#Elliott Kavanaugh

[kayden-valcourt]

Jax and Elliott Doodles

I was bored and needed to test my shitty style again and this is what we got. I am aware I'm uploading this 4 days late but it's fine.

I also added a sad Gabby at the bottom because her opinion on this situation matters too.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Red-teaming the SCOTUS code of conduct

Tomorrow (November 18) at 1PM, I'll be in Concord, NH at Gibson's Books, presenting my new novel The Lost Cause, a preapocalyptic tale of hope in the climate emergency.

On Monday (November 20), I'm at the Simsbury, CT Public Library at 7PM

Last April, Propublica's Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski dropped a bombshell: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had been showered in high-ticket "gifts" by billionaire ideologue Harlan Crow, who subsequently benefited from Thomas's rulings in the court:

https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-undisclosed-luxury-travel-gifts-crow

This was just the beginning: in the coming days and weeks, more and more of Thomas's corruption came to light, everything from the fact that his mother's home had been bought by Crow, to the fact that Thomas's adoptive son went to a fancy private school on Crow's dime:

https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-private-school-tuition-scotus

The news was explosive and not merely because of the corruption it revealed in the country's highest court. The credibility of the court itself was at its lowest ebb in living memory, thanks to the two judges who occupied stolen seats – Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett. One of those judges – Kavanaugh – is a credibly accused rapist. Thomas is also a credibly accused sexual abuser:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/01/30-years-after-her-testimony-anita-hill-still-wants-something-from-joe-biden-514884

Then, this illegitimate court went on to deliver a string of upsets to long-settled law, culminating in the Dobbs decision, which triggered state laws that force small children to bear their rapists' babies:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/health/abortion-bans-rape-incest.html

That was the context for the Thomas bribery scandal, which was swiftly joined by another bribery scandal, involving Samuel Alito's improper acceptance of valuable gifts from Paul Singer, another billionaire who brought business before the court:

https://www.propublica.org/article/samuel-alito-luxury-fishing-trip-paul-singer-scotus-supreme-court

This string of scandals and outrages naturally prompted public curiosity about the Supreme Court's ethical standards, and that triggered fresh waves of incredulous outrage when we all found out that the Supreme Court doesn't have any:

https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2023/why-doesnt-the-supreme-court-have-a-formal-code-of-ethics/

When Congress made tentative noises about providing minor checks and balances on the court, the justices erupted in outrage, telling Congress to go fuck itself:

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/supreme-court-ethics-durbin/cf67ef8450ea024d/full.pdf

Chief Justice Roberts went on whatever the opposite of a charm-offensive is called (an "offense offensive?"), a media tour whose key message to the American people was "STFU, you're hurting our feelings":

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/roberts-defends-high-court-against-attacks-on-its-legitimacy

To the shock of no one except billionaires and Supreme Court justices inhabiting the splendid isolation from societal norms that is the privilege of life tenure, America didn't like this. The Supreme Court's credibility plummeted. A large supermajority of Americans – 79%! – now support age limits for Supreme Court justices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/18/the-people-no/#tell-ya-what-i-want-what-i-really-really-want

Support for packing the Supreme Court is at an historic high and gaining ground, now sitting neck-and-neck with opposition at 46% in favor/51% opposed. Among under-30s, there's a healthy majority (58%) in favor of appointing more SCOTUS justices.

As Roberts' wounded bleats reveal, SCOTUS is very sensitive to its plummeting legitimacy. After all, the court doesn't have an army, nor does it have a police force. Supreme Court rulings only matter to the extent that the American people accept them as legitimate and obey them. Transformational presidents like Lincoln and FDR have waged successful wars against the Supreme Court, sidelining its authority and turning it into an unimportant rump institution for years afterward:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/26/mint-the-coin-etc-etc/#blitz-em

Now the Supremes are working their way through the (mythological but convenient) five stages of grief. Having passed through Denial and Anger, they've arrived at Bargaining, with the publication of the court's first "code" "of" "conduct":

https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/Code-of-Conduct-for-Justices_November_13_2023.pdf

It's…not good. As Max Moran writes for The American Prospect and The Revolving Door Project, the proposed code amounts to "security theater," a set of trivially bypassed strictures that would not have prevented any of the scandals to date and will permit far worse in the years to come:

https://prospect.org/justice/2023-11-17-supreme-court-objectivity-theater/

The security framing is a very useful tool for evaluating the Supremes' proposal. The purpose of a code of conduct isn't merely to prevent people from accidentally misstepping – it's to prevent malicious parties from corrupting the judicial process. To evaluate the code, we should red team it: imagine what harms a corrupt judge or a corrupting billionaire would be able to effect while staying within the bounds the code sets.

Seen in that light, the code is wildly defective and absolutely not fit for purpose. Its most glaring defect is found in the nature of its edicts – they are almost all optional. The word "should" appears 53 times in the document, while "must" appears just six times:

https://ballsandstrikes.org/ethics-accountability/supreme-court-code-of-conduct-hilariously-fake/

Of those six "musts," two are not pertinent to ethical questions (they pertain to the requirement for a justice to get prior approval before getting paid for teaching gigs).

When the code of conduct was rolled out, the court and its apologists pointed out that it was modeled on the ethical guidelines that bind lower courts. In the wake of the Thomas revelations, these guidelines were a useful benchmark to measure Thomas's conduct against. The fact that other federal judges would have been severely sanctioned or even fired if they had engaged in the same conduct as Thomas was a powerful argument that Thomas had overstepped the bounds of ethical conduct.

But as Bloomberg Law discovered when they compared the lower courts' codes to the Supremes' draft, the Supremes have gone through those lower court codes and systematically cut nearly every mention of "enforce" from their own draft. They also cut the requirement to "take appropriate action" if a violation is reported.

