It’s amusing that Crooked Clarence Thomas allies feel obligated to defend his (nonexistent) honor — they’re feeling the heat. Via TPM reporter Nicole Lafond: Fox News published a piece this Tuesday afternoon reporting that more than 100 of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ former clerks had signed onto a letter defending the justice’s “integrity” and “independence.” The …
Activist Judges!
GOP Venality Open Thread: ‘Just Us’ Thomas Is Attracting All the Wrong Attention
This post is in: Activist Judges!, C.R.E.A.M., Republican Venality
(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com) Clarence Thomas’ writings seem so bitter for someone who has so many friends — Aki Peritz (@AkiPeritz) August 10, 2023 BettyC already covered the news about Clarence & Ginni’s extravagant vacations, but wait, there’s more!… NYT finds Thomas got his RV through the largesse of a wealthy patron and didn’t disclose …
GOP Venality Open Thread: ‘Just Us’ Thomas Is Attracting All the Wrong AttentionPost + Comments (59)
Yeah, we all just loan our buddies a quarter mil to buy a personal bus.
Clyde didn’t even use the cash to buy an American made one. https://t.co/6nhOABOhqY
— Clean Observer (@Hammbear2024) August 6, 2023
Happy to report that NYMag is keeping their helpful list up to date, if you want a scorecard:
We’re keeping track of the recent pileup of revelations regarding secret financial arrangements between the justice and his rich friends. https://t.co/wwf6Zs9wJr
— New York Magazine (@NYMag) August 7, 2023
It won’t change until two conservatives in the Alito Six are no longer on the court. https://t.co/ei2YOgcDUO
— Clean Observer (@Hammbear2024) August 5, 2023
Call me a dreamer, but it seems as though the Permanent ‘Conservative’ Government Party may be leaning towards using Thomas as a scapegoat — a blatantly corrupt sacrifice for us Democrats and other honest types to purge, in order to protect the more activist (and younger) SC(R)OTUS judges. They’ve engineered a majority without him, and probably figure it’ll be easier to McConnell an eight-member court now than it would be during a (Murphy willing) second President Biden term. Many people are saying…
Clarence Thomas needs to resign or be forced off the court. pic.twitter.com/gab58ZXcKl
— Antonia Lee Donnelly (@DonnellyAntonia) August 11, 2023
Make it 6.
Clarence Thomas must resign. https://t.co/PbrpKyUC9T
— Robert Garcia (@RobertGarcia) August 10, 2023
ProPublica has more dirt on Crooked Clarence
by Betty Cracker| 191 Comments
This post is in: Activist Judges!, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity
There’s a new ProPublica report on a trio of right-wing oligarchs fulfilling Clarence and Ginni Thomas’s champagne wishes and caviar dreams. You can read the whole thing here (and pitch in a few quid for the tremendous public service ProPublica reporters are doing here if you’re so inclined). The latest report says that in addition …
ProPublica has more dirt on Crooked ClarencePost + Comments (191)
Another Indictment Open Thread: Judge Chutkan
This post is in: Activist Judges!, Open Threads, Republican Venality, Trump Indictments
In November 2021, Judge Chutkan ruled against Trump when he tried to invoke executive privilege to keep his White House papers secret from the Jan. 6 Committee. She wrote: "Presidents are not kings, and plaintiff is not president." https://t.co/4TwxGv3BoW — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) August 1, 2023 Let’s get this framed and mounted over the courthouse …
Another Indictment Open Thread: Judge ChutkanPost + Comments (211)
You know he hates Black women and this will just send him over the edge. He’s having to deal with GA DA Willis, NY AG James and now Federal Judge Chutkan? ??????
— #FireGarlandandWray (@Manspeaks1) August 1, 2023
DOJ makes it very clear that Trump had every right to speak out publicly and bring challenges to the election results, and that he lawfully did so.
