Wouldn't even accept a gift of bagels and lox

When the Clarence Thomas ethics scandals broke I saw an image of Thomas and a bunch of white guys sitting on a deck with woods behind him. There’s also some sort of statue with arms upraised. The first time I saw it the image was identified as some sort of rich man’s retreat, perhaps in the Adirondacks. I’ve since learned the image isn’t a photo, but a painting. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos expanded on a tweet by Sawyer Hackett that identifies the people. There is Harlan Crow, the guy funding all those swanky vacations; a lawyer working with supremacist Ginni Thomas; Leonard Leo, the guy dedicated to installing conservatives onto the federal courts; and the dean of the law school at the University of Georgia who writes briefs for Leo’s Federalist Society to influence Court decisions. These are men with a lot of interest in what Thomas does on the Court. Yeah, this was a gathering the attendees wanted to commemorate by having someone paint it. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported on what Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse had to say about Thomas’ explanation of why he didn’t report the vacations. One of the props Whitehouse used is a reproduction of that painting, which is at the top of Einenkel’s post. First problem: Travel by private jet is not on the personal hospitality exemption list. Second: Thomas said it was okay not to report because he asked colleagues, but he should have asked the Financial Disclosure Committee. Third: there’s no legal way to not disclose that Harlan Crow bought his property in Georgia. Fourth: The hospitality came from people known to want to turn the court into a tool of billionaires. A lapse in reporting back in 2011 was referred to the Financial Disclosure Committee. But the committee appears to have no public record of the referral. What happened to it? As Einenkel mentioned, Thomas started not reporting all he should back in 2011. McCarter has details and notes that nothing will be done as long as Chief Justice Roberts does nothing and the House is controlled by Republicans. Thomas certainly won’t resign. So Democrats need to keep the corruption front and center, keep reminding the country the corruption is enabled by Republicans, and keep talking about how every extreme decision by this court and others is because of Republicans and their rich donors. Mark Sumner of Kos reported that the Senate Judiciary Committee knows Thomas won’t come clean, so they demanded his benefactor Harlan Crow send them a list of all gifts over the $415 limit. They also sent letters to the known companies where Crow and Thomas vacationed. Sumner included a description of how Crow and Thomas got to be best buds. Sumner also noted the Washington Post suggested that Thomas is rich enough – his net worth is about $24 million, Ginni’s around $78 million – he could reimburse Crow for all that Crow spent on him. But he won’t.

Republicans will continue to pretend that this is all just “political.” And it is. Because for them, corruption and injection of massive wealth into the system is necessary for their party’s survival. It’s no coincidence that, right between getting the private school tuition, the $500,000 gift to Ginni Thomas, and the real estate purchase, Thomas delivered the deciding vote in Citizens United v. FEC, which opened political campaigns to unlimited spending by outside groups. Votes like that … that’s what this is all about.

We certainly can’t leave Ginni Thomas out of the scandals. Sumner reported on the latest. Leo funneled tens of thousands of dollars to Ginni prior to a case by the Judicial Education Project coming before the Court on which her husband sits. And funneled is the right word because there were intermediaries – which means they knew it was corrupt. Sumner wrote:

If the idea for sending the money originated with Leonard, then it’s an obvious bribe. If the request for the money came from either Ginni or Clarence Thomas, then it’s out and out extortion. Either way, it appears to be such a blatant example of criminal activity that it could result in charges.

That particular case coming before the court was the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Again, Thomas supplied a crucial vote. McCarter reported that, not surprisingly, Crow brushed off the demand he document how much he’s spent on travel with Thomas. So Congress can ask for Crow’s tax returns, which they can demand for any citizen. But Crow now has a second passport with tax haven St. Kitts and Nevis, which may complicate demanding his returns from the IRS. Editorial and Political Cartoons tweeted a meme showing the Supreme Court building with these words from Thomas Paine:

A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.

