The Supremes

[Francisco 2.0 32219]

51 minutes ago, DDD Dad said:

Deftones

 

 

 

[HenryJames 65564]

1 hour ago, South Austin said:

*tone def

*tone loc

[Skipper 5969]

18 minutes ago, Bullneck said:

I have concluded from this post that your time is WAY too valuable to be wasted here because you are Big Time.  But he's a Supreme Court justice.  He has a day job, doing that.  

Do you have a special dictionary for the word "meaningful?"  

Meaningful in the sense of "oh this guy has to be corrupt".   His cash outlay (with 4 other individuals that shared in profits and liabilities) was probably around $50K assuming he actually made a profit.  It's not in the same universe as the Thomas situation.

I'll add I don't think this is any different than the Fox News sensationalist reporting about Pelosi's husband's or Fauci's outside investments in an attempt to discredit everything they did.  Just attempts to drive clicks and fuel outrage.

Edited April 29, 2023 by Skipper

[Bullneck 18772]

3 hours ago, Skipper said:

Meaningful in the sense of "oh this guy has to be corrupt".   His cash outlay (with 4 other individuals that shared in profits and liabilities) was probably around $50K assuming he actually made a profit.  It's not in the same universe as the Thomas situation.

I'll add I don't think this is any different than the Fox News sensationalist reporting about Pelosi's husband's or Fauci's outside investments in an attempt to discredit everything they did.  Just attempts to drive clicks and fuel outrage.

I don't want to put words in your mouth but are you arguing that the amounts are the important part?  If I'm mistaken let me know.  

I remember talking to my grandfather when the John Connally milk bribe issue was going on and I told him I thought $10,000 wasn't much money.  He laughed and said that dishonest people do dishonest things.  

Again, maybe I'm wrong hanging onto that whole "if you're going to serve in government you set the example" but I don't think so.  It seems like a whole lot of people have skeletons in their closets.

Quote

Not Guilty

The jury in John Connally’s trial had been the only silent players on the courtroom stage. Now, while everyone else waited, they talked.

 

By Al Reinert

June 19750

March 23, 1971, in the Oval Office of the White House. A meeting is about to begin. There are eight men present, including President Nixon, John Ehrlichman, Budget Director George Shultz, Agriculture Secretary Clifford Hardin, and Treasury Secretary John Connally. Here is an edited transcript of that meeting.

PRESIDENT: I suggest that we sit over here everybody. More room and, uh [coughing]—Sit down.

* * *

PRESIDENT: Uh, well, we ought to review this, this situation with regard to milk. Now, uh, John, would you ex­press your views to us all—you ex­pressed them to me this morning.

CONNALLY: Uh, I’m not trying to talk about it at any great length the, the economics of it, but as far as the politics are concerned—looking to 1972, it, uh, it appears very clear to me that you’re going to have to move, um, strong in the Midwest. You’re going to have to be strong in rural America, and particularly that part of the country. Now, there are a lot of things that you can’t do, uh, with respect to farmers. They’re almost beyond help at this point. They feel like they are. They don’t feel like anybody’s trying to help them… I just don’t know many areas that you can do many things—that’s the net of what I’m saying—to help the farmers, uh, and the dairy people now. These dairymen are organized; they’re adamant; they’re militant. This particular group, AMPI, which is the American Milk Producers Institute or something, represents about forty thousand people… They’re asking for, for an increase in the cost, in the price of a hundredweight up to four—$4.92… Now if they, if you don’t support the price, they’re going to have to drop it because their, their resources aren’t such that they can continue to pay the difference between what, the $4.66 and the, and the $4.92… I’m addressing myself to the narrow aspects, to the political aspects of it. I don’t think there’s a better organiza­tion in the United States. If you can get it, you can’t get more help from, that will be, um, be more loyal to you. And, and I think they’ve got a worthy case to begin with. And that being true, I just think you ought to stretch the point.

Quote

Indictment, trial and acquittal[edit]

In July 1974, Connally was indicted for allegedly pocketing $10,000 from dairy industry lawyer Jake Jacobsen in exchange for influencing the government to increase federal dairy price support.^[40] At his April 1975 trial, Connally's defense called as character witnesses former First Ladies Jacqueline Kennedy and Lady Bird Johnson, as well as Texas state senator Barbara Jordan (the first female, black state senator in Texas history), Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara and Billy Graham.^[41] According to a November 1979 profile by Paul Burka in Texas Monthly magazine, "The case turned first on whether Connally would simultaneously be tried for perjury—some embarrassing inconsistencies had crept into his pretrial testimony—but his lawyer was able to prevent it, and then the issue came down to whether John Connally or Jake Jacobsen was telling the truth." On the strength of the defense's prominent character witnesses, Connally was acquitted.^[42][43]

1980 presidential run[edit]

See also: 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries

Connally announced in January 1979 that he would seek the Republican nomination for President in 1980. He was considered a great orator and strong leader and was featured on the cover of Time with the heading "Hot on the Trail", but his wheeler-dealer image remained a liability.^{[citation needed]} Connally drew the backing of Republican state representative Fred Agnich of Dallas.^[44] Connally raised more money than any other candidate, but he was never able to overtake the popular conservative front-runner, Ronald Reagan of California.^{[citation needed]} Connally spent his money nationally, while rival candidate George H. W. Bush, also from Houston, targeted his time and money in early states and won the Iowa caucus.^{[citation needed]}

Over a year before the election, Connally's views on foreign policy in the Middle East were reported to have made him the "favored Saudi candidate".^[45]

Following his loss in Iowa, Connally focused on South Carolina, an early primary state in which he had the support of U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond.^[46][47] He lost there to Reagan 55 to 30 percent and withdrew from the contest. Despite spending $11 million during the campaign, Connally secured the support of only a single delegate, Ada Mills of Clarksville, Arkansas, who became nationally known for a brief time as the "$11 million delegate".^[48]

After withdrawing, Connally endorsed Reagan and appeared with the former governor at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, fundraisers and other campaign events. During a press conference, Connally was asked if he thought Reagan was the best man to be president. Connally joked, "I think he's the second best man I can think of."^[47]

Connally was reported to have been interested in becoming Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration, but was only offered the post of Secretary of Energy, which he turned down.^[49][50] Governor of Texas Bill Clements said that Connally rejected the position for personal reasons and to focus on his law practice with Vinson & Elkins.^[49][50] He purchased a $1 million apartment in Washington D.C. from one of the Shah's sisters, reportedly due to higher political aspirations.^[50] He was assigned as one of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board's 19 members.^[50]

 

Edited April 29, 2023 by Bullneck

[956 Worldwide 34016]

3 hours ago, Nivek said:

The supreme court continues to demonstrate why they need serious oversight, and how money buys judges like it does everyone else.

