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U.S. SUPREME COURT
We have a huge (HUGE!) problem regarding the U.S. Supreme Court. The highest Court in the land — a body that essentially has the final word on our fate as citizens — has become insanely ideological. We don’t have to tell you that this is really, really, REALLY bad.
It is painfully apparent that, somewhere along the way, we abandoned the founders’ intention for constitutional interpretation (which was that constitutional interpretation belongs in the hands of the people, certainly not nine unelected lawyers) and replaced it with the idea of judicial supremacy (where the high court alone is responsible for interpreting our fundamental rights).
The most obvious problem with this shift is that Supreme Court Justices are only human, just like the rest of us. This means they are in no way immune from being swayed by powerful political proclivities and, worse, being corrupted.
Recently, there have been several deeply concerning stories about ethical issues and the Supreme Court Justices, including one that has Justice Samuel Alito engaging in luxury travel to Alaska with a billionaire hedge fund manager who often has business before the Court, and the Mississippi Book Festival buying 1,500 copies of Justice Elena Kagan’s books in exchange for her speaking at the event.
But these things are child’s play when compared to two other horrifying examples involving Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, one revealing breathtakingly bad judgement and deep political bias and the other exhibiting straight up corruption.
In our opinion, both Justice Alito and Justice Thomas should immediately resign their positions over these transgressions but, if they refuse, they should be removed from the U.S. Supreme Court through impeachment proceedings.
Let’s start with Justice Alito and his breathtakingly bad judgement and rather obvious deep political bias. On May 16, 2024, The New York Times reported that an upside-down American flag had flown outside the Alito’s home after the 2020 presidential election.
Although the upside-down flag has always been a sign of emergency and distress for the military, in the weeks after the 2020 election and subsequent January 6th insurrection it was embraced by supporters of “Stop the Steal,” or those who believed the false narrative that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Donald Trump. In fact, many Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th carried upside-down American flags for this reason.
This is obviously not a great look for a sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice on any day, but especially not at a time when the Court was actively deciding — and would continue to decide — whether to hear cases surrounding the 2020 election, the Capitol insurrection, and Donald Trump himself.
But it didn’t stop there. Less than a week after the first New York Times report, it was discovered that a second flag — known as the “Appeal to Heaven” flag — was flown outside the Alito’s vacation home during the summer and fall of 2023. The Appeal to Heaven flag, also carried by Trump supporters on January 6th, is yet another flag that has been embraced in support of the “Stop the Steal” movement (as well as Christian Nationalism and other far-right causes).
Our gut reaction is that these should be impeachable offenses. But, according to the U.S. Constitution, impeachment should be reserved for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” and Alito’s actions don’t rise to the level. That said, he should absolutely recuse himself from any case involving January 6th and/or Donald Trump’s involvement on that day.
… and then he needs to shape the hell up. For our judicial system to work, there must be enormous trust between judges and the American public — meaning our judges must be seen as fair and impartial. If they are not, the entire enterprise falls apart. This goes ten-fold for the Justices that sit on the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Alito is delusional if he thinks he can just blame outrageously bad judgement on his wife going forward. In our mind, he gets one mulligan. That’s it.
Now let’s turn our attention to Justice Clarence Thomas, who has also shown outrageously bad judgement but who has also exhibited corruptive behavior that is worthy of impeachment.
First came the text messages sent between former Donald Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, Clarence Thomas’ wife. The text messages sent between Mark and Ginni in the weeks following the 2020 election show Ginni’s extraordinary access to the White House and, not only championed, but encouraged efforts to overturn the perfectly valid 2020 presidential election. On November 10th, seven days after the election, Ginni texted: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!...You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
Even though some of the text messages were completely unhinged on Ginni’s part — “Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.” (Kraken is a term often used by followers of QAnon) — every American has the right to his or her own political opinion, regardless of whom they are married to. Plus, to be fair, in her testimony before the January 6th committee, Ginni said her husband was “uninterested in politics” and that they don’t discuss her “day-to-day work” or who she is “calling, emailing, texting or meeting.” Also in her September 29, 2022 testimony — where she made clear she still believes the 2020 election was “stolen” — she claimed that she “never spoke to her husband about legal challenges to the 2020 election” and that they do not talk about pending Supreme Court cases as “an iron clad rule.”
However, in a November 24th text exchange — twenty-one days after the 2020 election — between Meadows and Ginni, she mentions having a “conversation” with her “best friend” (it is well documented that Clarence and Ginni often refer to one another as their “best friend” in public). In case there was any doubt she was speaking of her husband in the text, Ginni’s testimony to the January 6th committee pretty much cleared it up: “My husband often administers spousal support to the wife that’s upset. So, I assume that that’s what it was.”
In response to Ginni’s November 24th text, Meadows responds: “This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.” (Sidenote: uggg…Good Lord, are you kidding me with this?) Ginni responds: “Thank you!! Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now… I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!”