If you are a bad judge or a bad donor, all of this is good news. Nearly everything that it condemns is merely optional, which means that if a judge can be convinced to ignore a rule, they won't have violated the code. What's more, even widespread rulebreaking doesn't trigger an investigation. That's a very weak security measure indeed.

But it gets worse. The Supremes' code also omit key definitions found in the codes that bind the lower courts. The most important definition to be cut is for "political organization," which the lower courts define expansively as both parties and "entit[ies] whose principal purpose is to advocate for or against political candidates or parties." That definition captures "nonprofits, think tanks, lobbying firms, trade associations, grassroots groups" – the whole panoply of organizations whom federal judges must maintain an arm's length distance from in order to preserve their objectivity. Federal judges may not lead, speak at or donate to these organizations.

By omitting this definition, the Supremes open the door to involvement with precisely the kinds of PACs, thinktanks and other influence organizations funded by the billionaires who have benefited so handsomely from the judges' rulings.

What's more, the Supremes carve out an explicit exemption for speaking to "nonprofits, think tanks, lobbying firms, trade associations, grassroots groups," and to serving as a director, trustee or officer of "a nonprofit organization devoted to the law, the legal system, or the administration of justice and may assist such an organization in the management and investment of funds."

As Moran points out, this exemption would cover – among other institutions – the far-right Federalist Society, which satisfies all those criteria. That means a Supreme Court justice could sit on the board and raise funds for the FedSoc without raising any issues with this code – not even one of those squishy "shoulds." Nothing in this code would stop Clarence Thomas or Thomas Alito from accepting lavish gifts, private jet rides, or luxury tour buses from billionaires with business before the court:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/justice-thomas-267000-loan-rv-forgiven-senate-democrats-104303972

As Moran writes, these definitional vacuums are a well-understood class of weaknesses in ethics codes. Congress gets a lot of mileage out of this ruse – for example, by narrowly defining "lobbying" to exclude things that most people understand that term to mean, Congress engage in improperly close relations with lobbyists while still maintaining that they hardly ever talk to a lobbyist at all:

https://www.politico.eu/article/jeff-hauser-opinion-watergate-european-union-qatargate/

The same ruse goes for campaign contributions – if you want to accept a lot of campaign contributions that would fall afoul of ethics rules, just narrow the definition of "campaign contribution" until all the money you're receiving no longer qualifies.

Moran closes by calling on Congress to formulate a real, meaningful code of conduct for the Supremes, one that orders Supreme Court judges not to accept corrupting gifts and to maintain the arm's length neutrality that the rest of the federal judiciary is required to keep. Rather than this new code of conduct constituting proof that SCOTUS can be its own oversight, its gross deficiencies should put to rest any question about whether the Supremes can be trusted to regulate themselves.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/17/red-team-black-robes/#security-theater

Image: Senate Democrats (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Supreme_Court_Building,_July_21,_2020.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[mitchipedia]

[Clarence Thomas has secretly accepted millions of dollars in luxury trips from a conservative Republican donor over more than 20 years, according to a ProPublica investigation.][a]

For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from [Dallas businessman Harlan Crow] without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.

The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The luxury trips contrast starkly with the public reputation Thomas has cultivated.

In Thomas’ public appearances over the years, he has presented himself as an everyman with modest tastes.

“I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States,” Thomas said in a recent interview for a documentary about his life, which Crow helped finance.

“I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it,” Thomas said. “I come from regular stock, and I prefer that — I prefer being around that.”

— Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski at ProPublica

[a]: https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-undisclosed-luxury-travel-gifts-crow)

Cory Doctorow reviews Thomas’s ignominous career. “… the elevation of the unrepentant rapist Brett Kavanaugh to the bench could never have occurred but for the trail blazed by Thomas as a sexually harassing, pubic-hair distributing creep boss.”

Thomas wants to ban same-sex marriage again, Cory notes. “And of course, he’s set precedent by hearing cases related to the attempted overthrow of the US government, despite the role his wife played in the affair.”

Thomas is not alone in furthering the right’s mission to destroy the morale of constitutional law scholars by systematically delegitimizing the court and showing it to be a vehicle for partisan politics and dark money policy laundering, but he is certainly at the vanguard.

[ulkaralakbarova]

