Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?

[Jolly]

@Axtremus said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

@George-K said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

So, ask yourself, why are they piling on Thomas?

Disclosure vs. secrecy — Thomas failed to disclose the gifts he received.

Just compensation vs. unusual gifts — earning royalties from books is easily understandable and there is no complain about the Random House payments being out of whack with what Random House pays other authors (market norms); selling real estate at (allegedly) above-market prices, staying in someone else’s property rent free, getting “free” renovations, having others (non-family) pay for your (grand)child’s private school tuition … you try arguing that these are “just compensation” or “market norms.” @LuFins-Dad and @Jolly tried to argue that the real estate stuff is somehow not out of the ordinary, but neither has so far touched the private school tuition stuff.

Why do you, @George-K, think they are piling on Thomas?

1. They're piling on Thomas. It's obvious and has already been pointed out.
2. Your inability to see that suggests you either have an agenda or you are an idiot. I don't think you are an idiot.

[taiwan_girl]

@George-K said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

@taiwan_girl that's right.

So, ask yourself, why are they piling on Thomas?

I don't know why. All three should be questioned. If you get lots of money from a company, it is pretty common sense that if that company has a case in front of you, you excuse yourself. All about appearances.

Judge Breyer is the only one that looks good and appears to have done the right thing.

[Jolly]

@taiwan_girl said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

@George-K said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

@taiwan_girl that's right.

So, ask yourself, why are they piling on Thomas?

I don't know why. All three should be questioned. If you get lots of money from a company, it is pretty common sense that if that company has a case in front of you, you excuse yourself. All about appearances.

Judge Breyer is the only one that looks good and appears to have done the right thing.

Court Packing.

[George K]

@Axtremus said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

@George-K said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

So, ask yourself, why are they piling on Thomas?

Disclosure vs. secrecy — Thomas failed to disclose the gifts he received.

He abided by the rules of the court as they existed at that time.

(grand)child’s private school tuition

Grand-NEPHEW's. Once again, look up the rules of disclosure.

I have no problem with being compensated for whatever work one does as long as the compensation is agreed-upon by all parties. I have no problem with accepting gifts from friends, regardless of size of said gift.

I have a problem when compensation might affect one's legal judgment, and I find the refusal to recuse in Sotomayor's case disturbing when the company that paid her had business before the court.

[Jolly]

Facts don't matter, only the narrative.

[taiwan_girl]

@Jolly said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

@taiwan_girl said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

@George-K said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

@taiwan_girl that's right.

So, ask yourself, why are they piling on Thomas?

I don't know why. All three should be questioned. If you get lots of money from a company, it is pretty common sense that if that company has a case in front of you, you excuse yourself. All about appearances.

Judge Breyer is the only one that looks good and appears to have done the right thing.

Court Packing.

Not sure what you mean as it relates to this case.

Court packing is a bad bad idea, regardless of which wants to do it.

[Jolly]

@taiwan_girl said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

@Jolly said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

@taiwan_girl said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

@George-K said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

@taiwan_girl that's right.

So, ask yourself, why are they piling on Thomas?

I don't know why. All three should be questioned. If you get lots of money from a company, it is pretty common sense that if that company has a case in front of you, you excuse yourself. All about appearances.

Judge Breyer is the only one that looks good and appears to have done the right thing.

Court Packing.

Not sure what you mean as it relates to this case.

Court packing is a bad bad idea, regardless of which wants to do it.

Why does a political entity engage in court packing?

[taiwan_girl]

@Jolly said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

@taiwan_girl said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

@Jolly said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

@taiwan_girl said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

@George-K said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

@taiwan_girl that's right.

So, ask yourself, why are they piling on Thomas?

I don't know why. All three should be questioned. If you get lots of money from a company, it is pretty common sense that if that company has a case in front of you, you excuse yourself. All about appearances.

Judge Breyer is the only one that looks good and appears to have done the right thing.

Court Packing.

Not sure what you mean as it relates to this case.

Court packing is a bad bad idea, regardless of which wants to do it.

Why does a political entity engage in court packing?

Because they have a very short term view and assume that they can get some sort of short term benefit.

[George K]

[Doctor Phibes]

I must admit I own a couple of her books, but I only bought them for the sex scenes.

