wrote, “seems a really good place to be.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/30/u...e=articleShare

[TSherbs]

George MAson Univ, the honey pot.

Follow the money.

[TSherbs]

"No mention of Ginni, of course."

[Chip]

"No mention of Ginni, of course."

About that: another catchy new release in the Thomas hit parade. (FYI: Leonard Leo is the evil genius guiding the Federalist Society.)

Clarence Thomas under scrutiny after report of activist’s payments to his wife

Leonard Leo funneled funds to Ginni Thomas with instructions not to mention her, Washington Post reports

Chris Stein
Fri 5 May 2023

The conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas is under renewed scrutiny after the Washington Post found that an activist with interests in the court’s decisions funneled tens of thousands of dollars to Thomas’s wife, with instructions not to mention her name.

The report published on Thursday outlines instances in which activist Leonard Leo paid Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, via the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway. Citing documents it had obtained, the Post said that Leo told Conway to bill one of his non-profits and send the funds to Thomas, at one point mentioning that paperwork associated with the transaction should have “no mention of Ginni, of course”.

A staunch abortion foe who is said to have helped Donald Trump choose his nominees for the supreme court, Leo told Conway’s firm, Polling Company, to bill his Judicial Education Project for “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting”.

The Post reports that it was unclear what type of consulting work Thomas did for either firm, but the Polling Company paid a total of $80,000 to Thomas’s Liberty Consulting from June 2011 to June 2012, with plans to pay another $20,000 before the end of that year.

The Post’s story is the latest in a stream of reports scrutinizing the ethics of supreme court justices, which began last month when ProPublica revealed entanglements between Clarence Thomas and the Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow. Thomas has for years accepted luxury travel from Crow and at one point participated in a real estate deal with the billionaire, without fully disclosing these associations, ProPublica reported. On Thursday, ProPublica revealed Crow also paid for Thomas’s great-nephew to attend a boarding school in Georgia.

Politico has reported that Neil Gorsuch, a conservative appointed to the supreme court by Trump, profited from the sale of a home to the executive of a law firm involved in cases the panel was considering. Gorsuch did not disclose the identity of the buyer in his mandatory reporting forms.

The supreme court swung firmly to the right after Trump appointed Gorsuch and two other conservatives to the bench. Last year, that group together with Thomas and fellow conservative justice Samuel Alito voted to overturn Roe v Wade and allow states to ban abortion entirely, and also issued decisions expanding the right to carry a concealed weapon without a permit and cutting into the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate power plant emissions.

Democrats cried foul over the recent reports about justice’s ethics, and the Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday held a hearing examining whether Congress should impose a code of conduct on the nation’s highest court. The committee’s chair, Dick Durbin, invited Chief Justice John Roberts to testify, but he declined, while sending along a statement signed by all nine justices to “reaffirm and restate foundational ethics principles and practices to which they subscribe”.

Republicans at the hearing showed no interest in considering legislation creating an ethics code for the court, and the matter seems unlikely to advance.

The Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who serves on the judiciary committee, said the Post’s report is a reminder of Leo’s determination to influence the court. “As news continues to reveal the depth of Leonard Leo’s creepy plot, it needs to be clear: his business isn’t *before* the Court; his business *is* the Court,” he tweeted.

In a statement to the Post, Leo said: “It is no secret that Ginni Thomas has a long history of working on issues within the conservative movement, and part of that work has involved gauging public attitudes and sentiment. The work she did here did not involve anything connected with either the court’s business or with other legal issues.”

Regarding his instruction to not mention Thomas’s name on the billing paperwork, he said: “Knowing how disrespectful, malicious and gossipy people can be, I have always tried to protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni.”

According to the Post, Leo’s Judicial Education Project has in about 13 instances submitted to the supreme court amicus briefs, which outside groups use to share insights with the justices. One of the cases he weighed in on was Shelby county v Holder, a challenge to a federal civil rights law in which the conservative bloc struck down a formula governing which states had to seek justice department approval before changing their voting laws.

Thomas was in the majority on that decision, issuing a concurring opinion that aligned both with his previous writings on the topic, and with the reasoning in the Judicial Education Project’s brief.