It is WILD that our ethics oversight of the most important legal authorities in the country amounts to “well, let’s just trust them.” 

[956 Worldwide 34016]

18 hours ago, wildcat09 said:

We've discussed it in this thread before. And I don't care that it might be innocent. They don't have to take the fucking job. Jimmy Carter sold his fucking peanut farm, let's treat these lifetime superlegislators at least as strictly. You want to make money investing in real estate? Go do that, but you can't be on SCOTUS. You want to be married to someone who makes millions of dollars from law firms? Cool, go do literally anything else other than be a federal judge. I'm sure she'd be able to support you if you have trouble finding work.

If they're not willing to accept these limitations, why should we trust anything they say or respect any decision they make? The position is supposed to be one of public trust. It's supposed to pay what we pay them and nothing more. If they want the job AND all of the extra benefits they're all getting these days, why the hell should anyone think that it's not those benefits that are what matter most to them?

We give SCOTUS justices about $250K a year.  It’s a lifetime appointment. And when they retire they continue to get that much, as well as continues access to fed benefits—- which are the gold plated standard. 
 

It is more than fair to tell them “you will get to be one of the most powerful and influential people in a superpower and your decisions will influence our society for generations.  In exchange, you’ll get an upper-middle class salary and live on it. If you want to be rich, BigLaw is waiting for your big brain.” 

[Stilicho 1390]

10 hours ago, NotActuallyALonghorn said:

Legitimately curious here, but what exactly do you think is wrong with the general idea of "originalism?" And a follow up, what sort of strategy do you think SCOTUS should employ to interpret the Constitution that wouldn't lead to long term turmoil? It's hard to argue to you believe in civil rights if you are opposed to originalism, but at the same time there are the same problems with believing in both civil rights and originalism, as most of our founding fathers didn't exactly have an exemplary record on the issue.

 

Originalism is a deliberate interpretive choice. It's not the only the means of interpreting constitutional text and its relatively new compared to other forms of interpretation (Brennan / T. Marshall "living constitutionalism"). It really hit the legal mainstream under Reagan, championed by Scalia.

To interpret the Constitution under originalism is to disregard most, if not all, historical and legal context that has occurred in this country since its ratification. It seeks to enshrine law and the definitions of terms in the Constitution perpetually in 1783 or 1865 (ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments). There is no evidence, that I've run across, that any of the Federalists or drafters of the constitution were under the illusion that the Constitution was a static document. J. Marshall directly states that it is not, and since Madison wrote the damn thing, you think he would've argued the point in Marbury. He didn't.

In practice, originalism does not seek to protect civil rights. The only civil rights that originalism has successfully "protected" have been 2A rights (which are relatively new in historical interpretation) and putting its thumb on the religion side of the state / religion scale. I can assure that modern 4th Amendment jurisprudence does not reflect 1783 realities, for example. How the hell could it?

Most civil rights, as we know them, have been derived by judicial interpretation of the 14th Amendment (substantive due process). There are problems with the way the Court has defined those rights and where they "come" from (the first substantive due process case was actually Dred Scott), but originalism works against substantive due process, not with it. It's a legal response to the recognition of all sorts of civil rights under the 14th Amendment in the post-WWII era. It was "invented" strictly as a means of limiting constitutional scope and protections. It's a more educated Rush Limbaugh telling you the Constitution doesn't technically offer protections because they are not enumerated verbatim. That's not what the Constitution was, is, or was ever intended to be. At least not to my eyes.

Scalia, and others, have argued that it is meant to force legislative responsibility back on Congress, rather than have the judiciary be the final arbiter of what can be interpreted out of the 14th Amendment. In other words, Congress should pass laws or Constitutional amendments codifying interpretations of civil rights, so that they cannot be taken away by later Court opinions (like... abortion). That sounds nice in theory, but we have used the Court as a political proving ground going all the way back to Marbury. The amendment process is more or less dead in our current political gridlock (ERA been on the block for... 40ish years now?). It would be nice if we relied on judicial interpretation less, but its been baked into the system so to speak. There was never in any real chance that the federal government would suddenly become better legislators because a few hardcore conservative justices decided to be pedantic dicks about everything and go out of there way to make life for many Americans harder than it needs to be, and it's already hard enough for a lot of folks.

Originalism is the trickle-down economics of constitutional interpretation. It's spun up bullshit to keep certain interests in power perpetually. The shinejob that the Founders never intended the Constitution to be interpreted in a context outside of their own is a marketing ploy to conservatives to make them feel better about fucking people over legally.

Finally, the ultimate irony of originalism and its prohibition on substantive due process is that gets tossed out the window by Scalia, its chief proponent, when he goes looking for constitutional protections for the 2nd Amendment in Heller and and for religion in Hobby Lobby. Like every other weapon in the conservative's limited arsenal, it is not meant to be equitable. It's just another power grab under shoddy veneer.

[HenryJames 65564]

And they’re all really fucking bad historians.

[Stilicho 1390]

4 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

And they’re all really fucking bad historians.

The fucking worst historians.

[WhatTheBuck 28616]

I’m a constitutional originalist. If you couldn’t buy the gun prior to 1792 then the 2nd Amendment doesn’t grant you the right to own it. 