[George K]

More shock and horror!

---

Stephanie Kirchgaessner of the Guardian wants her readers to think she has unearthed a real scandal:

Several lawyers who have had business before the supreme court . . . paid money to a top aide to Justice Clarence Thomas, according to the aide’s Venmo transactions. The payments appear to have been made in connection to Thomas’s 2019 Christmas party. The payments to Rajan Vasisht, who served as Thomas’s aide from July 2019 to July 2021, seem to underscore the close ties between Thomas . . . and certain senior Washington lawyers who argue cases and have other business in front of the justice.

Vasisht’s Venmo account – which was public prior to requesting comment for this article and is no longer – show that he received seven payments in November and December 2019 from lawyers who previously served as Thomas legal clerks. The amount of the payments is not disclosed, but the purpose of each payment is listed as either “Christmas party”, “Thomas Christmas Party”, “CT Christmas Party” or “CT Xmas party”, in an apparent reference to the justice’s initials. [Emphasis added.]

However, it remains unclear what the funds were for.

A real Sherlock Holmes case, this one. Maybe they were for a Christmas party? Who were these lawyers? Let’s look at the list of attendees:

The lawyers who made the Venmo transactions were: Patrick Strawbridge, a partner at Consovoy McCarthy who recently successfully argued that affirmative action violated the US constitution; Kate Todd, who served as White House deputy counsel under Donald Trump at the time of the payment and is now a managing party of Ellis George Cipollone’s law office; Elbert Lin, the former solicitor general of West Virginia who played a key role in a supreme court case that limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions; and Brian Schmalzbach, a partner at McGuire Woods who has argued multiple cases before the supreme court. Other lawyers who made payments include Manuel Valle, a graduate of Hillsdale College and the University of Chicago Law School who clerked for Thomas last year and is currently working as a managing associate at Sidley, and Liam Hardy, who was working at the Department of Justice’s office of legal counsel at the time the payment was made and now serves as an appeals court judge for the armed forces. Will Consovoy, who died earlier this year, also made a payment. [Emphasis added.]

A simple Google search of the bios of the named lawyers would confirm that all of them clerked for Thomas — a fact that ought to be front and center in any honest effort to tell this story, yet they’re headlined as “Lawyers with supreme court business,” and a casual reader scanning it might not immediately pick up that this is simply a list of his former clerks. An email promoting the story headlined it with “Guardian Exclusive: Clarence Thomas Ethics Investigation Finds Suspect Payments.” The notion that it’s improper for a Supreme Court justice to socialize with his former clerks is preposterous, notwithstanding the fact that most Supreme Court arguments in today’s world are made by attorneys who previously clerked for the Court — often for the currently sitting justices. Lawyers typically treat the judges they clerked for as mentors, with many remaining in close contact for years. Judges at any level rarely recuse themselves simply because the lawyers in a case are their former clerks.

If you read further down in the article, the quoted “ethics experts” at least seem to grasp that this is a story about a party with Thomas’s former clerks. However, one of them tries to invent a distinction in which it’s appropriate to charge lawyers to pay for the cost of their own attendance at a party only if they are junior lawyers not making the big money yet, which is a weird idea with no basis in any ethics rules:

Richard Painter…said it was “not appropriate” for former Thomas law clerks who were established in private practice to – in effect – send money to the supreme court via Venmo. “There is no excuse for it. Thomas could invite them to his Christmas party and he could attend Christmas parties, as long as they are not discussing any cases. His Christmas party should not be paid for by lawyers,” Painter said. “A federal government employee collecting money from lawyers for any reason … I don’t see how that works.” Painter said he would possibly make an exception if recent law clerks were paying their own way for a party. But almost all of the lawyers who made the payments are senior litigators at big law firms.

Kedric Payne…said that – based on available information – it was possible that the former clerks were paying their own party expenses, and not expenses for Thomas, which he believed was different than random lawyers in effect paying admission to an exclusive event to influence the judge. [Emphasis added.]

Notably, Kirchgaessner makes no effort to claim that anybody paid anything more than the cost of attending a party.

[George K]

The Notorious RBG.

