Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?
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Ed Whelan at NRO Comments:
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ProPublica yesterday published a long article on gifts of luxury trips that Justice Thomas has received from a billionaire friend, Dallas businessman Harlan Crow. The article raises lots of interesting questions, including about what a justice’s obligations to disclose gifts should be. But its claim that has gotten the most attention—that Justice Thomas “appears to have violated” longstanding disclosure obligations by not reporting gifts of airplane travel—rests on a much more contested account of those obligations than ProPublica acknowledges. ProPublica’s three reporters appear to have cherry-picked little-known and unnamed “experts” to present a false and damning clarity on the matter.
Let’s take a closer look:
- ProPublica asserts that “[e]thics experts said the law clearly requires disclosure for private jet flights.” According to these experts, an exemption in the rules “never applied to transportation, such as private jet flights,” and the “fact” that the exemption didn’t apply to private jet flights “was made explicit in recently updated filing instructions for the judiciary.”
It appears that Kedric Payne of the Campaign Legal Center is one of the “ethics experts” who offered to ProPublica such a crystalline view of the disclosure obligations. I’m not discerning who the other experts might be.
- On March 29, just eight days before ProPublica published its article, the New York Times published an article titled “Justices Must Disclose Travel and Gifts Under New Rules.” The article begins:
Supreme Court justices will be required to disclose more of their activities, including some free trips, air travel and other types of gifts, according to rules adopted earlier this month.
Under the new rules, justices and other federal judges must report travel by private jet, as well as stays at commercial properties, such as hotels, resorts or hunting lodges.
According to the article, leading legal ethicist Stephen Gillers described the new rules as a major change—a “giant step” away from rules that were “little more than a joke” and that “were very lax and tolerated circumvention”:
“In my world of transparency and judicial ethics, what we had until now was little more than a joke,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor emeritus at the New York University School of Law who specializes in legal ethics. “The rules were very lax and tolerated circumvention, and now we’ve taken a giant step away from that.”
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The Washington Post published a similar article on March 28. According to the article, the new rules “clarify that judges must report travel by private jet.” The previous rules “had not clearly defined the exemption for gifts considered ‘personal hospitality,’” and the “revised rules address that ambiguity.” The article quotes Gabe Roth, executive director of the liberal group Fix the Court, as acknowledging “the very clear loopholes in the judicial gift and travel reporting rules” that had existed under the old rules and that the new rules would “restrict.”
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An NBC News article yesterday about the ProPublica story begins:
For many years, a loophole that allowed Supreme Court justices to avoid disclosing certain gifts — including travel — funded by their friends was apparently big enough to fly a private jet through.
The federal judiciary just last month announced in a letter to lawmakers that it had tightened its rules for what judges and justices need to include in annual financial disclosure statements.
The article quotes Professor Gillers:
“In my view, before the recent amendments, the situation was sufficiently vague to give Thomas a basis to claim that reporting was not required,” said Stephen Gillers, an expert on judicial ethics at New York University School of Law. “I think that such an interpretation would be a stretch … but the interpretation is plausible.” [Ellipsis in original.]
- In sum, the claim by ProPublica’s “ethics experts” that the longstanding rules “clearly require[d] disclosure for private jet flights” and that the recent revision to the rules merely “made explicit” what was already clear is hotly contested.
Professor Gillers is probably the most widely cited legal-ethics expert of our age. That doesn’t mean that he’s always right, of course. But it does mean that any journalist exploring what legal-ethics rules mean would be interested in learning his views. And it’s especially strange that ProPublica’s reporters wouldn’t even acknowledge his conflicting account of the pre-existing disclosure obligations set forth in the New York Times article.
It’s possible, I suppose, that none of ProPublica’s three reporters ran across the New York Times article or the Washington Post article on the very topic they were writing about. But it sure seems that they sought out the ethics advice they wanted.
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WSJ:
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The left’s assault on the Supreme Court is continuing, and the latest front is the news that Justice Clarence Thomas has a rich friend who has hosted the Justice on his private plane, his yacht, and his vacation resort. That’s it. That’s the story. Yet this non-bombshell has triggered breathless claims that the Court must be investigated, and that Justice Thomas must resign or be impeached. Those demands give away the real political game here.
ProPublica, a left-leaning website, kicked off the fun with a report Thursday that Justice Thomas has a longtime friendship with Harlan Crow, a wealthy Texas real-estate developer. The intrepid reporters roamed far and wide to discover that the Justice has sometimes traveled on Mr. Crow’s “Bombardier Global 5000 jet” and that each summer the Justice and his wife spend a vacation week at Mr. Crow’s place in the Adirondacks.
The piece is loaded with words and phrases intended to convey that this is all somehow disreputable: “superyacht”; “luxury trips”; “exclusive California all-male retreat”; “sprawling ranch”; “private chefs”; “elegant accommodation”; “opulent lodge”; “lavishing the justice with gifts.” And more.