[Fudge Nuggets 18995]

19 hours ago, Skipper said:

So it's presumably been known by anyone that cared to check linkedin that his wife worked as a legal recruiter since 2007 but now we are to be outraged that she made money in that profession (which, by the way, is not an uncommon transition at all for former big firm lawyers tired of the grind)?  Absent something more to this, another non-story.   If we were to be outraged about this seems like it should have been at some point in the 18 years prior.

I went back and checked my job description as a citizen and didn't find "scouring the innerwebs to suss out political corruption of Supreme Court justices" anywhere in the roles and responsibilities section.  Seems there should be some sort of oversight committee or similar that handles that shit on our behalf.  But what do I know, I'm not part of "Big Law" where apparently no rules apply at all.

[Fudge Nuggets 18995]

20 hours ago, Skipper said:

And in any event do you think this guy at GT is going around telling clients they are going to get a favorable ruling in a fucking supreme court case because a justice netted a few hundred K on a property sale that by all means appears to be an arms length transaction? 

Yeah, I absolutely would expect the dude to go around privately advertising how much influence he has over a SC justice.  He wants to drum up business, that's a great way to do it.

[wildcat09 28563]

The next time someone asks what’s wrong with originalism and doesn’t specify which type of originalism they’re asking about, I get to give them a swirlie. 

[Nivek 16689]

34 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

The next time someone asks what’s wrong with originalism and doesn’t specify which type of originalism they’re asking about, I get to give them a swirlie. 

What is wrong with originalism?  I admit the extra crunchy at KFC was my teenage jam, but I also appreciate the change of pace that the original offers.  

[WhatTheBuck 28616]

6 minutes ago, Nivek said:

What is wrong with originalism?  I admit the extra crunchy at KFC was my teenage jam, but I also appreciate the change of pace that the original offers.  

They make today’s extra crunchy with yesterday’s leftover original. 

[jimmyjazz 45207]

10 minutes ago, Nivek said:

What is wrong with originalism?  I admit the extra crunchy at KFC was my teenage jam, but I also appreciate the change of pace that the original offers.  

Wow.  Hot take.  Originalism >>> Extra Crispyism

[Bullneck 18772]

25 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

They make today’s extra crunchy with yesterday’s leftover original. 

Both sides!

[956 Worldwide 34016]

Samuel Alito is very, very upset that the court is being criticized. 
 

[WhatTheBuck 28616]

I guess that would mean extra crunchy is trans fried chicken. 

[Neonmoon 38126]

17 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Samuel Alito is very, very upset that the court is being criticized. 
 

Alito can get fucked 

[Brisketexan 103653]

Wow.  Hot take.  Originalism >>> Extra Crispyism

I prefer the Popeyes Spicy approach to constitutional interpretation. You get an opinion that is significantly different than what you argued for, and maybe it took several months longer than expected to come out…but it’s still fantastic and makes you happy.

[Nivek 16689]

34 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

I prefer the Popeyes Spicy approach to constitutional interpretation. You get an opinion that is significantly different than what you argued for, and maybe it took several months longer than expected to come out…but it’s still fantastic and makes you happy.

I knew some Popeyes or Bojangles motherfuckers would come try to make this about them.  

[Nivek 16689]

2 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Samuel Alito is very, very upset that the court is being criticized. 
 

Translation:  Just because we are a corrupt institution that serves the political aims of a single party, and put them ahead of the will of the people, overreached and pretended we had the power to call an election, we lie, take bribes, support disenfranchisement of voters gerrymandering, and choose to continue to fuck over people for the sake of it,  it is illegal to protest our decisions, just trust us you dumbfucks, we shouldn't be criticized because we are smarter than you plebs.  Lifetime appointments Motherfuckers!  /scotus  #suckitAmericanVoters

[956 Worldwide 34016]

6 minutes ago, Nivek said:

Translation:  Just because we are a corrupt institution that serves the political aims of a single party, and put them ahead of the will of the people, overreached and pretended we had the power to call an election, we lie, take bribes, support disenfranchisement of voters gerrymandering, and choose to continue to fuck over people for the sake of it,  it is illegal to protest our decisions, just trust us you dumbfucks, we shouldn't be criticized because we are smarter than you plebs.  Lifetime appointments Motherfuckers!  /scotus  #suckitAmericanVoters

Same shit as people who wanted us to “respect the office” as DJT debased it. No one has done more than these people to cause a collapse of trust, they are eating into the principal of public trust. 

Edited April 29, 2023 by 956 Worldwide

[Stilicho 1390]

6 minutes ago, Nivek said:

Translation:  Just because we are a corrupt institution that serves the political aims of a single party, and put them ahead of the will of the people, overreached and pretended we had the power to call an election, we lie, take bribes, support disenfranchisement of voters gerrymandering, and choose to continue to fuck over people for the sake of it,  it is illegal to protest our decisions, just trust us you dumbfucks, we shouldn't be criticized because we are smarter than you plebs.  Lifetime appointments Motherfuckers!  /scotus  #suckitAmericanVoters

One way or another, I would really like to shit on this man's grave before I shuffle on off this mortal coil.

[Gap03 3192]

4 hours ago, Neonmoon said:

Alito can get fucked 

Alas, if only he could have gotten fucked in his youth, I suspect he wouldn't be the piece of shit he is today ...

[tx 3 putt 75539]

😂😂😂😂

 

[Mdhorn 5838]

Quick surmise of a lot revealed already: https://www.yahoo.com/news/supreme-court-under-fire-following-what-critics-say-is-a-wave-of-ethical-lapses-211130609.html

Not that any of this matters, this crop of SCOTUS judges isn't going to create ethic rules, because doing so would mean they are unethical and the first justices historically in need of one, and an asterisk to their legacy.  And by doing so, it would be a public admission, which would cast doubt on their rulings.  They could do it in a way that signifies they are trying to assuage public concerns, but again, they won't.

Although Clarence has shown he is no novice to being unethical already, equating to yet another reason for him personally to have oversight. Of course a committee to investigate would then be subject to Republicans subjugating it as another tool to damage democracy, and purge the SCOTUS of Democrats.  And replacing judges should be easier since they aren't elected.    

