Probably because Beyer disclosed his trips/gifts, instead of lying about them, in violation of the law, like Thomas has done.
I don't love the fact that any justices are accepting gifts like this, but, well... it's a fact of life, and they all do it. Given that I can't change it, it's not a hill I care to die on. But at least some justices comply with the reporting requirements.
This is a serious question, I'm not trying to score partisan points, but given what we know about gifts given to Justice Thomas, why should I believe this is an unbiased interpretation of the law and constitution?
Note that the SCOTUS ethics rules are loose enough that maybe all other justices are also accepting the same kinds of gifts Thomas has.
I, for one, do not have the access to a Justice's ear that Harlan Crow has.
> The Supreme Court justices have faced heavy criticism recently for accepting undisclosed gifts from wealthy patrons. Justice Clarence Thomas regularly took lavish vacations and private jet flights that were paid for by Texas billionaire Harlan Crow. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. took a fishing trip to Alaska in 2008 aboard a private plane owned by Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire.
Maybe this is breaking news to you that supreme Court justices receive gifts but a quick Google search will reveal news articles going back 10 plus years that talk about this. This is well known that supreme Court justices have received gifts many of them extremely lavish by normal person standards.
There is constantly investigations into the justices. Literally every opinion that they publish is scrutinized. If a traditionally liberal Justice all of a sudden ruled in an extremely conservative manner that would like people's hair on fire. So the investigations are constant and the fact that the justices rule extremely consistently is strong evidence that whatever gifts they're given do not influence them to rule opposite of their constitutional understanding.
What you do see in other areas such as Congress is that money buys votes. That is a well demonstrated fact. It is so common and so well demonstrated people ignore it at this point. You cannot find any evidence that the supreme Court justices are ruling inconsistent with their past stated constitutional understandings and inconsistent with their past rulings. That's why in all of these hit pieces there is never anything brought up about corruption and buying of justices. If there was even a shred of evidence that Clarence Thomas vote on the supreme Court could be bought it would be front and center on every page. Instead we get nonsense hit pieces of one of the most corrupt political bodies Congress pointing fingers at one of the most consistent government bodies.
Because you can disagree with how the justices rule on issues but the supreme Court justices are exceedingly consistent in how they rule. That is direct evidence that either votes have been bought for many decades and prior to when they were nominated to the supreme Court or that these gifts don't influence. I don't think there's a tin foil hat big enough to think that people are able to predict potential supreme Court justices decades before they even made a name for themselves and started buying them off on mass hoping they'll make the supreme Court.
I think you're missing my point I don't see a reason to investigate the justices. Because these gifts have been known about for a long time but there is never any evidence that they influence. Justices rule extremely consistent over the course of their career. Especially in the decade leading up to their service on the supreme Court.
The entire point of ethics rules is because things can influence outcome. Those rules get made because there is evidence that at least for some people things influenced outcomes. You have a grand total of nine people at any given time that are in the same court for a long long time. In my entire life I have never seen any evidence that for supreme Court justices things influenced their ruling. The history of the justices predicts their current rulings and does it amazingly well.
That is the counter evidence to say that these gifts are a problem to them. If they're not having an influence on their ruling they're not a problem. It may be something that we don't like because we might feel personally that it would influence us. But I find it hysterical that the people making the claims are the most influenced by gifts to change their votes.
They received significantly more trips paid by others than Thomas. That is what I meant by worse.
Also, as far as I can tell it looks like Thomas may have disclosed some of his trips. I'm not clear on that though. It is not clear how many trips the other justices took and didn't disclose.
Frankly you are making a massive assumption. We don't know how deep this behavior goes with the other justices. In 2018, Ginsburg had more trips paid for by others than any other justice for example. Since 2004, Bryer had more trips than any other justice.
The fact that people are only calling out one person seems very telling to me. This problem is far deeper than one guy or one side.
My biggest problem with the Clarence Thomas news isn’t that he (or any other justice) is being swayed with gifts. It’s that Thomas has publicly stated he leads a simple life where he doesn’t do any of the things he’s done.
He’s lying.
If he’s lying about this little thing, he’s lying about everything. This means he cannot be trusted with a lifetime appointment to the highest court.
You're correct: justices' opinions do not swing in they wind. They are cemented at the moment they were nominated, and remain the same for decades.
I don't believe Thomas was bought by bribery. I don't think any reasonable observer does. Rather, I think that he was friends with a very wealthy person, who appreciates that Thomas is ideologically inclined to give him what he wants.
Nor is that illegal. The illegal part is failing to disclose it. Nobody can say why he failed to disclose it. He has no reason to be embarrassed by it. It's widely interpreted as contempt for the law -- an uncomfortable thing to believe about the highest court in the land.
I know that a lot of lawyers (of all ideologies) have a lot of respect for the work of the Supreme Court. As a non-lawyer, my lack of respect should mean less than theirs. But when a decision comes down to ideology, they can be relied on to vote with their decades-old beliefs, and the entire charade of presenting a case seems unnecessary. The decision could have been written without pretending that they were actually deciding anything.