Adjectival overkill is the method of bad polemicists who don’t have much to report. The ProPublica writers suggest that Justice Thomas may have violated ethics rules, and they quote a couple of cherry-picked ethicists to express
But it seems clear that the Court’s rules at the time all of this happened did not require that gifts of personal hospitality be disclosed. This includes the private plane trips. ProPublica fails to make clear to readers that the U.S. Judicial Conference recently changed its rules to require more disclosure. The new rules took effect last month.
Justice Thomas would have been obliged to disclose gifts that posed a conflict of interest involving cases that would be heard by the High Court. But there is no evidence that Mr. Crow has had any such business before the Court, and Mr. Crow says he has “never asked about a pending or lower court case.”
The most ProPublica can come up with is that “Crow has deep connections in conservative politics.” Oh dear. One hilarious section reports that a painting at Mr. Crow’s New York resort includes Mr. Crow, Justice Thomas and three friends smoking cigars. One of the friends is Leonard Leo, “the Federalist Society leader regarded as an architect of the Supreme Court’s recent turn to the right,” ProPublica says.
This conspiracy is so secret that it’s hiding in plain sight. Can anyone imagine such a story ever being written about a liberal Justice on the Court?
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“Is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas corrupt? I don’t know,” tweeted Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu. “But his secretive actions absolutely have the appearance of corruption. And he apparently violated the law. For the good of the country, he should resign.” You gotta love the “I don’t know” but he should resign anyway formulation.
The liberal press—pardon the redundancy—has climbed onto its ethical high horse and is demanding “reform” at the Court. “All of this needs robust investigation,” demanded Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin dutifully saluted upon Mr. Whitehouse’s order and said his committee “will act” to impose a new “enforceable code of conduct” for the Court.
This ethics talk is really about setting up an apparatus that politicians can then use against the Justices if there is any transgression, however minor or inadvertent. The claims of corruption are intended to smear the conservative Justices and tarnish the Court to tee up case recusals, impeachment or a Court-packing scheme if Democrats get enough Senate votes to break the filibuster.
It’s all ugly politics, but the left is furious it lost control of the Court, and it wants it back by whatever means possible.
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"My pronouns are FA/FO." - Mik, 2024
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Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
@Doctor-Phibes you wanna field this one?
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So you’re honestly not at all bothered by a SCOTUS justice taking a half-mil worth of favors in a single trip?
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I’m having trouble imagining a similar reaction from you if this were, say, Soros treating Sotomayor.
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@jon-nyc said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:
@Doctor-Phibes you wanna field this one?
I suspect I'd be wasting my time. It's no often that I know I'm right, but I do here.
Judges should pay for their own holidays.
Proud supporter of Plan 2525. Everything you think, do and say will be in the pill you took today.
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I was thinking you might want to address the fine distinction between source consideration and messenger shooting.
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Or, we could discuss the closet liberal, who wouldn't have had any problems with anything Ginsburg ever did.
Face it, lad, you can put all the lace around it you wish, but at the end of the day, Washington is about perception and power. If the pols or judges are doing what you perceive to be good for the country, you probably don't care if the person wears a goat mask to the weekly orgies.
I think Thomas primarily rules on original intent, and I think he tries to adhere to the Constitution. I don't think the Wise Latina does.
So yes, I'd have more problem with her behavior than his. But...it's Washington. They're ALL crooked, to one extent or the other. And if Thomas could make a phone call and help your foundation immensely or give you a favorable ruling from the bench concerning same, you'd love the man until the end of time.
Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
@Jolly basically you’re saying he’s a crook but at least he’s your crook?
Proud supporter of Plan 2525. Everything you think, do and say will be in the pill you took today.
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@jon-nyc said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:
I was thinking you might want to address the fine distinction between source consideration and messenger shooting.
Horace has already set me straight on that point. Apparently it’s completely different when I do it as I’m driven by emotion. Conservatives can’t be driven by emotions as they don’t have any.
Proud supporter of Plan 2525. Everything you think, do and say will be in the pill you took today.
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@Doctor-Phibes said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:
@jon-nyc said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:
I was thinking you might want to address the fine distinction between source consideration and messenger shooting.
Horace has already set me straight on that point. Apparently it’s completely different when I do it as I’m driven by emotion.
I considered you to be someone who would be sympathetic to consideration of sources, that's all.
Conservatives can’t be driven by emotions as they don’t have any.
It's fine to have emotions and even to be ruled by them to whatever extent you'd like. Those of us incapable of any depth of thought, have little else to form opinions on, in any case. The issue is when people's opinions are based on their emotional truths, and they impose those opinions on others, via the cultural ideas and politics we all have to live with.
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@Doctor-Phibes said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:
@Jolly basically you’re saying he’s a crook but at least he’s your crook?
I'm saying several things:
- Nobody has come up with anything (and I assure you, they're like a cat that drank a bottle of laxitive and is digging holes for shit as fast as he can) that shows where this has affected any of Thomas' votes or rulings.
- Rich people have rich friends.
- Crooks? Not necessarily. Compromised? Every one of them, to one extent or another. It's politics. It's how the game is played in the big leagues. And shucks, sometimes they are crooks. I voted for Edwin Edwards twice. A man who gleefully admitted he was a crook, but he stole for the good people of Louisiana.