But, shortly after the election, he also engaged in three criminal conspiracies, to subvert the results and remain in power. pic.twitter.com/jeBTeNai5S
— ClearingTheFog (@clearing_fog) August 1, 2023
“My office will seek a speedy trial.” Jack Smith #TrumpIndictment pic.twitter.com/uOc3Br0WNP
— Victoria ???? ??Magliano-Ross (@PoliticalPrada) August 1, 2023
Seems the idea is try Trump by himself, and then get the rest after. This way he can't use the others to stall the trial date like he's trying in Florida. https://t.co/hpbXvIKPJE
— zeddy (@Zeddary) August 1, 2023
The indictment lists all of the people who told Trump his election fraud claims were not true:
1. Pence
2. Senior DOJ leaders
3. The DNI
4. CISA at DHS
5. Senior WH attorneys
6. Senior Trump 2020 campaign staffers
7. State legislators and officials
8. State and federal courts pic.twitter.com/Gqq1pBuv0A— Vera Bergengruen (@VeraMBergen) August 1, 2023
The plan was to stage a coup and then use the military to put down any protest that ensued. https://t.co/Lci2Td8xoA
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) August 1, 2023
Six unidentified co-conspirators, four of them attorneys.
— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) August 1, 2023
Two of Trump's unnamed co-conspirators are almost certainly John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell is likely a third.
Going to have to go back and try to narrow down the other three.
Guessing Jeff Clark is the DOJ official. pic.twitter.com/lDCQRheeGB
— ClearingTheFog (@clearing_fog) August 1, 2023
Yes, this is definitely Jeff Clarkhttps://t.co/tcjmCXdyZN
— ClearingTheFog (@clearing_fog) August 1, 2023
Co-conspirator 6 may be Steve Bannon.
Or potentially Peter Navarro (remember the ‘Green Bay Sweep’?).pic.twitter.com/eo2ZyVKKkf
— ClearingTheFog (@clearing_fog) August 1, 2023
Repub Venality Open Thread: Friday Alito Dump
This post is in: Activist Judges!, C.R.E.A.M., Open Threads, Republican Venality
Here we go…Alito runs back to his PR team (the WSJ Opinion Section) to whine about how he has to break norms to defend himself — ironically as he stands accused of breaking norms — but the real kicker is he gloats that he doesn’t believe Congress can impose ethics requirements. pic.twitter.com/H97tbU6eZg — Kaivan Shroff …
Repub Venality Open Thread: Friday Alito DumpPost + Comments (88)
Steven Rosenthal, a tax attorney and expert at Urban-Brookings, has described the Moore case as potentially destructive to the tax code, and expressed shock to TPM in a phone call that Alito did the interview.
“He’s either tone deaf, or simply doesn’t give a damn about ethics and the appearance of conflict,” Rosenthal told TPM.
Rivkin’s involvement in the Moore case goes back to when it was first filed at the District Court level in 2019.
In September 2021, he and another attorney representing the plaintiffs wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal presenting the case as a way for the Supreme Court to head off any potential future wealth tax of the kind that was under consideration by Democratic legislators at the time.
“If [the plaintiffs] prevail,” they wrote, “that would confirm that the Supreme Court’s precedents … remain good law, clearly barring any kind of federal property tax, including a wealth tax — unless Congress apportions it, which there is no obvious way to do.”
The plaintiffs lost at both the district court and appellate levels, and asked the Supreme Court to hear the case in March 2023…
Alito told Rivkin that he holds himself to higher ethical and disclosure standards than are mandated by law…
‘Just Us’ Alito: Try and stop me before I kill again. Bwa-ha-ha!
This description of Alito’s “distinctive interpretive method” is a very long way of saying “Partisan Republican”https://t.co/CXvgqm1xI4 pic.twitter.com/SbmXAfKPxp
— Mike Sacks (@MikeSacksEsq) July 28, 2023
David Rivkin landed a fawning on-the-record interview with Alito shortly after the Supreme Court took up Rivkin’s case seeking to roll back the federal income tax. Legendary stuff. https://t.co/GvMPBFjjVY pic.twitter.com/zCWh2ycPNw
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) July 28, 2023
Just to be clear, *without* legislation enacted by Congress, #SCOTUS would have one Justice; no budget; no building; no staff; no library; and no cases to resolve other than interstate disputes—the proceedings and dispositions of which the lone Justice would have to self-fund.
— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) July 28, 2023
🧵 Again, one of the hallmarks of far right authoritarians like Alito is the engagement in performative public lying, wherein they know they are lying, you know they are lying, & they want to show you that they can get away with it. https://t.co/KQjHYunlFw
— Mark Copelovitch (@mcopelov) July 28, 2023
Trumpery Open Thread: Judge Cannon’s Friday Doc Dump
This post is in: Activist Judges!, Open Threads, Trump Indictments
BREAKING: Judge Cannon sets Trump trial date for May 20, 2024 — Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) July 21, 2023 Almost certainly after the nomination will have been clinched. https://t.co/g5RW8QMm41 — Philip Bump (@pbump) July 21, 2023 Assuming TFG doesn’t stroke out first… Per Politico, “Judge sets Trump classified-documents trial for next May”: Donald Trump will stand …
Trumpery Open Thread: Judge Cannon’s Friday Doc DumpPost + Comments (129)
While Cannon earned a reputation as being deferential to Trump due to her rulings in a civil case challenging the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago last year, her early rulings in the criminal case appear designed to chart a middle course between Trump and the government. She has so far avoided tipping her hand on most of the explosive legal issues likely to arise during the pretrial proceedings.
Prosecutors from Smith’s office had argued that the case should not be considered “complex” under federal law or put on a protracted timeline, but Cannon rejected that view, writing that she is “unaware of any searchable case in which a court has refused a complex designation under comparable circumstances.”…
Cannon indicated Friday that she anticipates further argument and briefing on the process for selecting a jury in the case…
Here is the timeline Cannon laid out. https://t.co/kmd953Jp7v pic.twitter.com/8LGnBqUO06
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) July 21, 2023
This gives Trump about a month between criminal trials — the New York one begins in late March and may carry to mid-April. The Florida one begins in mid-May. https://t.co/kmd953Jp7v
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) July 21, 2023
There’s a pony in there somewhere!
BREAKING NEWS:
May 20, 2024 trial date set for Trump’s trial for taking and refusing to return top secret and national defense documents..
This is a major win for Special Counsel Jack Smith.
Judge Cannon rejected Trump’s efforts to delay past the November 2024 election.
— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) July 21, 2023
Weekend Reading Strange Tales: ‘Ginni and Clarence: A Love Story’
This post is in: Activist Judges!, Excellent Links
Save the date: Senate Democrats will vote on July 20 on legislation to set up a code of conduct for the Supreme Court, tighten financial disclosure rules, and beef up recusal requirements for justices. — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 11, 2023 How a fiercely loyal couple saved one another, raged against their enemies, and brought …
Weekend Reading Strange Tales: <em> ‘Ginni and Clarence: A Love Story’</em>Post + Comments (90)
“That was my first real campaign,” Ginni told a reporter in 1974. She was a high-school student canvassing for Republicans in the age of Watergate, which, she assured the reporter, “was just Nixon and his people, not the Republican Party.” Why campaign when you’re too young to vote? “Because the party needs us,” she said, sloshing through the rain to deliver more talking points. Ginni was a compulsive joiner. As a “warrior woman,” she donned a shield and cheered on the football team. Daub, a centrist Republican, would later employ her in D.C. She stood out in his office as social, eager, and unusually knowledgeable — “a wonk.”
In the spring of 1986, Clarence was a 37-year-old divorced single father and one of D.C.’s most eligible bachelors according to Jet magazine, which we can be fairly certain Ginni did not read. He was the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a rise from poverty that a traditional conservative would describe as a rags-to-riches individualist American triumph, but this is neither Clarence Thomas’s experience nor the story he chooses to tell.