In 1960, a team of Israeli secret agents is deployed to find Adolf Eichmann, the infamous Nazi architect of the Holocaust, supposedly hidden in Argentina, and get him to Israel to be judged. Credits: TheMovieDb. Film Cast: Peter Malkin: Oscar Isaac Adolf Eichmann: Ben Kingsley Hanna Elian: Mélanie Laurent Lothar Hermann: Peter Strauss Rafi Eitan: Nick Kroll Isser Harel: Lior Raz Zvi Aharoni: Michael Aronov Ephraim Ilian: Ohad Knoller Yaakov Gat: Torben Liebrecht Klaus Eichmann: Joe Alwyn Sylvia Hermann: Haley Lu Richardson Carlos Fuldner: Pêpê Rapazote David Ben-Gurion: Simon Russell Beale Fruma: Rita Pauls Vera Eichmann: Greta Scacchi Moshe Tabor: Greg Hill Dani Shalom: Michael Benjamin Hernandez Graciela: Rocío Muñoz Annia: Ania Luzarth Annie Werner: Tatiana Rodríguez Herr Werner: Ezequiel Campa Antonio: Aitor Miguens Dvora: Antonia Desplat Film Crew: Director: Chris Weitz Writer: Matthew Orton Producer: Fred Berger Producer: Brian Kavanaugh-Jones Line Producer: Micaela Buye Production Design: David Brisbin Associate Producer: Tom Daley Executive Producer: Ron Schmidt Executive Producer: Matt Charman Costume Design: Connie Balduzzi Director of Photography: Javier Aguirresarobe Producer: Jason Spire Editor: Pamela Martin Producer: Oscar Isaac Set Decoration: Florencia Martin Hairstylist: Florencia Grosso ADR Recordist: Noah Dunbar Sound Effects Editor: Adam Kopald Lighting Artist: Chris Rodriguez Post Production Coordinator: Matthew E. Schneider Transportation Coordinator: Nicolas Pollastri Researcher: Peter Cummings CG Supervisor: Michael Wharton Best Boy Electric: Ramón Cácceres Still Photographer: Valeria Fiorini Music Supervisor: Steven Gizicki Orchestrator: Jean-Pascal Beintus Script Supervisor: Claudia Morgado Escanilla Key Makeup Artist: Karina Camporino ADR Mixer: Michael Miller Special Effects Supervisor: Eduardo Puga Rigging Gaffer: Sebastián Mendelberg First Assistant Director: Ricardo Méndez Matta Special Effects Coordinator: Federico Ransenberg Grip: Ezequiel Cardoni Costume Assistant: Lucia Marmorek Digital Intermediate Producer: Patrick M. Allen Production Coordinator: Flor Colombatti Art Direction: Kendelle Elliott Art Direction: Rick Willoughby Hair Department Head: Suzanne Stokes-Munton Sound Mixer: Javier Farina Digital Compositor: Junyoung Han Assistant Camera: Alejo Giles Electrician: Javier Caña Rigging Grip: José Cangelosi Orchestrator: Nicolas Charron Electrician: Daniel Ring Foley Mixer: Randy Singer Sound Effects Editor: Ando Johnson Supervising Dialogue Editor: Lauren Hadaway Camera Operator: Matías Mesa Assistant Costume Designer: Soledad Muñiz Key Costumer: Pilar Gonzalez Main Title Designer: Michael Riley Boom Operator: Julián Catz Compositing Supervisor: Robert J. Bruce Visual Effects Supervisor: John P. Nugent Orchestrator: Sylvain Morizet Production Assistant: Adrian Fiszbejn Makeup Department Head: Jane Galli Foley Artist: Rick Owens Sound Assistant: Giorgia Garcia-Moreno Weapons Master: Franco Burattini Best Boy Grip: Enrique Vélez Key Grip: Ariel Vélez Post Production Coordinator: Vera Fabrykant Storyboard Artist: Poli Marichal Rigging Grip: Sergio Olmos Post Production Assistant: Max Pankow Art Department Coordinator: Laura Martinez Corfield Assistant Property Master: Mirella Hoijman Sound Assistant: Fernando Cornaglia Second Assistant Camera: Martin Dotta Music Editor: Terry Wilson Concept Artist: Pablo Olivera Digital Compositor: Saeed Faridzadeh Stunt Coordinator: Ariel Arredondo Lopez Dickson Costume Assistant: Juan David Troncoso Post Production Coordinator: Ezequiel Rossi Music Editor: Nevin Seus Picture Car Coordinator: Matias Di Capua Digital Compositor: Patrick O’Keeffe Visual Effects Producer: Edward P. Pedersen Assistant Camera: Karim Kachou Electrician: Julián Cantaro Costume Assistant: Delfina De La Cárcova Assistant Editor: Kevin Bailey Post Production Assistant: Eden Stelmach Transportation Captain: Diego Igartua Casting: Avy Kaufman Production Manager: Rodrigo Cala Matte Painter: Matthew Ribeiro Electrician: Walter Saavedra ADR Voice Casti...

[batemanofficial]

as a person with a uterus, the roe draft opinion makes me so fucking angry. i've seen so many proposed solutions in the few hours that it's been available to the public, but i haven't seen much talk about the issue that i really think is at the heart of this - taxing the church.

we're headed toward a theocracy at this point. as alito states in the draft, the decision to strike down roe is based on "morality." as i'm sure you can piece together, to white conservatives "morality" is code for "christianity." there is no doubt that this decision was based on the opinions of white protestants who want make sure that white protestant children inherit power in america.

this interview with jane elliott puts it plainly - it's not about the rights of fetuses, it's about christian hegemony and white supremacy. full stop.

even if you do not have a uterus, you are not safe. they're coming for obergefell (same-sex marriage), lawrence (sodomy), and others next; alito cites these in the draft, so it's safe to assume that they're on the chopping block too.

these decisions are all regarded by people like alito (read: "conservative christians") as attacks on "morality" and, more subtly, the christian way of life. no matter what they say, church leaders have the power to influence political decisions at every level, and people like alito, kavanaugh, barrett, thomas, and gorsuch are proof.

it is time to remove tax-exempt status for churches. immediately. if your church has ever "endorsed a candidate," they've violated the principle of separation of church and state. in america as it exists today, the white protestant church and the federal government are inextricably linked. we cannot move forward until we put a stop to this at the source.

[aardvarkingmad]

BUT THEY NEVER LIE....

Tom Elliott @tomselliott They said Trump colluded w/ Russia & the FBI saved us.

Then we learned Hillary & the FBI colluded w/ Russia.

They told us the Steele Dossier was "corroborated"

Then we learned it was entirely debunked.

They said the surveillance state would never be used against Americans.

Then we learned it happens all the time.

They told us a snooty Catholic student tormented a Native American

Then we learned it was the other way around

They told us Michael Avenatti was a warrior for justice

Then we learned he's a serial felon who exploits vulnerable clients

They told us Brett Kavanaugh was a serial rapist

Then we learned they were sitting on proof he wasn't

They told us they despise acts of abuse against women

Then they defended Biden's pattern of sexual harassment

They told us Trump's call w/ Ukraine's president was impeachable

Then they made excuses for Biden getting caught doing the same

They said BLM riots were righteous acts of social justice.

Then they said a smaller, less violent protest was literally terrorism.

They said right-wing extremists tried kidnapping Gov. Whitmer

Then we learned it was an FBI-led plot

They told us the USPS was conspiring to steal the election.

Then we learned it was all a conspiracy theory.

They said Hunter�s laptop was "Russian disinformation."