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023...e_iOSApp_Other

[TSherbs]

I've seen it written elsewhere that these revelations (all non-criminal, as far as I can tell) are nothing more than a liberal muckraking campaign showing the bias of the press and even racism toward Thomas.

Clearly, some members of the press are now combing through everything they can find about these justices and their money dealings and connections and supporters. Maybe even teams of reporters. Are they focused more on conservative justices? I don't know. If any reporting team for a conservative news organization (and they do exist, including the largest media outfit in the American market) is interested in looking at other justices with this level of scrutiny, they should go for it. All in. I will assume, until I learn otherwise, that ALL of the justices are being looked at this way because maybe the problem is endemic. Or maybe the liberal justices are worse! The George Mason Law article above mentions *all* the justices, including liberal ones, who have taken cushy appointments there over the years.

But until the evidence is reported on in meaningful ways, we just have to go with what we have thus far: Thomas seems to have drifted closest to the rails of ethical propriety in how he has accepted the largesse of this one supporter ("friend") in particular: he accepted lavish trips beyond the scope of the typical, he stopped reporting the various ways he received money from him, and monies to his wife's firm seem to have been intentionally hidden. If other justices have done similar things, let's get it out in the open. I will assume that more reporters are digging into this as far as they possibly can. Come on, Fox. If you want to be considered a real news organization, get some investigative journalists doing the grunt work.

Here is my take thus far:

1) I see no evidence that Thomas has been criminal. But I also don't buy that he made some errors out of misunderstanding. What, he fills out his own TurboTax form? Where is his accountant in all this? Regardless, Thomas does not (yet) appear to have committed a crime.

2) These revelations have tainted Thomas, his spouse Ginny (Jan 6 has already corroded her reputation), and the perception of the ethical rectitude and independence of the Supreme Court. I agree with Ruth Marcus that it does not appear that Thomas's votes were being bought in any specific way. But that would be only the *worst* of all scenarios; other degradations are still in play. What this *says* (seems to confirm) is the perception that even our Supreme Court justices can and do participate in enjoying the inner circle of the power brokers of political ideology and monied interests with which everyone assumes that the justice is aligned. And all, apparently, legally. This is *not good.*

2) Reporters should keep digging at the financial dealings of all of the SC judges.

3) The ethics rules for the Supreme Court need to be tightened to address what these revelations have shown and to address the corrosion of our confidence in their judicial independence.

[Chip]

Supremely Arrogant

Maureen Dowd
Opinion Columnist
May 6, 2023

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is still great.

It’s the greatest gathering of grievances we’ve ever seen on the high court. The woe-is-me bloc of conservative male justices is obsessed with who has wronged them. It might be an opportune time to hire a Supreme shrink so these resentful men can get some much-needed therapy and stop working out their issues from the bench.

Neil Gorsuch is settling a score for his mother. In her memoir, Anne Gorsuch Burford wrote that when she was forced out as Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator in 1983, her 15-year-old son, Neil, “was really upset.” He told her: “You should never have resigned. You didn’t do anything wrong. You only did what the president ordered. You raised me not to be a quitter. Why are you a quitter?” The scar from that trauma flared as he prepared a moot court brief with classmates at Harvard Law School and “tried to add material concerning the E.P.A. that did not fit,” according to a classmate who talked to The New York Times.

Burford was attacked during her tempestuous tenure as an enemy of the environment who slashed rules and spending to gut the E.P.A. The last straw, even for Republican lawmakers and Reagan officials, was when she rejected calls to turn over documents about a toxic-waste cleanup program that her agency had corrupted. She received a contempt citation from Congress.

Last year, her son moved to complete her toxic mission. He enthusiastically joined the 6-to-3 vote to severely curtail the E.P.A.’s ability to regulate power plant emissions. The activists who pushed for Gorsuch to be nominated to the court are finally getting to their real goal: the dismantling of their despised administrative state.

On Monday, the court agreed to review its unanimous decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council from 1984. As Charlie Savage wrote in The Times: “If the court overturns or sharply limits the Chevron precedent, it would become easier for business owners to challenge regulations across the economy. Those include rules aimed at ensuring that the air and water are clean; that food, drugs, cars and consumer products are safe; and that financial firms do not take on too much risk.”