There had been, after the brief and defining comfort of his Black Catholic elementary school, a tour of white institutions where Clarence was made to endure a succession of racist humiliations. He was one of only two Black children in his high-school seminary, which is to say constantly surrounded by white adolescent boys. “Smile so we can see you, Clarence,” he recalls one saying in the dark. He dropped out of his college seminary after he heard a classmate celebrating the death of Martin Luther King Jr. As an undergraduate at Holy Cross, he listened to records of Malcolm X speeches, helped found a Black Student Union, and nearly dropped out in protest of racially motivated mistreatment. He was never so invested in student life at Yale Law, where the distance between himself and his classmates appeared the difference between Pin Point and Greenwich. “I felt the difference in my bones,” he writes. “I was among the elite, and I knew that no amount of striving would make me one of them.” What other Yale Law student, gearing up for a summer home, was “sick with worry” about the “frightening prospect” of driving through the South in an unreliable old car past a Klan-sponsored billboard? Who else had to endure the strange looks of white mechanics inspecting the failing car, a “bad night’s sleep” in a strange motel when no one could fix it, and rescue, finally, from his brother?
As the head of the EEOC, burdened with debt, Thomas was a man conspicuously lacking generational wealth. He was still broke. American Express cut him off for failure to pay his bills. He could not access a credit card, and so when he did official business, incredibly, his secretary had to book him only in hotels that took cash. His apartment was full of cockroaches. He was overcome with loneliness, “lower than a snake’s belly,” and, according to his friend Armstrong Williams, liable to “bore women to death” on dates.
It was not on a date that he met 29-year-old Virginia Lamp but at an intimate roundtable on affirmative action, or, as Ginni recently put it, on the subject of “how long America needs race-preference policies to get over slavery.” Midge Decter (or “Mrs. Norman Podhoretz”) introduced Thomas to Ginni, who was then a labor lobbyist for the Chamber of Commerce. The two of them shared a cab back to the airport…
Ginni did not doubt her husband when a young woman accused him of describing rape scenes at work. In fact, reports Clarence, she “loved me more than ever.” Weren’t these accusations just more evidence that she had landed the ideal man, an object of crazy-making desire? “In my heart,” she said later, “I always believed she was probably someone in love with my husband and never got what she wanted.”
By all accounts, at this point, Clarence Thomas simply fell apart. “I lay across the bed and curled up in a fetal position,” he writes. “He was,” Ginni said later, “debilitated beyond anything I’d ever seen in my life.” “I have never had an experience like that,” former senator John Danforth later said. “Ever. Still haven’t. Because he was a broken man. He was just broken.” It was “spiritual warfare,” Virginia said, “good versus evil.”
It is hard to see how Clarence Thomas would have extricated himself from the fetal position without Ginni, who closed the blinds and put on Christian music and invited couples over to pray and called a neighbor to come over and give Clarence a haircut, which she did. He got up at one in the morning the night before the hearing and looked over his papers, suggestions on how to respond, and was, according to Ginni, “really confused.” She cleared the table for him. She turned on his computer. He wrote his speech on a notepad. She typed it up…
She watched the proceedings in rage, “the wrath of anger coming out of my eyes.” Why wasn’t the conversation about his heroism? Where was the celebration for obstacles he had overcome? “My name has been harmed,” he said. “My integrity has been harmed. My character has been harmed. My family has been harmed. My friends have been harmed. There is nothing this committee, this body, or this country can do to give me my good name back. Nothing.”…
… Thomas’s loyalty, repeatedly expressed, is not to the grandfather who denied him affection, or the country that abandoned him to poverty, but to the woman he “needed … more than anyone,” the woman who did not doubt him when doubt was merited, the woman who handed him a towel as he emerged exhausted from the bath, or perhaps the shower, a Supreme Court justice. She was “as dear and close a human being as I could have ever imagined having in my life.” They had been through a “fiery trial” and emerged “one being — an amalgam.”