[TexEx15 17330]

 

[Jhawkmvp 1488]

That is how you Senator.  The SC used to be the most respected part of the federal government.  They brought disgrace and distrust on themselves.

[Biff Tannen 45214]

28 minutes ago, TexEx15 said:

 

Channeling Al Franken there. Love it. 

[Mdhorn 5838]

Gottdam that's some sweet, clean bullshit free, proof driven accusations.  "The court has conclusively proven that it cannot police itself."  And this is a direct condemnation of  Chief Justice Roberts.  How can you allow your fellow justices, to allow this travesty to erode the court that you preside as Chief Justice?  Or rather, are you on the take, too?  

Edited May 3, 2023 by Mdhorn

[Captainant 26927]

Republicans and US judicial apologists be like:

 

[jimmyjazz 45207]

 

[Francisco 2.0 32219]

Nifty how Propublica can find out all this stuff.

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

Quote

In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”

 

 

Quote

Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.

The payments extended beyond that month, according to Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at the school. Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year, Grimwood told ProPublica.

 

Quote

“Harlan picked up the tab,” said Grimwood, who got to know Crow and the Thomases and had access to school financial information through his work as an administrator.

Before and after his time at Hidden Lake, Martin attended a second boarding school, Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. “Harlan said he was paying for the tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy as well,” Grimwood said, recalling a conversation he had with Crow during a visit to the billionaire’s Adirondacks estate.

 

Spoiler

ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin’s education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.

Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin’s education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow’s.

The tuition payments add to the picture of how the Republican megadonor has helped fund the lives of Thomas and his family.

“You can’t be having secret financial arrangements,” said Mark W. Bennett, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. Bennett said he was friendly with Thomas and declined to comment for the record about the specifics of Thomas’ actions. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn’t let his lawyer friends buy him lunch.

Thomas did not respond to questions. In response to previous ProPublica reporting on gifts of luxury travel, he said that the Crows “are among our dearest friends” and that he understood he didn’t have to disclose the trips.

ProPublica sent Crow a detailed list of questions and his office responded with a statement that did not dispute the facts presented in this story.

“Harlan Crow has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate, especially at-risk youth,” the statement said. “It’s disappointing that those with partisan political interests would try to turn helping at-risk youth with tuition assistance into something nefarious or political.” The statement added that Crow and his wife have “supported many young Americans” at a “variety of schools, including his alma mater.” Crow went to Randolph-Macon Academy.

Crow did not address a question about how much he paid in total for Martin’s tuition. Asked if Thomas had requested the support for either school, Crow’s office responded, “No.”

Last month, ProPublica reported that Thomas accepted luxury travel from Crow virtually every year for decades, including international superyacht cruises and private jet flights around the world. Crow also paid money to Thomas and his relatives in an undisclosed real estate deal, ProPublica found. After he purchased the house where Thomas’ mother lives, Crow poured tens of thousands of dollars into improving the property. And roughly 15 years ago, Crow donated much of the budget of a political group founded by Thomas’ wife, which paid her a $120,000 salary.

“This is way outside the norm. This is way in excess of anything I’ve seen,” said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, referring to the cascade of gifts over the years.

Painter said that when he was at the White House, an official who’d taken what Thomas had would have been fired: “This amount of undisclosed gifts? You’d want to get them out of the government.”

A federal law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to publicly report most gifts. Ethics law experts told ProPublica they believed Thomas was required by law to disclose the tuition payments because they appear to be a gift to him.

Justices also must report many gifts to their spouses and dependent children. The law’s definition of dependent child is narrow, however, and likely would not apply to Martin since Thomas was his legal guardian, not his parent. The best case for not disclosing Crow’s tuition payments would be to argue the gifts were to Martin, not Thomas, experts said.

But that argument was far-fetched, experts said, because minor children rarely pay their own tuition. Typically, the legal guardian is responsible for the child’s education.

“The most reasonable interpretation of the statute is that this was a gift to Thomas and thus had to be reported. It’s common sense,” said Kathleen Clark, an ethics law expert at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s all to the financial benefit of Clarence Thomas.”

Martin, now in his 30s, told ProPublica he was not aware that Crow paid his tuition. But he defended Thomas and Crow, saying he believed there was no ulterior motive behind the real estate magnate’s largesse over the decades. “I think his intentions behind everything is just a friend and just a good person,” Martin said.

Crow has long been an influential figure in pro-business conservative politics. He has given millions to efforts to move the law and the judiciary to the right and serves on the boards of think tanks that publish scholarship advancing conservative legal theories.

Crow has denied trying to influence the justice but has said he extended hospitality to him just as he has to other dear friends. From the start, their relationship has intertwined expensive gifts and conservative politics. In a recent interview with The Dallas Morning News, Crow recounted how he first met Thomas. In 1996, the justice was scheduled to give a speech in Dallas for an anti-regulation think tank. Crow offered to fly him there on his private jet. “During that flight, we found out we were kind of simpatico,” the billionaire said.

The following year, the Thomases began to discuss taking custody of Martin. His father, Thomas’ nephew, had been imprisoned in connection with a drug case. Thomas has written that Martin’s situation held deep resonance for him because his own father was absent and his grandparents had taken him in “under very similar circumstances.”

Thomas had an adult son from a previous marriage, but he and wife, Ginni, didn’t have children of their own. They pitched Martin’s parents on taking the boy in.

“Thomas explained that the boy would have the best of everything — his own room, a private school education, lots of extracurricular activities,” journalists Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher reported in their biography of Thomas.

Thomas gained legal custody of Martin and became his legal guardian around January 1998, according to court records.

Martin, who had been living in Georgia with his mother and siblings, moved to Virginia, where he lived with the justice from the ages of 6 to 19, he said.

Living with the Thomases came with an unusual perk: lavish travel with Crow and his family. Martin told ProPublica that he and Thomas vacationed with the Crows “at least once a year” throughout his childhood.