Then we learned it was absolutely real.

They told us the FBI were America's stalwart defenders of justice & rule of law

Then we learned they aided and abetted sex trafficking

They told us they needed two weeks to stop the spread.

Then, almost two years later, we're called selfish for wanting our lives back.

They told us they'd follow science wherever it leads.

Then they led campaigns to have science censored.

They said masks stop the spread.

Then we learned they do nothing.

They told us Gov. Cuomo's totalitarian approach to Covid was a model

Then we learned he was running death camps & covering up evidence

They said Fauci was America's Covid savior.

Then we learned he accidentally helped invent it.

They told us Covid never could have come from a Chinese biolab

Then we learned that's almost guaranteed to be what happened

They told us 50 percent vaccinated would mean no more surges

Then we saw surges amongst the highest vaccinated populations

They told us Trump fans brought zipties to kidnap lawmakers & killed a cop w/ a fire extinguisher

Then we learned they did none of these things

They told us the attack was planned on Parler

Then we learned it was actually Facebook

Now they say the FBI never would have been involved in the Jan. 6th riot

Well ... let's just see.

[antoine-roquentin]

John M. Olin isn’t exactly a household name. Neither is the Olin Corporation, the gunpowder and chemical company he inherited from his father. But he played a crucial role in funding the rightward turn of American politics, and particularly American courts, in the past few decades.

If you’ve been to law school, you might notice that his name pops up a lot.

The John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business at Harvard.

The John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy at Yale.

The John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics at UVA.

The other John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics at Stanford.

This week on the Future Perfect podcast, we talk to James Piereson, who used to run Olin’s foundation, and investigative reporter Jane Mayer. They explain how Olin’s name got attached to so many centers and programs — and how those centers and programs actually affect all Americans.

Olin was passionate about spreading the law and economics movement, which sought to use tools of economic analysis to ensure that laws were creating efficient markets, and that regulations weren’t strangling businesses without good reason.

He spread it on campuses with his namesake centers, and by funding weekend resort trips for federal judges, where jurists enjoyed lectures from Nobel-winning economists — called the Manne seminars — before having fun on the beach. Because they were presented as mere economics instruction, even liberal judges were enthusiastic about the retreats. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gushed in 1999, “The instruction was far more intense than the Florida sun.” A young Elizabeth Warren met her husband, Bruce Mann, at a Manne law and economics event.

The rise of law and economics, however, had profound jurisprudential consequences. According to a recent paper by economists Elliott Ash, Daniel Chen, and Suresh Naidu, judges who went to Olin-funded weekend trips ended up imposing longer criminal sentences, and were likelier to rule against unions and environmental regulations. One way we know it was the actual content of the seminars that made a difference? Attendees weren’t tougher on crime if their instructor was Milton Friedman, who lectured on the benefits of legalizing drugs. Because Friedman didn’t teach most seminars, though, the overall effect was to increase incarceration.

Olin’s foundation has helped push the judiciary to the right — and not just through those seminars. The foundation provided seed money for the Federalist Society when it was just a student group at Yale, Harvard, and UChicago; it has since risen to become the most powerful legal organization in the American right, and has close ties to five out of the nine justices of the Supreme Court. It directly provides shortlists of judges that President Trump uses to make appointments.

That’s just scratching the surface of what Olin, a conservative radicalized by the 1969 campus protests at his alma mater Cornell, was able to do with his foundation. Before and after his death, it funded conservative media like Firing Line and the American Spectator, and helped conservative journalists like Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza get their start in college.

Olin’s influence rivals that of far better-known political donors like George Soros or the Koch brothers, and it’s really important to understand what he and his team have achieved.

dark money doesn’t only fund election campaigns, it’s key to the remaking of the entire intellectual landscape of america under neoliberalism

[rapeculturerealities]

When I watched Christine Blasey Ford testify before the Senate on Thursday, I was impressed with her courage, but not surprised by her graciousness. “Does that work for you?” she asked the senators who were grilling her, as if she were the hostess of her own inquisition. At another point she said, “I’m used to being collegial.”

It’s a graciousness I recognize from the private school world we both occupied in D.C. I went to National Cathedral School, a girls school that has much in common with Ford’s alma mater, Holton-Arms. It was drilled into us: Always say please. Don’t raise your voice. We were raised in a world of ballroom dancing classes, of country club swim meets, of handwritten thank-you notes. We were expected to be smart and athletic, polite and pretty. Eating disorders were par for the course. We were trained to be gracious. Composed. Nice. We faced enormous pressure to succeed (ace our SATs, get As at school, win field hockey games), and on top of that, we were supposed to smile.

In short, it was a world that demanded performance. We had to perform for our parents, our teachers, our college interviewers, our friends. And we performed for the boys, too. We were expected to be fun, we were expected to be game. Just not too game. To be labeled a “ho” was impossible to live down. Word of the slutty girls passed from school to school quickly. And there was the perpetual humiliation of having our attractiveness rated by the boys in our circles, many of whom we counted as friends. “She’s such a box,” boys from our brother school, St. Albans, would say in my era, and we were expected to take it as a compliment. The annual St. Albans yearbook even included a “BABES” page with photos of the NCS girls deemed the most attractive. Did we protest? We did not. Worse, many of us were flattered to be on that page.

read more

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Who is Brett Kavanaugh, and how will he vote if he becomes America’s next Supreme Court justice? There is no shortage of speculation about his personal or political worldview — but it’s not especially uniform. In the days after he was announced, court-watchers mined Kavanaugh’s old opinions and emerged with conflicting accounts of his ideology. His abortion rulings are simultaneously too liberal and too conservative. He’s both opposed to and supportive of the Affordable Care Act. He’s most similar to Chief Justice John Roberts and most similar to Justice Clarence Thomas.