It wasn’t normal for the wife of a Supreme Court justice to give a full, intensely personal, and aggrieved account of the confirmation process and her husband’s attendant breakdown to People magazine, complete with posed pictures of them in their apartment — here casually reading a Bible together on the couch, here drinking coffee in the kitchen, here holding hands amid a bunch of binders on the floor — but from the very beginning Ginni and Clarence Thomas would appear to have no particular interest in decorum. In 1994, Clarence Thomas, successor of Thurgood Marshall on a Court steeped in “formality, courtesy, and dignity,” according to its Historical Society, presided over and hosted Rush Limbaugh’s third wedding, to a former aerobics instructor he met on CompuServe, at the Thomases’ home in Fairfax Station. Thomas had told the nation he couldn’t get his reputation back; he evidently did not care to try…
Thomas quotes W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass, he echoes arguments one might encounter in Black Power, he draws frequently on his own painful childhood, and yet he comes, almost all of the time, to conclusions amenable to Harlan Crow. In an opinion on affirmative action and elsewhere, Thomas quotes Douglass: “The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us … I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us.” It would be madness to suggest that Clarence was wrong to see hypocrisy, condescension, and white supremacy running through the progressive project, and while these may not have been the concerns of his friends in Washington, he found in Republicans people with the same basic program: to take, when confronted with a neighbor’s deprivation, no political action at all…
There was something in Ginni and Clarence that reinforced and refined a shared extremism, something beyond their shared intolerance for ambiguity. There was an interlocking set of beliefs, a fatalism born of the lived experience of racism and the entire heavily manned edifice of white ignorance. If white liberals only made anything worse, if they would sacrifice the safety of children sent into South Boston in service of their own pathetic vanity, they might as well live inside their own self-affirming stories. They were most dangerous, after all, when they tried to help. They were most supportive, those angels lining the hallway, when you left their myths intact.…There is considerable ambiguity about what various participants in the invasion of the Capitol on January 6 were doing. There is no ambiguity about what Ginni Thomas was doing. She was trying to overthrow the government. Biden had been elected on November 3. On November 5, Ginni seemed to think everything had been taken care of. The “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators,” she wrote in a text to the president’s chief of staff, “are being arrested & detained … & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.” On November 9, she sent dozens of Arizona lawmakers emails asking them to choose their own electors (that choice being “yours and yours alone”) rather than let Biden take the state he had won. “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!,” she wrote to Meadows the next day. “You are the leader, with him.” November 19: “The intense pressures you and our President are now experiencing are more intense than Anything Experienced (but I only felt a fraction of it in 1991).”…
On January 6, she posted a George Orwell quote to social media. The quote was fake. She was a Facebook-addled 63-year-old woman posting at 3:33 a.m., 3:46 (“I get up early with my dogs,” she told the committee), whose sources of information included Glenn Beck and other more obscure because more insane right-wing conspiracy theorists. She was a woman who identified happiness itself as an act of antagonism against “haters,” a self-proclaimed bridge burner disgusted with both Mike Pence and “elites,” a category that evidently did not include the wife of the longest-serving Supreme Court justice or the president’s chief of staff to whom she happened to be talking. She was a hype-woman being hyped up by her friends (“There are no rules in war,” Connie Hair, then Louie Gohmert’s chief of staff, reportedly texted her) and in turn hyping others. She was picking up “vibes,” she told the January 6 committee, vibes being sufficient basis on which to overturn an election…
There is no obvious strategic benefit toward making a spectacle of one’s lack of respect for judicial procedure. This is not useful to the Federalist Society, or to Harlan Crow, or to the many institutions Harlan Crow supports. It is an expression of love to Ginni, or an expression of disdain for the rest of us, or both.
“What’s the best part of being a justice?” she asked him in their interview.
“First of all,” he said, “it would be impossible without you … Um, it’s sort of like” — and here he is searching for the words, his eyes darting back and forth — “it’s sort of like, How do you run with one leg?”…
He thought going to Yale was going to make him equivalent to white ppl.
What he doesn’t realize is that white ppl will ALWAYS question your existence in any professional setting. We’re where we are bc he hates he’s not white.— Ryan (@Ryanspeaks140) July 2, 2023
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