That included visits to Camp Topridge, Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks, and two cruises on Crow’s superyacht, Martin said. On a trip in the Caribbean, Martin recalled riding jet skis off the side of the billionaire’s yacht.

Roughly 20 years ago, Martin, Thomas and the Crows went on a cruise on the yacht in Russia and the Baltics, according to Martin and two other people familiar with the trip. The group toured St. Petersburg in a rented helicopter and visited the Yusupov Palace, the site of Rasputin’s murder, said one of the people. They were joined by Chris DeMuth, then the president of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. (Thomas’ trips with Crow to the Baltics and the Caribbean have not previously been reported.)

Thomas reconfigured his life to balance the demands of raising a child with serving on the high court. He began going to the Supreme Court before 6 a.m. so he could leave in time to pick Martin up after class and help him with his homework. By 2001, the justice had moved Martin to private school out of frustration with the Fairfax County public school system’s lax schedule, The American Lawyer magazinereported.

For high school, Thomas sent Martin to Randolph-Macon Academy, a military boarding school 75 miles west of Washington, D.C., where he was in the class of 2010. The school, which sits on a 135-acre campus in the Shenandoah Valley, charged between $25,000 to $30,000 a year. Martin played football and basketball, and the justice sometimes visited for games.

Randolph-Macon was also Crow’s alma mater. Thomas and Crow visited the campus in April 2007 for the dedication of an imposing bronze sculpture of the Air Force Honor Guard, according to the school magazine. Crow donated the piece to Randolph-Macon, where it is a short walk from Crow Hall, a classroom building named after the Dallas billionaire’s family.

Martin sometimes chafed at the strictures of military school, according to people at Randolph-Macon at the time, and he spent his junior year at Hidden Lake Academy, a therapeutic boarding school in Georgia. Hidden Lake boasted one teacher for every 10 students and activities ranging from horseback riding to canoeing. Those services came at an added cost. At the time, a year of tuition was roughly $73,000, plus fees.

The July 2009 bank statement from Hidden Lake was filed in a bankruptcy case for the school, which later went under. The document shows that Crow Holdings LLC wired $6,200 to the school that month, the exact cost of the month’s tuition. The wire is marked “Mark Martin” in the ledger.

Crow’s office said in its statement that Crow’s funding of students’ tuition has “always been paid solely from personal funds, sometimes held at and paid through the family business.”

Grimwood, the administrator at Hidden Lake, told ProPublica that Crow wired the school money once a month to pay Martin’s tuition fees. Grimwood had multiple roles on the campus, including overseeing an affiliated wilderness program. He said he was speaking about the payments because he felt the public should know about outside financial support for Supreme Court justices. Martin returned to Randolph-Macon his senior year.

Thomas has long been one of the less wealthy members of the Supreme Court. Still, when Martin was in high school, he and Ginni Thomas had income that put them comfortably in the top echelon of Americans.

In 2006 for example, the Thomases brought in more than $500,000 in income. The following year, they made more than $850,000 from Clarence Thomas’ salary from the court, Ginni Thomas’ pay from the Heritage Foundation and book payments for the justice’s memoir.

It appears that at some point in Martin’s childhood, Thomas was paying for private school himself. Martin told ProPublica that Thomas sold his Corvette — “his most prized car” — to pay for a year of tuition, although he didn’t remember when that occurred.

In 2002, a friend of Thomas’ from the RV community who owned a Florida pest control company, Earl Dixon, offered Thomas $5,000 to help defray the costs of Martin’s education. Thomas’ disclosure of that earlier gift, several experts said, could be viewed as evidence that the justice himself understood he was required to report tuition aid from friends.

“At first, Thomas was worried about the propriety of the donation,” Thomas biographers Merida and Fletcher recounted. “He agreed to accept it if the contribution was deposited directly into a special trust for Mark.” In his annual filing, Thomas reported the money as an “education gift to Mark Martin.”

 

[Horn Under a Bad Sign 20304]

3 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Nifty how Propublica can find out all this stuff.

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

 

 

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin’s education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.

Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin’s education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow’s.

The tuition payments add to the picture of how the Republican megadonor has helped fund the lives of Thomas and his family.

“You can’t be having secret financial arrangements,” said Mark W. Bennett, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. Bennett said he was friendly with Thomas and declined to comment for the record about the specifics of Thomas’ actions. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn’t let his lawyer friends buy him lunch.

Thomas did not respond to questions. In response to previous ProPublica reporting on gifts of luxury travel, he said that the Crows “are among our dearest friends” and that he understood he didn’t have to disclose the trips.

ProPublica sent Crow a detailed list of questions and his office responded with a statement that did not dispute the facts presented in this story.

“Harlan Crow has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate, especially at-risk youth,” the statement said. “It’s disappointing that those with partisan political interests would try to turn helping at-risk youth with tuition assistance into something nefarious or political.” The statement added that Crow and his wife have “supported many young Americans” at a “variety of schools, including his alma mater.” Crow went to Randolph-Macon Academy.

Crow did not address a question about how much he paid in total for Martin’s tuition. Asked if Thomas had requested the support for either school, Crow’s office responded, “No.”

Last month, ProPublica reported that Thomas accepted luxury travel from Crow virtually every year for decades, including international superyacht cruises and private jet flights around the world. Crow also paid money to Thomas and his relatives in an undisclosed real estate deal, ProPublica found. After he purchased the house where Thomas’ mother lives, Crow poured tens of thousands of dollars into improving the property. And roughly 15 years ago, Crow donated much of the budget of a political group founded by Thomas’ wife, which paid her a $120,000 salary.

“This is way outside the norm. This is way in excess of anything I’ve seen,” said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, referring to the cascade of gifts over the years.

Painter said that when he was at the White House, an official who’d taken what Thomas had would have been fired: “This amount of undisclosed gifts? You’d want to get them out of the government.”

A federal law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to publicly report most gifts. Ethics law experts told ProPublica they believed Thomas was required by law to disclose the tuition payments because they appear to be a gift to him.