The Chevron ruling arose from a challenge to a decision by Gorsuch’s mother to lower automobile emissions standards. He can now vindicate her stance.

Samuel Alito also feels maltreated. In writing the opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade, this brazenly political justice who doesn’t distinguish between his legal and religious views mercilessly stripped women of the right to make decisions about their bodies. But somehow, he whines that he is the victim. Last month Alito told The Wall Street Journal that he did not like the way the court’s legitimacy was being questioned. “We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us.”

Funny. That’s how many women feel about this Supreme Court.

Clarence Thomas, who is still bitter over being outed as a porn-loving harasser of women who worked for him — even though Joe Biden did his best to sweep the corroborating evidence under the Senate rug — was slapped with more revelations of ethics derelictions this past week. ProPublica broke the news that Thomas’s billionaire benefactor for luxury trips and family property, Harlan Crow, had also secretly paid the private school tuition for Thomas’s grandnephew.

The Washington Post revealed that Leonard Leo, an executive vice president at the Federalist Society — the cult that has transformed the courts in its own right-wing image — surreptitiously funneled tens of thousands of dollars to Thomas’s wife, Ginni, for “consulting work” a decade ago.

The Post reported that Leo told the G.O.P. pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Mrs. Thomas, but stipulated that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

“The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case,” the paper said.

John Roberts cannot accept that these justices are incapable of policing themselves. Despite all the slime around him, he refused to testify before Congress about a court that blithely disdains ethics. One reason may be, as The Times reported, that the chief justice’s own wife, Jane, has made millions of dollars as a legal recruiter, placing lawyers at firms with business before the Supreme Court.

Even though I’ve been writing since Bush v. Gore that the court is full of hacks and the bloom is off the robes, it is still disorienting to see the murk of this Supreme Court.


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/06/o...e=articleShare

[TSherbs]

Very interesting. I had no idea about the Gorsuch family.

[dneal]

Maureen Dowd, writing essentially a gossip column, describes the inner motives of people as described to her by other people. A calliope of opinions that requires mind reading.

Supremely arrogant, indeed.

[Chip]

Very interesting. I had no idea about the Gorsuch family.

I remember when Reagan appointed his mother to office. The oil-and-gas and mining lobbyists in Cheyenne threw a big drunken bash for the state legislators.

She was as dishonest as the day is long.

[dneal]

The $3+M book deal SotoMayor had, while she presided over a case involving her publisher, seems absent in all these news articles.

[Chip]

The $3+M book deal SotoMayor had, while she presided over a case involving her publisher, seems absent in all these news articles.

So stop whining and post something.

(There's a bit toward the end of the piece on the Scalia Law School about some of the liberal justices cozying up.)

[dneal]

Whining? Just noting the partisanship.

[Kgbenson]

Now I read that Gorsuch also did not declare business having been done with a person having litigation in front of the court. How much will this pattern spread through these justices? I guess we'll find out, since reporters are now combing back through thousands of cases and business databases.

Sounds like this is the "culture" of the court. Stunning, but true.

[TSherbs]

Now I read that Gorsuch also did not declare business having been done with a person having litigation in front of the court. How much will this pattern spread through these justices? I guess we'll find out, since reporters are now combing back through thousands of cases and business databases.

Sounds like this is the "culture" of the court. Stunning, but true.

Yes, this is unfortunate. Maybe it has always been true and we were just blind to it. Regardless, here we are with a tainted look, partisan-like rhetoric in the opinions, and a suspicious and prying media that smells possible corruption.

It hasn't helped that our political tendency to be inertia in the legislature has moved much of the political and cultural battles into the courts and thus the nomination and confirmation process, politicizing the courts even further.

[Chip]

If honesty and decency and a high regard for the law are partisanship, then I'm a partisan.

[Chuck Naill]

Frontline had a story about the Thomas' last evening.

[dneal]

If honesty and decency and a high regard for the law are partisanship, then I'm a partisan.

So you think Sotomayor needs to go?