It seems like there should be a better, more systematic way to evaluate Kavanaugh’s political ideology than hunting for clues in past rulings. It’s easy enough to do this for justices once they’re seated on the Supreme Court, but for relatively obscure federal appeals court judges like Kavanaugh, the ideological signals are dimmer, and quantitative political scientists must get creative.

They’ve found indicators about ideology in judges’ votes, hiring decisions, political donations, the text of judges’ rulings, and the language used to talk about them. It’s impossible, of course, to predict with certainty how Kavanaugh will vote if he ends up on the Supreme Court. But taken together, these tools can provide us with a general guide for where Justice Kavanaugh might land. Will he be another Roberts? Another Thomas? Or something in between?

Using judges’ votes as a proxy

The gold standard for measuring the ideology of Supreme Court justices is by looking at judges’ votes on cases. Its measurements are called Martin-Quinn scores, and they place the justices on a familiar left-right spectrum.

It is not that simple for other federal judges like Kavanaugh, who sits on the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals. “Right now, we have nothing perfect for the lower courts,” said Maya Sen, a political scientist at Harvard. There are a few thorny reasons why.

A big part of the problem is that lower court judges’ ideology isn’t always as visible in their rulings. For one thing, lower court judges aren’t supposed to contradict the Supreme Court. “If you’re a circuit judge, you might think a Supreme Court precedent is horribly wrong, but you don’t have the ability to do anything about it,” said Josh Blackman, a professor of law at the South Texas College of Law Houston. This means that circuit court judges who want to adhere closely to Supreme Court precedent may frequently need to set their ideology aside when considering cases. And while the Supreme Court takes cases only when there is a genuinely unresolved legal dispute, lower court judges mostly deal with dry, straightforward legal questions where the answer may not tell us much about a judge’s ideology.1

One alternative to trying to code lower court judges’ rulings as liberal or conservative is to look at a simpler measure — how often they disagree with the majority. According to economists Elliott Ash and Daniel Chen, Kavanaugh cast a dissenting vote in 7 percent of the published cases he heard on the D.C. Circuit between 2006 and 2013. By contrast, only 3 percent of the overall votes during his tenure were dissents. And Kavanaugh was especially likely to dissent when he was overruled by two of his Democrat-appointed colleagues. (Circuit court judges mostly decide cases on three-judge panels.)

Tying these findings to ideology, though, is tricky. At best it just shows that Kavanaugh disagreed with his colleagues more often, not how he disagreed with them.

Using politicians’ ideology as a proxy

One of the oldest and most widely used methods for measuring judicial ideology is based on a simple idea: A judge’s views on key political issues are likely to be fairly similar to those of the people who appointed him. In 2007, a group of political scientists and legal scholars proposed that lower court judges’ ideology could be gauged using a combination of factors: the ideology score for the president at the time of the judge’s appointment and the ideology scores for the senators from the president’s party in the state where the judge resides. (If both home-state senators share the president’s party, their scores are averaged; if neither senator is from the president’s party, the president’s score alone is used.) This latter piece draws on the norm of “senatorial courtesy,” where senators generally do not vote for nominees who are opposed by senators who share the president’s party and are from the nominee’s home state.

These Judicial Common Space scores give us a rough sense for how a lower court judge like Kavanaugh might vote relative to the current justices if he or she were confirmed to the Supreme Court. According to the JCS scores, Kavanaugh would land far to the right, just to the left of the arch-conservative Thomas.

Because Kavanaugh was appointed to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals, he has no home-state senator for the purposes of JCS, which means that his score is based entirely on the ideology of his appointing president in the year he was confirmed. In Kavanaugh’s case, that’s George W. Bush in 2006. It is a thin basis on which to project a judge’s ideology.

But Andrew Martin, one of the creators of the Martin-Quinn scores and the JCS scores, remains optimistic about their usefulness. He pointed out that there is a high correlation between the JCS scores of circuit court judges who were subsequently appointed to the Supreme Court — such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Clarence Thomas — and their Martin-Quinn scores in their first year on the court, suggesting that the JCS scores have been fairly accurate predictors of ideology.2

Using money and clerks as a proxy

Another approach is to follow the money — specifically, campaign donations by judges. For this, Sen and other political scientists and legal scholars have mined an enormous data set of political contributions by public figures, including federal judges. According to these scores, Kavanaugh sits roughly in the middle of the ideological distribution of conservative judges.

The problem is that there are limits to how much a political donation can tell us about any person’s political views. “One interesting thing about Kavanaugh is that he’s actually donated to Democrats and Republicans, which is unexpected,” Sen said. It gets even more interesting. According to Sen, the one Democrat whom Kavanaugh has donated to is Richard Cordray of Ohio. Cordray, like Kavanaugh, was a law clerk for Justice Anthony Kennedy, whom Kavanaugh has been nominated to replace. But Cordray was also the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was subjected to a scathing dissent written by Kavanaugh this year.

While writing a paper on campaign contributions and judicial ideology, Sen and her co-author, Adam Bonica, debated whether to remove this Democratic contribution from their ideology calculations. Sen told us that with it, Kavanaugh appears fairly moderate. Without it, he appears “quite conservative.” They decided to leave it in.

In an effort to get a different predictor of ideology — with a bigger data set to draw on — Sen and her co-authors also took a look at the political leanings of judges’ clerks. According to Sen, Kavanaugh’s clerk-based ideology score is less ambiguous than his personal donation-based score. His clerks might be diverse, but they are very conservative, she said.

This method is helpful in several key ways. The first is that, unlike the JCS scores, a clerk-based metric can capture how a nominee’s ideology has changed over the course of a judge’s career because as a judge hires more clerks, the scores can be updated. The score is also based on a much larger pool of data. Judges hire multiple clerks each year, enabling the data set for each judge to grow over time.