Justices also must report many gifts to their spouses and dependent children. The law’s definition of dependent child is narrow, however, and likely would not apply to Martin since Thomas was his legal guardian, not his parent. The best case for not disclosing Crow’s tuition payments would be to argue the gifts were to Martin, not Thomas, experts said.

But that argument was far-fetched, experts said, because minor children rarely pay their own tuition. Typically, the legal guardian is responsible for the child’s education.

“The most reasonable interpretation of the statute is that this was a gift to Thomas and thus had to be reported. It’s common sense,” said Kathleen Clark, an ethics law expert at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s all to the financial benefit of Clarence Thomas.”

Martin, now in his 30s, told ProPublica he was not aware that Crow paid his tuition. But he defended Thomas and Crow, saying he believed there was no ulterior motive behind the real estate magnate’s largesse over the decades. “I think his intentions behind everything is just a friend and just a good person,” Martin said.

Crow has long been an influential figure in pro-business conservative politics. He has given millions to efforts to move the law and the judiciary to the right and serves on the boards of think tanks that publish scholarship advancing conservative legal theories.

Crow has denied trying to influence the justice but has said he extended hospitality to him just as he has to other dear friends. From the start, their relationship has intertwined expensive gifts and conservative politics. In a recent interview with The Dallas Morning News, Crow recounted how he first met Thomas. In 1996, the justice was scheduled to give a speech in Dallas for an anti-regulation think tank. Crow offered to fly him there on his private jet. “During that flight, we found out we were kind of simpatico,” the billionaire said.

The following year, the Thomases began to discuss taking custody of Martin. His father, Thomas’ nephew, had been imprisoned in connection with a drug case. Thomas has written that Martin’s situation held deep resonance for him because his own father was absent and his grandparents had taken him in “under very similar circumstances.”

Thomas had an adult son from a previous marriage, but he and wife, Ginni, didn’t have children of their own. They pitched Martin’s parents on taking the boy in.

“Thomas explained that the boy would have the best of everything — his own room, a private school education, lots of extracurricular activities,” journalists Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher reported in their biography of Thomas.

Thomas gained legal custody of Martin and became his legal guardian around January 1998, according to court records.

Martin, who had been living in Georgia with his mother and siblings, moved to Virginia, where he lived with the justice from the ages of 6 to 19, he said.

Living with the Thomases came with an unusual perk: lavish travel with Crow and his family. Martin told ProPublica that he and Thomas vacationed with the Crows “at least once a year” throughout his childhood.

That included visits to Camp Topridge, Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks, and two cruises on Crow’s superyacht, Martin said. On a trip in the Caribbean, Martin recalled riding jet skis off the side of the billionaire’s yacht.

Roughly 20 years ago, Martin, Thomas and the Crows went on a cruise on the yacht in Russia and the Baltics, according to Martin and two other people familiar with the trip. The group toured St. Petersburg in a rented helicopter and visited the Yusupov Palace, the site of Rasputin’s murder, said one of the people. They were joined by Chris DeMuth, then the president of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. (Thomas’ trips with Crow to the Baltics and the Caribbean have not previously been reported.)

Thomas reconfigured his life to balance the demands of raising a child with serving on the high court. He began going to the Supreme Court before 6 a.m. so he could leave in time to pick Martin up after class and help him with his homework. By 2001, the justice had moved Martin to private school out of frustration with the Fairfax County public school system’s lax schedule, The American Lawyer magazinereported.

For high school, Thomas sent Martin to Randolph-Macon Academy, a military boarding school 75 miles west of Washington, D.C., where he was in the class of 2010. The school, which sits on a 135-acre campus in the Shenandoah Valley, charged between $25,000 to $30,000 a year. Martin played football and basketball, and the justice sometimes visited for games.

Randolph-Macon was also Crow’s alma mater. Thomas and Crow visited the campus in April 2007 for the dedication of an imposing bronze sculpture of the Air Force Honor Guard, according to the school magazine. Crow donated the piece to Randolph-Macon, where it is a short walk from Crow Hall, a classroom building named after the Dallas billionaire’s family.

Martin sometimes chafed at the strictures of military school, according to people at Randolph-Macon at the time, and he spent his junior year at Hidden Lake Academy, a therapeutic boarding school in Georgia. Hidden Lake boasted one teacher for every 10 students and activities ranging from horseback riding to canoeing. Those services came at an added cost. At the time, a year of tuition was roughly $73,000, plus fees.

The July 2009 bank statement from Hidden Lake was filed in a bankruptcy case for the school, which later went under. The document shows that Crow Holdings LLC wired $6,200 to the school that month, the exact cost of the month’s tuition. The wire is marked “Mark Martin” in the ledger.

Crow’s office said in its statement that Crow’s funding of students’ tuition has “always been paid solely from personal funds, sometimes held at and paid through the family business.”

Grimwood, the administrator at Hidden Lake, told ProPublica that Crow wired the school money once a month to pay Martin’s tuition fees. Grimwood had multiple roles on the campus, including overseeing an affiliated wilderness program. He said he was speaking about the payments because he felt the public should know about outside financial support for Supreme Court justices. Martin returned to Randolph-Macon his senior year.

Thomas has long been one of the less wealthy members of the Supreme Court. Still, when Martin was in high school, he and Ginni Thomas had income that put them comfortably in the top echelon of Americans.

In 2006 for example, the Thomases brought in more than $500,000 in income. The following year, they made more than $850,000 from Clarence Thomas’ salary from the court, Ginni Thomas’ pay from the Heritage Foundation and book payments for the justice’s memoir.

It appears that at some point in Martin’s childhood, Thomas was paying for private school himself. Martin told ProPublica that Thomas sold his Corvette — “his most prized car” — to pay for a year of tuition, although he didn’t remember when that occurred.

In 2002, a friend of Thomas’ from the RV community who owned a Florida pest control company, Earl Dixon, offered Thomas $5,000 to help defray the costs of Martin’s education. Thomas’ disclosure of that earlier gift, several experts said, could be viewed as evidence that the justice himself understood he was required to report tuition aid from friends.

