#harlan crow

[socialjusticeinamerica]

[porterdavis]

Somebody call the cops

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

This is just what we know about. This is the Neo-Nazi billionaire oligarch that owns Clarence Thomas. He flies Ted Cruz, Clarence Thomas, and other Republican politicians and judges around on his private jet. He has an autographed copy of Hitler’s book. He also has a “dictator garden” filled with larger than life sculptures of infamous dictators. Harlan Crow needs to be separated from his position of power. A small handful of billionaire oligarchs control the entire Republican Party and the illegitimate SCOTUS.

These oligarchs have been using their unlimited dark money to introduce legislation and decide cases in front of the Supreme Court for decades. They have been shaping America in their image since the 1960’s. If Trump wins or the Republicans take both houses of Congress it will be game over and welcome to Project 2025 and the end of democracy.

[liberalsarecool]

It's always that Hitler-curious friend.

[odinsblog]

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday walked back a planned vote to subpoena two megadonors connected to Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. The reason? Republicans threw a fit.

Democrats on the Judiciary Committee finally took the first step last week to address the high court’s ethics crisis and announced they would seek to subpoena Republican billionaire megadonor Harlan Crow and ultraconservative activist Leonard Leo. Both men feature prominently in the ethics scandal for their relationships with Thomas and Alito. The committee said it would also seek to subpoena wealthy GOP donor Robin Arkley II.

But Chair Dick Durbin appeared to put that all on hold on Thursday, when he abruptly ended a committee meeting after outraged Republicans threatened to retaliate if Crow and Leo were subpoenaed.

(continue reading)

[uboat53]

You know, it's become fairly obvious that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is playing fast and loose with ethics, waltzing right past the line on many occasions, but it's also obvious that he fails to recognize what part of it hurts him the most.

The things he did are bad, yes, but what really makes him look bad is the fact that we're still not hearing about any of it from him.

Think about it, the revelations of the expensive vacations and private travel that Harlan Crow provided to him came four and a half months ago. If he'd come clean then and publicly disclosed everything that he had done, he might have at least salvaged some shred of trust, but he didn't. Instead, he continued to obfuscate and claim that, as a Supreme Court Justice charged with carefully analyzing some of the most complex legal issues in the land, he wasn't capable of fully understanding a basic ethics and disclosure requirement.

Now we find out that he's been helping right-wing legal groups raise money, right wing legal groups that routinely come before him in his capacity as a Supreme Court Justice. And we didn't hear it from him, we heard it from investigative reporting. Again.

The real question now isn't about all of the extremely unethical things Thomas has done, though there are certainly enough of them at this point that a reasonable person would begin to consider impeachment a possibility. No, the real question now is how many more of these ethical lapses Justice Thomas is hiding, when the dogged reporting of ProPublica will uncover them, and whether the Supreme Court can maintain any sort of reputation for fairness by the time it is all over.

[not-safe-for-democracy]

[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.]

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Steven Lubet

In an unprecedented move, the Senate Judiciary Committee has advanced a bill requiring the Supreme Court to adopt a code of conduct and to create a mechanism for investigating alleged violations of the code and other laws.

It is no secret that the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal and Transparency Act was prompted in part by investigations into several Justices’ deficient financial disclosures, receipt of extravagant gifts, questionable transactions and misuse of staff. The full court has consistently resisted adopting such an ethics code, but certain Justices’ justifications for their questionable conduct only hurt their cause.

Their excuses were all remarkably flimsy, almost beyond belief.

Justice Clarence Thomas began the round of rationalizations when Pro Publica reported that he had enjoyed decades of lavish vacations at the expense of billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow — including cruises in Indonesia and the Greek Islands on Crow’s superyacht — none of which were included as gifts on Thomas’s financial disclosure forms as required by the Ethics in Government Act.

In a one-paragraph statement, Thomas opaquely claimed that he had sought guidance early in his tenure on the court from unnamed “colleagues and others in the judiciary,” who advised him that “this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends” was not reportable.

Thomas has never revealed the identities of his alleged ethics advisors, but it is notable that no Justice or Judge has stepped forward to take responsibility for his decidedly lax interpretation of the disclosure rules. Whoever may have mentored Thomas, it is highly unlikely, to put it mildly, that any federal judge in the early 1990s would have understood “this sort of personal hospitality” to cover the omission of 20 years of luxury vacations at a private Adirondacks resort, a Texas ranch and California’s Bohemian Grove, ferried on a private jet (not to mention payment of private school tuition for the Justice’s nephew and the purchase of his mother’s home).