As innovative as this method is, though, there are downsides. Although many judges look for at least some clerks who are ideologically similar, some may also hire “counter-clerks” — people with opposing ideological views who can challenge and sharpen the judges’ arguments. And lower-level judges, including district court judges, may simply care less about their clerks’ views because so few of their cases hinge on contested legal questions.

Using judges’ language and evaluations as a proxy

So what if we stop looking at the people in a judge’s personal orbit and instead try to get as close to their ideology as we can by looking at reports from the courtroom or the language of their decisions? A new approach examines the text of reports written about judges by an assortment of lawyers who have argued in their courtrooms. These are compiled in a legal almanac with entries that read like a Zagat guide for judges, with snappy quotes about their friendliness and hostility to a host of legal issues.

Two political scientists, Adam Feldman and Kevin Cope, created separate dictionaries with words and phrases associated with liberal and conservative rulings and used them to analyze the reports and create ideology scores for each judge. They’re still in the process of conducting their analysis, but Feldman said that according to their method, Kavanaugh falls in the middle of the D.C. Circuit’s conservative bloc. (They don’t have a comparison yet for the Supreme Court.)

The methodology’s biggest downside, Feldman said, is its reliance on the editors of the legal almanac. “We can’t tell exactly who was surveyed to create these reports or how they were compiled,” he said.

Other scholars have used text-based analysis in a different way, by comparing the kinds of language judges use. Do they frequently quote conservative precedents? Or use economics-based language? Ash and Chen compared Kavanaugh’s writing style to the sitting Supreme Court justices and found that it’s most akin to Alito’s.

Some remain skeptical of text-based measurements for judges. They might work well in Congress, Sen said, where members use colloquial language in floor speeches that is readily identifiable as conservative or liberal — “death tax” and “estate tax,” “fake news” and “alternative facts,” or “pro-life” and “anti-choice,” for example. Legal language, however, is jargony and typically avoids these colloquialisms, making it much harder to tease an ideological signal out of the noise.

All of these approaches add up to one general conclusion: If confirmed, Kavanaugh is likely to be a very conservative justice in the mold of Alito or Neil Gorsuch. Predicting exactly where he’ll fall is harder to do, but given the court’s composition, it doesn’t matter whether he’s the second- or third-most conservative member of the court — the question is whether he’ll join the solid bloc on the right-most side of the court or stake out territory in the center-right, like Roberts.

For some court-watchers, though, the clue-hunting method remains more appealing than cobbling together the results of several clever — but imperfect — quantitative analyses. Blackman, the law professor, said he viewed Kavanaugh as most similar to Roberts. Since we’re natural empiricists here at FiveThirtyEight, we asked why. “You won’t like my answer,” he said. It was simply that he’d been following Kavanaugh’s career closely for over a decade.

[kayden-valcourt]

Elliott and Emerald's Birthday

It was on the 21st but they're still worth celebrating.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Clarence Thomas and the generosity of a far-right dark-money billionaire

Clarence Thomas has set some important precedents in his career as a Supreme Court justice — for example, the elevation of the unrepentant rapist Brett Kavanaugh to the bench could never have occurred but for the trail blazed by Thomas as a sexually harassing, pubic-hair distributing creep boss:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/01/30-years-after-her-testimony-anita-hill-still-wants-something-from-joe-biden-514884

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/06/clarence-thomas/#harlan-crow

Today, Thomas continues to steer the court into new territory — for example, he’s interested in banning same-sex marriage again:

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/24/thomas-constitutional-rights-00042256

And of course, he’s set precedent by hearing cases related to the attempted overthrow of the US government, despite the role his wife played in the affair:

https://www.npr.org/2022/03/30/1089595933/legal-ethics-experts-agree-justice-thomas-must-recuse-in-insurrection-cases

Thomas is not alone in furthering the right’s mission to destroy the morale of constitutional law scholars by systematically delegitimizing the court and showing it to be a vehicle for partisan politics and dark money policy laundering, but he is certainly at the vanguard:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/25/consequentialism/#dotards-in-robes

Today, Propublica published an expose on the vast fortune in secret gifts bestowed upon Thomas by the billionare GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, who is also one the most significant funders of political campaigns that put business before Thomas and the Supreme Court:

https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-undisclosed-luxury-travel-gifts-crow

The story, reported by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski is a masterwork of shoe-leather investigative journalism, drawing on aviation records, social media posts and other “open source” intelligence to expose the illegal, off-the-books “gifts” from a billionaire to an unaccountable Supreme Court justice with a lifetime appointment.

Here are a two of those gifts: a private jet/superyacht jaunt around Indonesia valued at $500,000; and a $500,000 gift to Ginni Thomas’s Tea Party group (which pays Ginni Thomas $120,000/year).

On top of that are gifts that are literally priceless: decades’ worth of summer vacations at Camp Topridge, Crow’s private estate, with its waterfall, great hall, private chefs, 25 fireplaces, thee boathouses, clay tennis court, batting range, 1950s-style soda fountain and full-scale reproduction of Hagrid’s hut.

Summer retreats to Topridge allow business leaders like Leonard Leo — the Federalist Society bankroller and mastermind who set Trump up to pack the Supreme Court — to coordinate in private with Thomas:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/29/betcha-cant-eat-just-one/#pwnage

They also allow top execs from PWC, Verizon and other corporations who may have business before the court to establish a warm, collegial relationship with a judge whose decisions can make billions for their employers. In its reporting, Propublica points out that Thomas got to hang out on Crow’s superyacht with Mark Paoletta, who was then general counsel for Trump’s OMB, and who has opposed any tightening of ethics rules for Supreme Court judges: “there is nothing wrong with ethics or recusals at the Supreme Court.”

Crow and Thomas also hobnob together at Crow’s Texas ranch, and at the Bohemian Grove, the Bay Area’s ultra-luxe retreat for rich creeps. Crow bought Thomas a private superyacht cruise through New Zealand, another through the Greek islands, and a river trip around Savannah, GA. He also traveled around the country on Crow’s private jet — even a short private jet trip is valued around $70,000.