“At first, Thomas was worried about the propriety of the donation,” Thomas biographers Merida and Fletcher recounted. “He agreed to accept it if the contribution was deposited directly into a special trust for Mark.” In his annual filing, Thomas reported the money as an “education gift to Mark Martin.”

 

The corruption is so brazen.

[Dnaguy 11598]

On 4/30/2023 at 12:22 AM, tx 3 putt said:

😂😂😂😂

 

[Neonmoon 38126]

The just vacations was also a lie 

 

[Horn Dog 9473]

Yes but RBG once donated a SIGNED book to a nonprofit that was used in a charity auction…. so both sides.

[burntorangebongos 10658]

 

[CooterBrown 17761]

Seems like an IRS audit could find all kinds of gifts/income that were not reported. You know, if the IRS audited politicos.

 

[HenryJames 65564]

 

[Dahobbs 17251]

2 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Nifty how Propublica can find out all this stuff.

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

 

 

 

 

  Hide contents

ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin’s education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.

Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin’s education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow’s.

The tuition payments add to the picture of how the Republican megadonor has helped fund the lives of Thomas and his family.

“You can’t be having secret financial arrangements,” said Mark W. Bennett, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. Bennett said he was friendly with Thomas and declined to comment for the record about the specifics of Thomas’ actions. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn’t let his lawyer friends buy him lunch.

Thomas did not respond to questions. In response to previous ProPublica reporting on gifts of luxury travel, he said that the Crows “are among our dearest friends” and that he understood he didn’t have to disclose the trips.

ProPublica sent Crow a detailed list of questions and his office responded with a statement that did not dispute the facts presented in this story.

“Harlan Crow has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate, especially at-risk youth,” the statement said. “It’s disappointing that those with partisan political interests would try to turn helping at-risk youth with tuition assistance into something nefarious or political.” The statement added that Crow and his wife have “supported many young Americans” at a “variety of schools, including his alma mater.” Crow went to Randolph-Macon Academy.

Crow did not address a question about how much he paid in total for Martin’s tuition. Asked if Thomas had requested the support for either school, Crow’s office responded, “No.”

Last month, ProPublica reported that Thomas accepted luxury travel from Crow virtually every year for decades, including international superyacht cruises and private jet flights around the world. Crow also paid money to Thomas and his relatives in an undisclosed real estate deal, ProPublica found. After he purchased the house where Thomas’ mother lives, Crow poured tens of thousands of dollars into improving the property. And roughly 15 years ago, Crow donated much of the budget of a political group founded by Thomas’ wife, which paid her a $120,000 salary.

“This is way outside the norm. This is way in excess of anything I’ve seen,” said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, referring to the cascade of gifts over the years.

Painter said that when he was at the White House, an official who’d taken what Thomas had would have been fired: “This amount of undisclosed gifts? You’d want to get them out of the government.”

A federal law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to publicly report most gifts. Ethics law experts told ProPublica they believed Thomas was required by law to disclose the tuition payments because they appear to be a gift to him.

Justices also must report many gifts to their spouses and dependent children. The law’s definition of dependent child is narrow, however, and likely would not apply to Martin since Thomas was his legal guardian, not his parent. The best case for not disclosing Crow’s tuition payments would be to argue the gifts were to Martin, not Thomas, experts said.

But that argument was far-fetched, experts said, because minor children rarely pay their own tuition. Typically, the legal guardian is responsible for the child’s education.

“The most reasonable interpretation of the statute is that this was a gift to Thomas and thus had to be reported. It’s common sense,” said Kathleen Clark, an ethics law expert at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s all to the financial benefit of Clarence Thomas.”

Martin, now in his 30s, told ProPublica he was not aware that Crow paid his tuition. But he defended Thomas and Crow, saying he believed there was no ulterior motive behind the real estate magnate’s largesse over the decades. “I think his intentions behind everything is just a friend and just a good person,” Martin said.

Crow has long been an influential figure in pro-business conservative politics. He has given millions to efforts to move the law and the judiciary to the right and serves on the boards of think tanks that publish scholarship advancing conservative legal theories.

Crow has denied trying to influence the justice but has said he extended hospitality to him just as he has to other dear friends. From the start, their relationship has intertwined expensive gifts and conservative politics. In a recent interview with The Dallas Morning News, Crow recounted how he first met Thomas. In 1996, the justice was scheduled to give a speech in Dallas for an anti-regulation think tank. Crow offered to fly him there on his private jet. “During that flight, we found out we were kind of simpatico,” the billionaire said.

The following year, the Thomases began to discuss taking custody of Martin. His father, Thomas’ nephew, had been imprisoned in connection with a drug case. Thomas has written that Martin’s situation held deep resonance for him because his own father was absent and his grandparents had taken him in “under very similar circumstances.”

Thomas had an adult son from a previous marriage, but he and wife, Ginni, didn’t have children of their own. They pitched Martin’s parents on taking the boy in.

“Thomas explained that the boy would have the best of everything — his own room, a private school education, lots of extracurricular activities,” journalists Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher reported in their biography of Thomas.

Thomas gained legal custody of Martin and became his legal guardian around January 1998, according to court records.

Martin, who had been living in Georgia with his mother and siblings, moved to Virginia, where he lived with the justice from the ages of 6 to 19, he said.

Living with the Thomases came with an unusual perk: lavish travel with Crow and his family. Martin told ProPublica that he and Thomas vacationed with the Crows “at least once a year” throughout his childhood.

That included visits to Camp Topridge, Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks, and two cruises on Crow’s superyacht, Martin said. On a trip in the Caribbean, Martin recalled riding jet skis off the side of the billionaire’s yacht.

Roughly 20 years ago, Martin, Thomas and the Crows went on a cruise on the yacht in Russia and the Baltics, according to Martin and two other people familiar with the trip. The group toured St. Petersburg in a rented helicopter and visited the Yusupov Palace, the site of Rasputin’s murder, said one of the people. They were joined by Chris DeMuth, then the president of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. (Thomas’ trips with Crow to the Baltics and the Caribbean have not previously been reported.)