As excuses go, “somebody once told me it was okay” is about a step above “the dog ate my homework,” but it is still better than Thomas’s earlier excuse for ­­not disclosing years of his wife’s employment when Virginia Thomas was paid $686,589 by the conservative Heritage Foundation and Hillsdale College.

Upon amending 20 years of his financial reports, Thomas gave the far-fetched explanation that he had “inadvertently omitted” the information “due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions.” It takes almost preternatural shamelessness for a Supreme Court Justice — whose job calls for parsing the most complex legislation — to insist that he misunderstood the plain meaning of “spouse’s employment” for 20 reporting years.

If Thomas’s excuses for nondisclosure were sketchy, at least he didn’t become visibly angry when he was caught. Not so Justice Samuel Alito, who made an irate preemptive strike via the Wall Street Journal editorial page when he learned that Pro Publica was about to publicize his own nondisclosures.

The Pro Publica reporters contacted Alito for comment before going live with their article about an Alaska vacation financed by prominent Republican donors. Rather than answer their questions, however, Alito took advantage of his contacts at the Wall Street Journal to get a jump on the story. He published his response several hours before Pro Publica’s post, in which he called the yet unseen article misleading and false.

There was no disputing the facts. In 2008, Alito enjoyed a three-day, all-expenses junket at a remote Alaska fishing camp owned by a wealthy conservative activist named Robin Arkley II which was apparently arranged by Federalist Society official Leonard Leo. Another guest was the billionaire Paul Singer, who flew the Justice to Alaska on his private jet. No details about the trip were listed as gifts on Alito’s disclosure forms.

Unlike Thomas, Alito claimed no preexisting friendships with his benefactors, which did not stop him from playing the “personal hospitality” card. Although the statutory disclosure exception clearly applies only to “food, lodging, or entertainment,” and not to transportation, Alito defended his nondisclosure by cobbling together several unrelated statutes in a tortured attempt to show that private jet flights constitute “hospitality facilities.”

The Justice seemed to argue that the trip had no value because he sat in “what would have otherwise been an unoccupied seat,” imposing no “extra cost” for Singer. One might expect an avowed textualist to pay more attention to the statutory definition of “gift,” which includes, for example, “free attendance at an event,” which also costs nothing to the host.

The most recent revelations involve Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s use of court staff to bolster her book sales at speaking engagements. That would have violated the lower federal courts’ Code of Conduct for United States Judges, which prohibits the substantial use of “chambers, resources or staff” to engage in otherwise permitted financial activities — if the Supreme Court had ever adopted its own version of the code.

Sotomayor’s excuse was that her “chambers staff” was only recommending “the number of books based on the size of the audience so as not to disappoint attendees who may anticipate books being available at an event.” In other words, the Justice admitted assigning a judicial assistant to keep track of book purchases relative to audience sizes, in order to maximize her potential sales.

The three Justices’ hollow rationalizations display a patronizing expectation that the public will ultimately buy whatever they say, no matter how implausible.

But to paraphrase the late Justice Robert Jackson: Supreme Court Justices do not get the last word because they are infallible; they only believe themselves infallible because they get the last word. When it comes to judicial ethics, that has to change.

[socialjusticeinamerica]

[porterdavis]

One hand washing another, corruption, bribery....what shall we call it?

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

☝️

[liberalsarecool]

Quid pro quo Conservative corruption.

Yet another example of a biased Thomas ruling.

[odinsblog]

HOT TAKE: Conservative Democrats in red states aren’t conservative because “that’s the only way to win in middle America and the South” — they are often conservative because they are well PAID to be conservative

“Together, Sinema and Manchin have caused significant headaches for Democrats over the last two years — first by opposing much of the "Build Back Better" social spending and climate bill and then by opposing Democrats' plans of weakening the Senate's 60-vote filibuster to pass voting rights legislation.

Crow has also made significant contributions to moderate-to-conservative House Democrats.

According to federal campaign finance data, the Texas billionaire has given $16,800 to Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey since 2018, contributing thousands as recently as October 2022.

Gottheimer, a member of the so-called "Unbreakable Nine" of moderate Democrats who insisted on de-linking Build Back Better from the infrastructure bill, has at times been a thorn in the side of his party as well.

And Crow has contributed $12,500 to Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas since 2006. Cuellar, a conservative opponent of abortion rights, faced a strong primary challenge from progressive activist Jessica Cisneros in 2022.

Crow's relationship and lavish vacations with Justice Thomas have raised significant ethics concerns — Thomas never disclosed the flights and yacht trips financed by the GOP megadonor, apparently violating a post-Watergate federal law that requires justices to report gifts.”

👉🏿 https://www.businessinsider.com/sinema-manchin-clarence-thomas-vacations-harlan-crow-megadonor-republican-2023-4