U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Ginsburg Edition

Asking the Republican-appointed Chief Justice who exempted the Justices from the Dobbs leak investigation to investigate Thomas’s corruption, rather than doing it yourself, is so deeply unserious. I’m surprised Dem Senators were willing to pass the buck so brazenly. https://t.co/W0hhLHmVvf

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) April 11, 2023

I don't know if it's an attempt to say later, "Well, we gave you a chance to do it yourself, now we gotta do it."

Roberts seems to have zero pull with Thomas and Alito. Not much with the others as well I'd imagine.

The power of Congress to investigate the conduct of a Supreme Court justice is inherent in its constitutional power to impeach and dismiss justices. So, yes, letting Roberts be in charge is buck passing pure and simple.

After last week’s bombshell ProPublica report on Justice Thomas’ undisclosed gifts, I said the Senate Judiciary Committee will act.

We’ll start with a hearing.

And if the Court does not finally resolve this issue on its own, @JudiciaryDems will consider legislation to fix it. https://t.co/v07suRnoU4

— Senator Dick Durbin (@SenatorDurbin) April 11, 2023

Don't make us consider legislation.

With Republicans controlling the House, no legislation is possible. They will hold hearings. Your proposal?

I don't remember if the Constitution awards the Senate sole power over SCOTUS-related matters.

Same as for presidents, any articles of impeachment against a justice must be passed by the House, trial happens in the Senate. But that provision shouldn't limit the power to investigate conduct solely to the House.

Durbin is also still following that Senate procedure where senators from a state where a district court judge is based get to say yay or nay on a judicial nomination. So Republicans have been blocking nominations. There’s also a 5th Circuit spot that Biden hasn’t nominated anyone for yet , and Durbin isn’t encouraging him to do so

Your proposal?

I'm not actually a President, you know

No, the blue chip rule is fucking bullshit.

that blue chip rule is the sort of thing that happens in a clubby, pseudo-aristocratic atmosphere where everyone is pretending to be "a gentleman"

aka the Senate

half of them stopped pretending but the other half pretended not to notice

this exactly

sometimes i wonder if these guys are altogether on the up and up?

NEW:

Harlan Crow paid Thomas for property.

The law explicitly requires disclosure of property sales.

Thomas didn't disclose anything.

Here's Thomas' signature on the undisclosed deal.https://t.co/zC7JGm1l10

By @JustinElliott @js_kaplan & @Amierjeski pic.twitter.com/0tQ1O1FhbY

— Eric Umansky (@ericuman) April 13, 2023

I don't know. Did you ever think that disclosing things makes Clarence Thomas feel bad? Ease off, people.

I love to sell property to my friends. I do it all the time.

“He now owned the house where the justice’s elderly mother was living.”

Don’t miss the strangest part of this story: Thomas sold his mother’s home and MADE HARLAN CROW HIS MOTHER’S LANDLORD. https://t.co/4S3jlRPh7z

— Dr. Thrasher (@thrasherxy) April 13, 2023

My Mother's Landlord was the 2nd volume of Thomas' autobiography iirc

Just pulling himself up by his own bootstraps.

In a statement, Crow said he purchased Thomas’ mother’s house, where Thomas spent part of his childhood, to preserve it for posterity. “My intention is to one day create a public museum at the Thomas home dedicated to telling the story of our nation’s second black Supreme Court Justice,” he said. “I approached the Thomas family about my desire to maintain this historic site so future generations could learn about the inspiring life of one of our greatest Americans.”

Ah, ok that seems legit. I'm sure he wanted to preserve/restore it to the condition it was in when Thomas lived there.

Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees. The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints.

The renovations included a small room in which Thomas' mother could sit among Stalin-era memorabilia, such as the revolver the Marshall carried in case a minion insubordinated

What's the emoji for when you're sad that you can't tell if something is a joke or not?

The fact that he disclosed the ownership for at least 10 years, then didn't disclose the sale, seems pretty damning to me.

I suspect Thomas is likely selling timeshare properties on the side as well

ha, what a piece of shit, straight out of the Trump playbook. hide something, get caught, pretend to be cooperative but keep on hiding shit.

This is all just so goddamn weird

Who bets Crow gives Thomas a little kickback each month from his mom's rent?

Meanwhile Dem senators keep trying to get others to investigate when they have the authority to do so themselves:

It would be best for the Chief Justice to commence a proper investigation, but after a week of silence from the Court and this latest disturbing reporting, I’m urging the Judicial Conference to step in and refer Justice Thomas to the Attorney General for investigation.

— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) April 14, 2023

Yeah but congressional investigations have exactly zero teeth. Congress been investigatin' shit forever and I am not familiar with a single recent instance of a congressional investigation resulting in consequences.