Now contrast Thomas with Justice Elena Kagan. Aldous Pennyfarthing of the Kos community working from a story in The Forward reported that a bunch of women who went to high school with Kagan offered to send her bagels and lox from a legendary Lower East Side deli. They wanted to support her because she had to work with Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett every day. And Kagan – declined, saying she can’t accept gifts. Even gifts way under the $415 limit. When I see a situation I know is wrong – Supreme Court corruption, lax and loosening gun policies that result in daily deaths – and the people who could do something about it aren’t I conclude they want that. In this case, they want a corrupt Supreme Court. Thomas wants to be corrupted. He gets lavish vacations. He gets to show the rest of the country how powerful he is (never mind he dances to the tune of his benefactors). Republicans want that corruption because it keeps them in power (see gutting the Voting Rights Act, opening the floodgates of political donations, and refusing to rule on gerrymandering) and keeps their big donors happy. Rich people (who I’ve said many times wouldn’t be billionaire rich without oppressing their workers, which is a form of corruption) want a corrupt court that will consistently do their bidding and take their side against the little guys. Democrats or at least enough of them are also corrupt and want a corrupt court. My reasoning for that is they had a chance to reform the court, to expand it to blunt conservative power and impose ethics, and didn’t take it. We have a corrupt court and too many people in power are just fine with that. Both Crow and Thomas have said they take these lavish trips together because they are dear friends. I wonder how long that friendship would last if Thomas, for any reason other than retirement and maybe including that, left the Court. I’ve heard lots of voices saying this corruption calls for ethics reforms of the Court. I’ve heard only a few voices call for the impeachment of Thomas. Yeah, I know the current House would never approve it. Back on April 21 Brooke Gladstone of the NPR and WNYC show On the Media spoke with Corey Robin, journalist, professor, and author of The Enigma of Clarence Thomas. A transcript of the segment is available here. The key to Thomas is money – if you have it you can wield it. The more money one has the more Thomas believes one should play a role in society. He has built his jurisprudence to justify that. Some of that view of wealth came from his grandfather. Thomas was born into poverty, then went to live with his grandfather, who was reasonably wealthy and who had pulled himself out of poverty with hard work and money. Thomas was critical of liberals who treated the grandfather’s limited wealth with scorn. In the 1950s through the 1970s the Supreme Court built protections around Free Speech. Business saw the Constitution did not protect them and they saw they could be regulated and constricted in all sorts of ways. In 1987 Thomas gave a speech saying we should redefine business activity not as economic, but as speech. That would give business a Constitutional status. (I’m sure that speech was a big reason Thomas was invited to the court four years later.) The effort began with advertising, with fossil fuel advertising in particular. That was declared to be political speech, which opened the gates to everything else – such as a cake maker who refused to serve gay people. Kagan recognized the problem with that. Everything business does uses words, from telling an employee they’re fired, to every written contract. And now all of that is protected by free speech. Other things this effort did: Give moral standing to the businessman. Declare a political donation to be an expression of our values, and thus speech. And equate money with speech. Modern campaigns are expensive. Costly campaigns require big donors. That big wealth can convince voters to select certain candidates, to convince voters of the correctness of the corporation’s ideas. That is in a Supreme Court opinion. It’s in the open, not hidden in a footnote or anywhere else. Yeah, it is a roadmap for wealthy people. The idea that money is speech goes back to Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, two great liberal justices. So campaign expenditures are off limits from government regulation. And campaign contributions can’t be limited for the sake of equalizing speech. That means limiting money isn’t a way to campaign finance reform. The money (voices) of small donors will never be equivalent to the money (voices) of the billionaires. The real solution is distribution of money in the economy. Even Noah Webster was concerned with the concentration of wealth – a democracy or republic would be impossible with it. What this scandal has shown is how much money Harlan Crow has and what he’s willing to do with it. And issues, such as minimum wage, are more than economic questions, they’re also cultural and political questions about who gets to talk in our society and who gets heard in the media. We have a long tradition of one person, one vote. But equating money with speech erodes that tradition. The rich person is worth more in both the economic and political spheres. That’s the legacy of Thomas. I add... If the solution is to eliminate concentrated wealth, how do we do that? What remedy is open? Congress has been bought. The Court has been bought. Even voter suppression and gerrymandering are rampant, reducing the remedy through voting. Robin didn’t answer, though Gladstone said “that would probably be impossible now because they would be seen as impinging on the speech of business.” I’ve been a part of Voters Not Politicians here in Michigan. This group was responsible for passing the citizens redistricting commission amendment, which contributed to the state now having a Democratic led legislature. They also got a voter bill of rights amendment passed. Now they’re starting a push towards campaign finance reform. I haven’t yet attended any of their townhall meetings because the ones close by have been on evenings I have commitments. I don’t know what measures they have planned. I wonder how this effort will fare against corrupt Thomas.