Thomas reconfigured his life to balance the demands of raising a child with serving on the high court. He began going to the Supreme Court before 6 a.m. so he could leave in time to pick Martin up after class and help him with his homework. By 2001, the justice had moved Martin to private school out of frustration with the Fairfax County public school system’s lax schedule, The American Lawyer magazinereported.

For high school, Thomas sent Martin to Randolph-Macon Academy, a military boarding school 75 miles west of Washington, D.C., where he was in the class of 2010. The school, which sits on a 135-acre campus in the Shenandoah Valley, charged between $25,000 to $30,000 a year. Martin played football and basketball, and the justice sometimes visited for games.

Randolph-Macon was also Crow’s alma mater. Thomas and Crow visited the campus in April 2007 for the dedication of an imposing bronze sculpture of the Air Force Honor Guard, according to the school magazine. Crow donated the piece to Randolph-Macon, where it is a short walk from Crow Hall, a classroom building named after the Dallas billionaire’s family.

Martin sometimes chafed at the strictures of military school, according to people at Randolph-Macon at the time, and he spent his junior year at Hidden Lake Academy, a therapeutic boarding school in Georgia. Hidden Lake boasted one teacher for every 10 students and activities ranging from horseback riding to canoeing. Those services came at an added cost. At the time, a year of tuition was roughly $73,000, plus fees.

The July 2009 bank statement from Hidden Lake was filed in a bankruptcy case for the school, which later went under. The document shows that Crow Holdings LLC wired $6,200 to the school that month, the exact cost of the month’s tuition. The wire is marked “Mark Martin” in the ledger.

Crow’s office said in its statement that Crow’s funding of students’ tuition has “always been paid solely from personal funds, sometimes held at and paid through the family business.”

Grimwood, the administrator at Hidden Lake, told ProPublica that Crow wired the school money once a month to pay Martin’s tuition fees. Grimwood had multiple roles on the campus, including overseeing an affiliated wilderness program. He said he was speaking about the payments because he felt the public should know about outside financial support for Supreme Court justices. Martin returned to Randolph-Macon his senior year.

Thomas has long been one of the less wealthy members of the Supreme Court. Still, when Martin was in high school, he and Ginni Thomas had income that put them comfortably in the top echelon of Americans.

In 2006 for example, the Thomases brought in more than $500,000 in income. The following year, they made more than $850,000 from Clarence Thomas’ salary from the court, Ginni Thomas’ pay from the Heritage Foundation and book payments for the justice’s memoir.

It appears that at some point in Martin’s childhood, Thomas was paying for private school himself. Martin told ProPublica that Thomas sold his Corvette — “his most prized car” — to pay for a year of tuition, although he didn’t remember when that occurred.

In 2002, a friend of Thomas’ from the RV community who owned a Florida pest control company, Earl Dixon, offered Thomas $5,000 to help defray the costs of Martin’s education. Thomas’ disclosure of that earlier gift, several experts said, could be viewed as evidence that the justice himself understood he was required to report tuition aid from friends.

“At first, Thomas was worried about the propriety of the donation,” Thomas biographers Merida and Fletcher recounted. “He agreed to accept it if the contribution was deposited directly into a special trust for Mark.” In his annual filing, Thomas reported the money as an “education gift to Mark Martin.”

 

Wow. Just wow. How the fuck does a school charging $70,000+ a year (15 years ago!) go bankrupt? 

Edited May 4, 2023 by Dahobbs

[Neonmoon 38126]

The Republicans will continue to destroy democracy and the rule of law until someone holds them accountable. It’s as simple as that. 
 

[CooterBrown 17761]

7 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

Wow. Just wow. How the fuck does a school charging $70,000+ a year (15 years ago!) go bankrupt? 

Do you even Prime Academy, bro?

 

[Francisco 2.0 32219]

17 minutes ago, Neonmoon said:

The Republicans will continue to destroy democracy and the rule of law until someone holds them accountable. It’s as simple as that. 
 

 

But the Supreme Court.

 

Look, I get it---but honestly, at this point, there is only one group that can hold the Supremes accountable for anything---themselves.  Because the GOP sure as hell doesn't want to (unless, of course, we magically had a 6-3 Democratic appointed Supreme Court, but that probably won't happen in the rest of my life).

 

 

 

 

[WhatTheBuck 28616]

2 hours ago, Neonmoon said:

The just vacations was also a lie 

 

“Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin’s education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow’s.”

I think I know why. 

[SquishMitten 10373]

I’m torn on the Gorsuch deal. It was well below the original asking price, but I haven’t seen anything about a fair market value. As long as it wasn’t well above FMV, it’s possible that it was an entirely innocent deal and he had no reason to think he needed to disclose additional information (or even ask his partners about the buyer). Also, it says he has sided with the buyer’s firm in 8 out of 12 cases. Has there been any discussion of those cases? Did his decisions in each generally follow his pattern or was he making arguments that were outside of his usual line of reasoning? In the 4 that he ruled against them, was it a decisive loss? Or did he still concede to some of their positions? If they all track with his history, then I think that is pretty conclusive evidence he wasn’t swayed by the sale (or that he even knew there was an ethical issue). 
 

All that being said, I agree there should be stricter rules. They should be required to know everything about where there income derives from, and they should be required to disclose it in detail. Maybe even flag certain things as potential conflicts of interest to make sure everyone sees it. Had that been done, maybe the sale never happens. But if it did, parties on the other side from that firm could have raised it as a potential reason for recusal, and there wouldn’t be a lick of the appearance of impropriety. 

[tx 3 putt 75539]

He’ll never do it, but thomas must step down 

[Ghost of LL 15255]

2 hours ago, CooterBrown said:

Seems like an IRS audit could find all kinds of gifts/income that were not reported. You know, if the IRS audited politicos.

 

I'm sure it was all reported to the IRS.

Because Clarence Thomas wouldn't cheat on his taxes, would he?