The Mueller report did not result in impeachment and the Senate didn't convict Trump after either of his two impeachments, but you be hard pressed to say they were all 'without consequence'.

This is all just so goddamn weird

It is, it's like a rejected script for Succession.

there's something to be said for not being willing to go down without a fight and make sure you hit your enemy in the head so they remember it next time.

my only objection is the tendency to blame the party that has no ability to stop the wheels in motion for the result, but not doing anything at all just signals to everyone "cool, we can do this and nobody will give us any trouble".

and then there's government agencies that can do things and fuck it up, like the FDA, who should have issued a notice of non-enforcement discretion re: mifepristone by now, and the DOJ, who was inexcusably late filing their appeal to SCOTUS for the mifepristone case this morning, when they need a stay by 12:00 am.

Astonishing. As @JudiciaryDems wrote, the Chief Justice must investigate how such conduct could take place at the Court under his watch. And if the Court does not fix these clear abuses, Congress must. https://t.co/DQCP6Lylnm

— Senator Dick Durbin (@SenatorDurbin) April 13, 2023

Durbin , head of Judiciary Committee, a profile in lack of courage. Senator Blumenthal is also tweeting that if Justice Roberts doesn’t act, Congress must do something .

Endorsing Paul Vallas right before he loses in Chicago, keeping Feinstein on Judiciary and creating a new problem for Dem confirmations, keeping blue slips after Rs wiped their mouths with them… great year for Durbin https://t.co/g1aYJkETFN

— David Weigel (@daveweigel) April 15, 2023

Over the last two decades, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has reported on required financial disclosure forms that his family received rental income totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars from a firm called Ginger, Ltd., Partnership.

But that company — a Nebraska real estate firm launched in the 1980s by his wife and her relatives — has not existed since 2006.

That year, the family real estate company was shut down and a separate firm was created, state incorporation records show. The similarly named firm assumed control of the shuttered company’s land leasing business, according to property records...

The previously unreported misstatement might be dismissed as a paperwork error. But it is among a series of errors and omissions that Thomas has made on required annual financial disclosure forms over the past several decades, a review of those records shows. Together, they have raised questions about how seriously Thomas views his responsibility to accurately report details about his finances to the public.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/04/16/clarence-thomas-ginger-financial-disclosure/

in retaliation for all of the bad press, in one of the next cases before the court, Clarence will get four other conservative justices to join him in ruling that the Federal Government does not exist

https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/politics/clarence-thomas-amend-disclosure-gop-megadonor/index.html

Thomas is going to amend his 2014 filing on the property sale, and feels he should be excused for how he did it because .

a reminder that last term, Justice Thomas authored the opinion that says *when your state-appointed lawyer* fails to introduce evidence of your innocence in state court, that's *your fault* - and it's illegal for a federal court to consider the evidence. https://t.co/Ixj6jDMZF5 https://t.co/hJT4irqHoH

— Leah Litman (@LeahLitman) April 17, 2023

OK cool so that's tha

Motherfucker is guilty as hell, and nothing will happen to him.

Corey Robin, who wrote an essential book about Thomas:

As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie pointed out, “Corruption is much more than a cartoonish quid pro quo.” When money talks, the words need not take the form of “Do this, and I’ll give you that.” Money buys a lifetime of conversation between men of power. In that fraternity of words and wealth, stories are swapped, trust is gained, respect is earned, ideas are shared and preferences become policy.

As a description of the problem of Clarence Thomas, however, corruption too has its limits. Morally, corruption rotates on the same axis as sincerity — forever testing the purity or impurity, the tainted genealogy, of someone’s beliefs. But money hasn’t paved the way to Thomas’ positions. On the contrary, Thomas’ positions have paved the way for money. A close look at his jurisprudence makes clear that Thomas is openly, proudly committed to helping people like Crow use their wealth to exercise power. That’s not just the problem of Clarence Thomas. It’s the problem of the court and contemporary America.

Thomas’ positions have paved the way for money.

Too true. But the constant tangible rewards Thomas gets for his conservatism through contact with the wealthy helps to prevent any widening of his perspective, but instead tends to shelter it, narrow it and radicalize it even further.

As we go through the waiting-for-a-huge-unscheduled-ruling-from-#SCOTUS fire drill for the third time in eight days, a reminder that this is not how the Court has historically operated—or how it should.

That’s a big theme of my book on the “shadow docket,” which comes out 5/16: https://t.co/YtNnX7hl9j

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) April 21, 2023

He makes good points even if he’s pushing his book. He’s referring to expected ruling today/ tonight re abortion pill lower court rulings

oh great

(re: your 2nd sentence)

#BREAKING: #SCOTUS *stays* Judge Kacsmaryk’s mifepristone ruling in full pending appeal.

This means there will be no change in the access to or availability of the medication anytime soon.

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) April 21, 2023