Crow also makes many donations on Thomas’s behalf, from a $105,000 donation to Yale Law School for the “Justice Thomas Portrait Fund” to paying for a 7 foot tall, 1,800 lb bronze statue of the nun who taught Thomas in the eighth grade, which now stands in a New York Catholic cemetery.

This is without precedent. No Supreme Court justice in US history received comparable gifts during their tenure on the bench. Federal judges quoted in the story call it “incomprehensible,” noting that US judges bend over backwards not to owe anyone any favors, going so far as to book restaurant reservations without using their titles.

Virginia Canter, a former US government ethics lawyer of bipartisan experience said Thomas “seems to have completely disregarded his higher ethical obligations,” adding “it makes my heart sink.”

The Supreme Court’s own code of ethics prohibits justices from engaging in conduct that gives rise to the “appearance of impropriety,” but the code is “consultative,” and there are no penalties for violating it. But US judicial officers — including Thomas — are legally required to disclose things like private jet trips. Thomas did not. In general, justices must report any gift valued at more than $415, where a gift is “anything of value.” This includes instances in which a gift is given by a corporation whose owner is the true giver.

Crow is a Red Scare-haunted plutocrat who says his greatest fear is “Marxism.” He was a key donor to the anti-tax extremists at the Club For Growth, and has served on the board of the American Enterprise Institute — climate deniers who also claimed that smoking didn’t cause cancer — for 25 years.

Crow is a proud dark-money source, too, whose $10m in acknowledged donations to Republican causes and candidates are only the tip of the iceberg, next to the dark money he has provided to groups he declines to name, telling the New York Times, “I don’t disclose what I’m not required to disclose.”

Crow claims that the vast sums he’s lavished on Thomas — who, again, presides over the test cases that Crow is helping to put before him — are just “hospitality.” Crow called the private retreats with business leaders and top government officials “gatherings of friends,” and added that he was “unaware of any of our friends ever lobbying or seeking to influence Justice Thomas” while at his private estates or on his superyacht or private plane.

For his part, Thomas publicly maintains that he hates luxury. In a Crow-financed documentary about Thomas’s life, Thomas tells the camera, “I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it. I come from regular stock, and I prefer that — I prefer being around that.”

Judges often have to make determinations about conflicts of interest, and lawyers have an entire practice devoted to preventing conflicts from arising. I doubt whether Thomas himself would consent to have a dispute of his own tried in front of a judge who had received millions in gifts from his opponent.

The Supreme Court’s power comes from its legitimacy. The project of delegitimizing the court started with the right, and Democrats have been loathe to participate in any activity that would worsen the court’s reputation. As a result, the business lobby and authoritarian politicians have had free rein to turn the court into a weapon for attacking American workers, American women, and LGBTQ people.

It doesn’t have to be this way. When the Supreme Court blocked all of FDR’s New Deal policies — which were wildly popular — FDR responded by proposing age limits for Supreme Court judges. When the Supremes refused to contemplate this, FDR asked Congress for a law allowing him to appoint one new Supreme Court judge for every judge who should retire but wouldn’t.

As the vote on this bill grew nearer, the Supremes reversed themselves, voting to uphold the policies they’d struck down in their previous session. They knew that their legitimacy was all they had, and when a brave president stood up to their bullying, they caved.

https://theconversation.com/packing-the-court-amid-national-crises-lincoln-and-his-republicans-remade-the-supreme-court-to-fit-their-agenda-147139

The Supreme Court has moved America further away from the ideals of pluralistic democracy than we can even fathom, and they’re just getting started. They are taking a wrecking ball to the lives of anyone who isn’t a wealthy conservative, and they’re doing it while accepting a fortune in bribes from American oligarchs.

Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Here’s how you can: I’m kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: Mr. Kjetil Ree (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Supreme_Court.JPG

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: An altered image of Clarence Thomas, standing in gilded judicial robes on the steps of the Supreme Court. Looming over the court is a line-drawing of a business-man with a dollar-sign-emblazoned money-bag for a head.]

[hottchicksgetclicks]

'Gone Girl' gave a face to an ancient monster of myth

‘Gone Girl’ gave a face to an ancient monster of myth

Before “grab ’em by the pussy,” before the Harvey Weinstein exposé, before Time’s Up and the Women’s March and the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing, there was Amy Elliott Dunne. 

Amy was one of the protagonists of Gone Girl, published in 2012 and adapted into a movie in 2014. The story seems familiar at first: A pretty young white woman goes missing, and every single clue points to her…

[bornxtoxdie-blog1]

Allow me to introduce my newest muses! I’ve linked to each muse’s bio, with triggering warnings listed after each link. If you would like to plot with any of these babes, feel free to hit me up!

Aoife Tierney (Brie Larson) [Warnings for death and murder]

Dolly Sutton (Ashley Greene) [Warnings for car accident and death]

Eilis Kavanaugh (Deborah Ann Woll)

Emma Young (Kristen Stewart) [Warnings for car accident and death]

Fabien Geroux (Landon Liboiron) [Warnings for fire and death]

Fawn Stone (Amanda Seyfried)

Hecate Chapel (Madelaine Petsch) [Warnings for death and murder]

Holden Vance (Nathan Parsons) [Warning for death]

Isaac Miller (Ansel Elgort)

Jeremy Kane (Amadeus Serafini)

Keegan Lewis (Colin Woodell) [Warnings for fire and death]

Kenna Ross (Nina Dobrev) [Warnings for bullying and homophobia]

Lennon Rose (KJ Apa)

Meredith Logan (Kiernan Shipka) [Warning for death]

Ophelia Harrison (Naomi Scott) [Warning for homophobia]

Philippa Elliott (Hayley Atwell) [Warnings for death, murder, guns, and kidnapping]

Renata Gotha (Holland Roden) [Warning for prostitution]

