What Was Bought, What Was Sold

A lobbyist working the Texas state legislature gets wind of a bill that would go against his clients' interests, so he goes around offering campaign funds to willing legislators to drop the bill. A particular official is tricky to get but the lobbyist finally gets him to commit with a $10,000 donation. When the bill comes to a floor vote, the lobbyist is outraged to watch that official vote for the bill. He angrily confronts the man later on to find out the opposition had paid him off with a $50,000 donation. The lobbyist keeps cursing out the legislator, who finally shrugs and answers "you knew I was weak when I took the ten thousand."
-- one of many Molly Ivins' apocryphal yet likely-true stories

The corruption of Far Right, holier-than-thou, hypocritical, two-faced conservatives is easy to spot when the rot is sitting atop the entire federal judiciary.

Clarence Thomas got on the Supreme Court bench in 1991 under a cloud of legitimate sexual harassment allegations, aided by Republican Senators who bullied Anita Hill and Democratic Senators loathe to rock the boat. That there were other accusers who were ignored or blocked from testifying remains an injustice to this day.

Ever since then, Thomas has worked under a cloud of unethical behavior that kept getting swept under the rug because those in charge - the Chief Justice is responsible for overseeing investigations into SCOTUS misconduct - would rather keep the conservative majority unified and in control of the Judiciary. 

Never mind the many times Thomas should have recused himself from cases that involved his politically active wife Ginni, especially her involvement in the January 6th Insurrection.

Never mind the calls for investigations like this one in 2013 into Thomas' attending fundraising events for the Federalist Society, a violation of judicial ethics banning judges from any political fundraising.

There's been other questionable and unethical judges on the Supreme Court before: Samuel Chase was impeached in 1805 but it was more over partisan politics than direct misconduct, James Clark McReynolds was personally unlikeable and anti-Semitic, and Abe Fortas was forced to resign over revelations of an annual retainer from a Wall Street financier that compromised impartiality.

But have any of them sank to the levels that Thomas has, given the reveal of Thomas' ties to a deep-pocket Far Right billionaire?

ProPublica broke the story last week about how Clarence and Ginni Thomas would receive lavish gifts, rides on luxury yachts and private jets, and enjoy expensive vacations all on the dime of one Harlan Crow, billionaire real estate developer and a major Federalist Society funder (Via Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski):

In late June 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a private chef.

If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000. Fortunately for him, that wasn’t necessary: He was on vacation with real estate magnate and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, who owned the jet — and the yacht, too.

For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.

The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.

These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosures. His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said...

The law in question appears to be the Ethics In Government Act, passed in 1978 as part of the post-Watergate reforms. Thomas apparently refused to file the paperwork that thousands of federal employees - from the President on down to the janitors at the Smithsonian - file every time they receive ANY kind of gift from persons who have or even might do business with the U.S. government.

Even Thomas' fellow Justices reported gifts as simple as fishing rods or as ornate as bronze sculptures, all because these things could be considered acts of bribery and influence peddling by rich people looking for favors if any legal matters come to the fore.

Thomas refused to apply the laws to himself, exposing his judicial authority as hypocrisy, himself as a fraud. His claims to not understanding the law, or that he went by other people's bad advice, violates the common legal concept that "ignorance of the law is no excuse."

And today the story got worse when ProPublica (again by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski) uncovered how Crow directly paid Thomas in a land deal that Thomas failed to report. 

In 2014, one of Texas billionaire Harlan Crow’s companies purchased a string of properties on a quiet residential street in Savannah, Georgia. It wasn’t a marquee acquisition for the real estate magnate, just an old single-story home and two vacant lots down the road. What made it noteworthy were the people on the other side of the deal: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his relatives.

The transaction marks the first known instance of money flowing from the Republican megadonor to the Supreme Court justice. The Crow company bought the properties for $133,363 from three co-owners — Thomas, his mother and the family of Thomas’ late brother, according to a state tax document and a deed dated Oct. 15, 2014, filed at the Chatham County courthouse.

The purchase put Crow in an unusual position: He now owned the house where the justice’s elderly mother was living. Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees. The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints.

A federal disclosure law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to disclose the details of most real estate sales over $1,000. Thomas never disclosed his sale of the Savannah properties. That appears to be a violation of the law, four ethics law experts told ProPublica...

This wasn't a misunderstanding or the gift of a friend, this was a business transaction and a clear violation of ethics.

It ought to be treated as violation of federal law.

Given the broken nature of Congress, and the historical failures of impeachment where partisan loyalty overrode the best interests of the nation, we should not expect any action out of them other than public posturing. The House Republicans will never turn on one of their justices responsible for the extremist rightward bent of the Supreme Court: The Senate Democrats may hold committees about Thomas' failures but can't get the two-thirds vote needed to remove him.

This is a matter that has to go to the Justice Department. Never mind the screams from the Far Right that this is "yet another witch hunt" against a Republican figure. Thomas is refusing to abide by the expected ethical norms of the office he holds, and he is flouting the legal system he is supposed to defend. If he's breaking a law, any law, he needs to be held accountable like any other citizen. No one, not a President nor a Senator nor a Justice should be above the law.

How can anyone accept a legal ruling from a Supreme Court Justice who will not hold himself accountable to the laws he applies to everyone else?