< It is very, VERY important to remember that, at the time of these texts, Donald Trump was very publicly declaring his intention to take what he called a “major fraud on our nation” to the U.S. Supreme Court.” >
We get that Ginni Thomas having a “conversation” with her “best friend” is not necessarily illegal. BUT it becomes highly suspicious when her husband is the ONLY Supreme Court Justice to voice dissent after the U.S Supreme Court rejected former President Donald Trump’s 2021 efforts to stop the National Archives from releasing documents to the January 6 House Select Committee — a release of documents that would have certainly uncovered Meadows’ and Ginni’s text messages. On January 19, 2022, the Supreme Court issued its ruling, which said: “The application for stay of mandate and injunction pending review presented to the Chief Justice and by him referred to the Court is denied.” Then it says, “Justice Thomas would grant the application.”
The text episode is in addition to the facts that 1) Ginni has often been cozy with many right-wing individuals and groups with interests before the Supreme Court, and 2) that Crowdsourcing for Culture and Liberty, a right-wing think tank she led, received nearly $600,000 in anonymous donations between 2019 and 2022 ostensibly to bring together — in the words of Mark Paoletta, Ginni’s personal attorney — “conservative leaders to discuss amplifying conservative values with respect to the battle over culture.”
The almost $600,000 in anonymous donations came to Crowdsourcing for Culture and Liberty via the think tank Capital Research Center (CRC) as a “fiscal sponsorship,” with at least $400,000 routed through yet another nonprofit Donors Trust, a fund also known to support conservative causes. The same year CRC funneled the money to Ginni Thomas’ organization, CRC filed an amicus brief before the Supreme Court requesting the Court hear a case to limit fuel emission regulations in Oregon. This was the only time CRC filed a brief with the Supreme Court since at least 2001, which is the latest information available.
Then there is this. Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo, a conservative judicial activist, directed GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway (yes, the same Kellyanne Conway who became a senior adviser in the Trump White House) to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Ginni for “consulting work,” telling Conway he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K.” Leo helpfully added to his directive: “No mention of Ginni, of course.” Yes. Of course. That very day, Conway’s firm, The Polling Company, sent the nonprofit Judicial Education Project a bill for $25,000. As Leo instructed, Conway listed the purpose of the payment as “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting.”
All in, The Polling Company paid Ginni Thomas’ firm, Liberty Consulting, $80,000 between June 2011 and June 2012, with the expectation that they would pay another $20,000 by the end of 2012.
In what must be the craziest “coincidence” in U.S. history, in 2012 the Judicial Education Project filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder, a landmark voting rights case that challenged a civil rights law that protected minority voters. The Court held the predominately conservative view that it is unconstitutional to use the coverage formula in the Voting Rights Act to determine which jurisdictions are subject to the preclearance requirement. Clarence Thomas was part of the 5-to-4 majority.
Soon after all these revelations, it got much, much worse for Clarence Thomas. ProPublica — an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest — reported that Justice Thomas accepted luxury trips (think huge yachts and private jets) for over twenty years from Dallas real estate tycoon Harlan Crow, a well-known, wealthy Republican donor. Just one of the luxury vacations Clarence and Ginni enjoyed — a 2019 trip to Indonesia — would have cost the couple over $500,000 if they had paid for it out of their own pocket. Associate Supreme Court Justices earn $274,200/year.
< Not for nothing, but Harlan Crow is a man who has a sculpture garden on his Texas estate that includes the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and Lenin and Stalin …who are some of the most brutal dictators of the 20th century. A Dallas Morning News reporter once called the garden a “historical nod to the facts of man’s inhumanity to man.” … and the sculpture garden is not even half of it. Inside the estate, Crow has a collection of Nazi artifacts and Adolf Hitler memorabilia, including a signed copy of “Mein Kampf” and two paintings by der Führer himself. There are also Hitler stamps, Nazi medallions, and embroidered Third Reich linen napkins. Well, isn’t that just fabulous! Jonah Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Dispatch — a publication in which Crow is a minority investor — defended Crow on Twitter: “(The garden) is not a tribute to evil or something to be mocked. It’s an attempt (to) commemorate the horrors of the 20th century in the spirit of ‘never again.’ Harlan Crow is a deeply honorable, decent, and patriotic person. He's not the strawman Thomas haters are trying to make him.” So, let's get this straight: Harlan Crow is trying to remind himself and the very, very limited number of people who come to his garden that they should not commit future genocide and other Nazi-like atrocities? Sorry Jonah, we have a very hard time buying that. >
ProPublica also revealed that, in 2014, one of Harlan Crow’s companies bought several properties in Savannah, Georgia from Clarence Thomas, his mother, and the family of Clarence’s deceased brother. Not long after the purchase, contractors began an extensive remodel of the home, where Clarence’s mother still lived.
Yet another story showed that, although Thomas reported on financial disclosure forms that his family received between $50,000 and $100,000 a year from an entity called Ginger, Ltd., Partnership, this partnership has not existed since 2006. Evidently, the family created a new company when Ginger, Ltd., Partnership was supposedly shuttered but, as with everything with this man and his wife, the details are murky and the record-keeping at best sloppy.
Unfortunately for Clarence, the ProPublica exposé brought back to the front-page other articles from the past, like a 2011 New York Times report that Harlan Crow had made other huge gestures for Clarence and Ginni since they all met in the mid-1990s, like giving them a Bible once owned by Frederick Douglass and coughing up $500,000 for Ginni to start a Tea Party-related organization.