Una Mulligan (Carlson Young) [Warning for mention of abortion]

Wren Rosenfeld (Nikki Reed) [Warning for cancer]

Zara Carmichael (Emily Kinney) [Warnings for death and murder]

[gwydionmisha]

Please, please, please if you can manage it, contact your Senators to get them to fight the Kavanaugh nomination.  This is geometrically more important if you have a centrist Democrat like Joe Manchin, Doug Jones, and Heidi Heitkamp (Donnelly and Tester are now no on Kavanaugh.  If you are a constituent, consider thanking them for doing the right thing.); or Republicans like.  You may want to contact Chuck Schumer and ask him to whip the Democrats so as to get them to stand in united opposition. If you have Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Susan Collins, or Lisa Murkowski, please keep calling to ask them to vote no.  Jeff Flake, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski remain the best bets, so please keep the pressure on them!  Flake and Murkowski have joined the Democrats in demanding an FBI Background check, and the FBI now has a week to investigate the allegations, so there is still time to make your voice heard!  

Protest in person if you can, but if you can’t, here are some other options:

Call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to the representative of your choice.

This App phones your rep for you: http://takeastance.us/

Here is one that will send your reps a fax: https://resistbot.io/

[50shadesofregret]

Chapter 4 (Thursday, June 23, 2011) - Too Good for Humpday

We skipped Wednesday. As much as I chafe against the tedium of this book’s day-by-day updates, Wednesday’s absence makes me want to know about it even more. What deep, dark secret happened on Humpday? Was it more humping?

The hunt for our helicopter saboteur continues, and Jack Hyde is thrown into the mix of possible suspects, since he was recently fired and dropped off the grid.

The very serious businesspeople move on to talking about the acquisition of Kavanaugh Media. As a reminder, since it’s been a while, Kavanaugh Media is owned by Katherine Kavanaugh’s father. The same Katherine Kavanaugh who is best friends with Christian’s fiancée. The same Katherine Kavanaugh who is in an increasingly serious relationship with Christian’s adopted brother Elliott.

That’s the Kavanaugh Media they’re talking about acquiring, without mentioning it to the affected parties. Business is business, after all. I still don’t understand how this was a bigger plot point.

Ros gets the pair of Manolos Christian promised. Christian offers to hire on the truck driver who saved him after the crash. Ana isn’t ready to move in with Christian yet. They meet with the wedding planner.

Christian is still giving his father the silent treatment, and Ana tries to get him to break the silence. He’s Christian, so he tells her to drop it, and then thinks to himself Fifty Shades, baby in what almost seems like a proud manner.

This is a book about logistics. Christian keeps planning things, and eventually we’ll see those plans come to fruition. But until then, we’re in for status updates. It’s like reading the notes from business meetings for a company you don’t even work at.

Today’s Lesson: Try and turn every relationship in your life into that of employer and employee. Dating somebody? Buy the company she’s interning at, and then buy her friend’s family business for safe measure. 

Chapters Referenced: None.

[fullspectrum-cbd-oil]

Law Student Receives ‘Fantastic Advice’ from Justice Gorsuch: Learn to Win or Lose Graciously

When penning a letter to a justice of the Supreme Court, one law student wasn’t sure if he would receive a response — until, to his “surprise,” he got some “fantastic advice” back.

A few months had passed since the University of Dayton rising 2nd-year law student Patrick Sobkowski wrote a letter to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch “asking for advice as [he made his] way through law school.”

“It was an extremely pleasant surprise to come home to a response from him,” Sobkowski tweeted.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The student said that regardless of pursuing a degree as a lawyer or not, Gorsuch offered “fantastic advice” to anyone.

The letter, dated May 21, reads:

“My advice to law students is very simple: work hard, learn to write and speak effectively, never give up on your passions, treasure your family and friendships, find time to do public service, and learn to win — or lose — graciously.

More than all of that, know that you will have many regrets in life — things said or done, or left unsaid or undone — but the one thing you will never regret is being kind.”

A few months ago, I wrote a letter to Justice Gorsuch asking for advice as I make my way through law school.

It was an extremely pleasant surprise to come home to a response from him.

Fantastic advice; regardless of whether you are a lawyer or not. pic.twitter.com/yzYxSJfnxG

— Patrick J. Sobkowski (@PJSobkowski) July 18, 2019

Gorsuch’s letter sparked reactions on social media:

.@UDaytonLaw student @PJSobkowski received great advice from Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch that we can all take to heart: https://t.co/AES5UuboST

— University of Dayton (@univofdayton) July 19, 2019

Gorsuch quickly cementing his place as my favorite member of SCOTUS https://t.co/TArzO70jn2

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) July 19, 2019

Great to see Justice Gorsuch take the time to respond to a letter like this — regardless of whether you agree or disagree with his views. https://t.co/1XrJpK6K3r

— Josh Douglas (@JoshuaADouglas) July 19, 2019

When I met with Justice Gorsuch last November at the @FedSoc National Lawyers Convention, he gave me the following piece of advice as I start my career this coming fall: “Aim high.”

He is sincerely one of the nicest, approachable, and selfless individuals I’ve ever met. https://t.co/bMfIpbtljS

— Elliott Hamilton (@ElliottRHams) July 19, 2019

After over a year had passed since Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, Gorsuch was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, nominated by President Donald Trump.

Trump also nominated Justice Brett Kavanaugh — who was sworn in after his controversial confirmation hearings over sexual misconduct allegations from decades ago — to succeed Justice Anthony Kennedy. In early June, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg praised Kavanaugh for the first all-female group of law clerks staff.

“Justice Kavanaugh made history by bringing on board an all-female law clerk crew,” Ginsburg previously said. “Thanks to his selections, the Court has this Term, for the first time ever, more women than men serving as law clerks.”

  from IJR https://ift.tt/2M1FD5e via IFTTT