When the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg accepted a $1 million prize from a liberal billionaire’s foundation, she pledged to pass the money to a list of designated charities. Four years later, it is unclear where Ginsburg sent that money—an ambiguity that experts say raises conflict of interest concerns.

The Berggruen Institute, a private foundation founded by billionaire investor Nicolas Berggruen, awarded Ginsburg its annual $1 million Philosophy & Culture award during a swanky star-studded event in December 2019. At the time, ethics experts raised red flags over Ginsburg’s acceptance of the prize, noting that the bounty far exceeded the $2,000 limit placed on honoraria by Judicial Conference regulations. But Ginsburg temporarily assuaged those concerns when she pledged to donate the prize money to more than 60 charities that reflected her personal causes, including the American Bar Foundation, the American Cancer Society, and the Metropolitan Opera.

What Ginsburg failed to mention was that she also directed the Berggruen Institute to conceal the full list of her designated charities from the public, a spokeswoman for the institute told the Washington Free Beacon. The Berggruen Institute even engaged in some creative accounting in its Form 990 tax return to ensure the recipients remain shrouded in secrecy.

"That list, per her wishes, is not for publication," Berggruen Institute spokeswoman Rachel Bauch told the Free Beacon.

Experts say the lack of transparency surrounding Ginsburg’s $1 million prize raises the possibility that some of the recipients could have had business before the court prior to Ginsburg’s death. One of the few known recipients, the American Bar Foundation, is affiliated with the American Bar Association, which filed several amicus briefs before the Supreme Court in 2020 before Ginsburg’s death. There is no evidence that Ginsburg recused herself from those cases.

[Horace]

From a lefty's perspective, it's difficult to even wrap one's mind around the damage RBG did by not retiring. She traded a tiny bit of ego gratification to stay on for a couple more years, for an unbalanced court that's ruling against everything her side fought for. She had one job, there at the end. And for all her alleged qualities as a human being, she failed a really simple test of character. It's nearly dispositive of the woman being anything other than a narcissistic social climber. Then again, she was old and perhaps senile. The higher qualities of the mind are the first to go.

[Mik]

Or perhaps she simply thought SCOTUS retirements and appointments ought not be subject to such political chicanery.

[Horace]

@Mik said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

Or perhaps she simply thought SCOTUS retirements and appointments ought not be subject to such political chicanery.

I don’t think any reasonable person would have considered her retirement to be chicanery.

[Mik]

You've never been appointed to a life-long position of power either.

[Horace]

@Mik said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

You've never been appointed to a life-long position of power either.

I'm comfortable with my opinion that it was a weak move on her part. What's your opinion?

[Mik]

I think you are right if you only view it from the perspective of the political and judicial power of her tribe. As I stated above, there are other ways to look at it and she perhaps subscribed to one or the other. In my view to have done so would have been declaring an alignment with the Democratic party as opposed to being a jurist supposedly above that bipartisan fray. I think it would have been unseemly for a SCOTUS justice.

We've had enough mixed opinions on this court to determine that it is difficult to predict which way they might rule. Isn't that what we want, or do we want a rubberstamp court?

[Horace]

@Mik said in Did Clarence Thomas Do anything Wrong?:

I think you are right if you only view it from the perspective of the political and judicial power of her tribe. As I stated above, there are other ways to look at it and she perhaps subscribed to one or the other. In my view to have done so would have been declaring an alignment with the Democratic party as opposed to being a jurist supposedly above that bipartisan fray. I think it would have been unseemly for a SCOTUS justice.

Justices are aligned with the social values of the party that nominated them. That's why they were nominated. Our most recent nomination couldn't define what a woman was. That's because she is well aware of why she was nominated, and what she was expected to say. She knew the culture she represented.

We've had enough mixed opinions on this court to determine that it is difficult to predict which way they might rule. Isn't that what we want, or do we want a rubberstamp court?

It wasn't difficult to predict which way they'd rule on the culture war issues, such as affirmative action, gay marriage custom websites, and school debt. It was right down ideological lines in all three cases.

[Mik]

I think you are confusing the obviously partisan nomination and confirmation process with actually serving as a justice. Take for instance John Roberts, who has regularly infuriated conservatives through his opinions. The initial process is how you get there. Once you are there you are free to rule as you see fit, as it should be.