And it just goes on and on and on. Now we hear that Crow paid for two years of private-school tuition for Clarence Thomas’s grandnephew, who Thomas has said he raised as a son.
In what comes as no surprise, Harlan Crow isn’t the only generous Thomas benefactor — and the grift goes way, way back. It started just months after Thomas’ confirmation hearing, when he was accepted into the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, a club ripe with wealthy, mostly conservative members. The New York Times reports that “over the years, his Horatio Alger friends have welcomed him at their vacation retreats, arranged V.I.P. access to sporting events and invited him to their lavish parties. In 2004, he joined celebrities including Oprah Winfrey and Ed McMahon at a three-day 70th birthday bash in Montana for the industrialist Dennis Washington. Several Horatio Alger friends also helped finance the marketing of a hagiographic documentary about the justice in the wake of an HBO film that had resurfaced Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations against him during his confirmation.”
ProPublica confirms much of this reporting, revealing Justice Thomas’ wealthy “friends” “have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into the premium suites at sporting events and sent their private jets to fetch him — including, on more than one occasion, an entire 737.” These gifts include “at least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas;” a “dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox;” “two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica;” a “standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast;” and 26 private jet flights and 8 helicopter flights.
One of the best examples is from 1999, when Justice Thomas purchased a $267,230 40-foot Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon R.V. Over the years, he described to friends and colleagues how he sacrificed and saved to purchase it, and he often used the R.V. to polish his down-to-earth, I-was-born-in-poverty-but-somehow-pulled-myself-out-of-it-by-my-bootstraps persona: “I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States. There’s something normal to me about it. I come from regular stock, and I prefer being around that.”
Problem is, Thomas didn’t buy the R.V., at least not outright. His rich buddy Anthony Welters — who made tons of money in the health care industry — “financed” it for Thomas with terms Thomas would never have likely received from a bank. Thomas would not comment on the transaction, and beyond a cryptic email, Welters would also not answer straightforward questions, despite repeated requests from The New York Times:
< Note: In November 2023, under enormous pressure, the Supreme Court justices released a Code of Conduct to “set out succinctly and gather in one place the ethics rules and principles that guide the conduct of the Members of the Court.” The language is broad — for example, it prohibits justices from letting “family, social, political, financial or other relationships influence official conduct or judgment,” and engaging in activities that “detract from the dignity of the justice’s office,” “interfere with the performance of the justice’s official duties,” or “reflect adversely on the justice’s impartiality” — and offers no ideas on how to enforce the code or specific examples of compromised “activities” (i.e., expensive trips, R.V.s, and other perks given to them by rich friends). We guess we’ll just have to wait and see if this is a serious attempt at changing behavior, or just a b.s. move to try to simply squelch bad press… >
Anthony Welters would not say how much he had lent Justice Thomas, how much the justice had repaid and whether any of the debt had been forgiven or otherwise discharged. He declined to provide The Times with a copy of a loan agreement — or even say if one existed. Nor would he share the basic terms of the loan, such as what, if any, interest rate had been charged or whether Justice Thomas had adhered to an agreed-upon repayment schedule. And when asked to elaborate on what he had meant when he said the loan had been ‘satisfied,’ he did not respond.
Guess now we know why Anthony Welters was so tight-lipped. After reviewing loan documents, Democratic members of the Senate Finance Committee found that “Welters forgave a substantial amount, or even all of the principal balance of his loan to Clarence Thomas, constituting of the forgiveness of approximately $267,230.00 of debt owed by Justice Thomas.”
Since these extremely concerning revelations about Clarence and Ginni Thomas have come to light, much of the debate in political circles and on cable news has revolved around things like when should Justices have to disclose certain things OR when should Justices recuse themselves OR what is the definition of “personal hospitality.”
We call b.s. on all that background noise. Clarence Thomas’ behavior is corrupt, plain and simple.
Article I of the U.S. Constitution says the House of Representatives “shall have the sole Power of Impeachment” and that “the Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments,” with a two-thirds vote needed to convict. Article I also says that “the president, vice president, and all civil officers of the United States are subject to impeachment,” which includes Supreme Court Justices.
Only one Supreme Court Justice — Samuel “Old Bacon Face” Chase — has ever been impeached, and that was in 1805. It’s time for it to happen again with Clarence Thomas. At a bare minimum the charge of Bribery applies.
It is imperative that Justice Thomas be held accountable for his corrupt actions because, according to the analytics and advisory company Gallup, “by all measures, Americans’ opinions of the Supreme Court are the worst they have been in 50 years of polling.” A 2022 poll found that “forty-seven percent of U.S. adults say they have ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ of trust in the judicial branch of the federal government that is headed by the Supreme Court. This represents a 20-percentage-point drop in just two years, including seven points since just the year before, and is now the lowest in Gallup's trend by six points.” The latest Gallup poll “also finds a record-tying-low 40 percent of Americans saying they approve, and a record-high 58 percent saying they disapprove, of the job the Supreme Court is doing.”
We cannot have Americans lose trust in the American Judiciary. It just cannot happen.