As you day, democracy is about losing gracefully. But as of now, I'm practically guaranteed to lose for the rest of my life any time it comes down to an ideological issue. That's not corruption; it's the fact that there are at least five justices who I don't believe will even consider it. The fact that one of them doesn't consider a law relevant is an indicator that something is badly aligned, upsetting the balance under which I'm expected to be a good loser.
How is noting that Justice Thomas took bribes from a conservative billionaire "politicizing" the Court? In any other branch of government and any other court with the federal judicial branch, he would at minimum be required to disclose those gifts. In most positions, he would be removed from service for receiving them.
How is noting that Justice Thomas is married to a conservative activist "politicizing" the Court?
I'm not arguing Justices's spouses shouldn't work. But, conflicts of interest should be disclosed and the Justice should be required to recuse themselves when potential conflicts arise. And Thomas sitting on cases that involve issues in which his wife is active or receiving payments for services is a MASSIVE conflict.
Of the Justices, Thomas and his wife are unique in the level of potential conflicts.
> What I never see in any of these articles about justices getting favors or gifts or this and that is any link that influenced the outcome of a case. You'd think that would be readily apparent because the opinions and views of these justices are known they've held them for decades. The rulings they make are very consistent to the point that scholars can predict the outcomes of nearly every case. So if them having friendships with powerful people and receiving gifts were influencing the outcomes of cases we would see inconsistent rulings happening. We don't see that at all.
I think you just haven't actually read anything about the Clarence Thomas information in the past 3 months? There are specific Harlan Crow interests that have been amici briefs in cases on which he has judged. That's pretty cut and dry as this go.
But it looks to me based on this statement that the standard of proof for you is going to be "Please show me the check with the memo line that says 'I gave this check for your vote on the Supreme Court'" And anything short of that isn't going to cut it for you. That's not the way corruption works. It's not a one-off. You go back to the corrupted well, and you start to justify it to yourself as not corrupt, because "he's just my friend, and we have an understanding and see eye-to-eye."
Pretending that Harlan Crow doesn't have more influence on the court than you or I do because of his payments to Thomas is willful blindness to corruption.
Also, there have been equally questionable things about liberal justices. I don't care, I want more transparency from all of them, absolutely. But the don't pretend this is a liberal conservative thing when there's a clear case of corruption on the table. All of the justices voted against stricter scrutiny, and that's suspicious to me.
Well, not his "child", I think it was a grand-nephew that he was the legal guardian of. Small point, but significant to disclosure requirements which focus on immediate family members.[1]
I tend to think this whole string of ethics attacks on Thomas by the legislature and amplified by select media outlets is a convenient distraction from the conversation about insider stock trading in House and Senate (for which, btw, AOC and Gaetz have cosponsored a bill to ban, and deserves far more visibility and support).[2]
Really anything those two can agree on is worth attention, imo.
Not saying the criticisms of all justices don't have merit, though I think it's a minority of the balloons being floated that have any real "there" there. Avoiding even the "appearance of conflict" is the right bar, and virtually none of the justices have done a stellar job at this. That said, in terms of ethics crises, I'm far more concerned about insider trading in the Legislative branch. After that, probably pay-to-play schemes in the Executive branch and the revolving door with lobbyists. Somewhere far below that - but not at bottom - book deals and vacations for SCOTUS justices. The cynical side of me suspects attempts to delegitimize the institution correlate with balance of Court ATM and the displeasure of the loudest voices on the matter, rather than objective concern.
Valid? Yes. Deserving the bandwidth of zero-sum press coverage compared to other high-profile ethics issues implicating the very people driving the criticism of Court ethics right now? Meh, not so much.
> What I never see in any of these articles about justices getting favors or gifts or this and that is any link that influenced the outcome of a case.
Ethical guidelines are established not just to prevent bribery and corruption, but also to prevent the appearance of bribery and corruption. Public faith in institutions, especially ones as powerful and far-reaching as SCOTUS, is important and shouldn't be brushed aside.
As to the rest of your point - it's hard to disprove a negative. There have been justices that have 'evolved' or grown throughout their tenure - Roberts is a current example. The kind of social leverage that providing round trip flights on your private jet to view the unveiling of a portrait of yourself[1] can absolutely be applied to ensure adherence to 'predicted' outcomes of opinions. Kavanaugh has been the swing vote on several recent decisions, and the early leaking of the Dobbs draft opinion strongly implies the application of this kind of social pressure to a Justice like Kavanaugh.
You may think this kind of herd-mentality extreme when it comes to such a vaunted position but the absolute requirement that conservative scotus nominees belong to the Federalist Society is just another example of this sad reality.
The only checks involved were in the mail, and almost certainly addressed to Clarence Thomas, who has taken more in bribes than the last 30 other justices combined, and that’s only the ones he’s been caught on.
>But I think all the justices can see what Thomas was doing was pretty awful and I doubt any of the other justices, even those whose views I find abhorrent, would have gone that far.
I'm not sure that is the case. Ginsburg got a trip from a person and then the court declined to take up a case against said person.[1] The whole article is quite good so I would recommend reading the whole thing.
>This ethics code very clearly brings in consideration of the judge’s spouse’s activities as well, something which, once again is a major problem with Thomas, and none of the other judges as far as I can tell.
If his wife had wanted to give a speech and Thomas told her no, how many articles would there have been about the mean, misogynist, conservative man controlling his wife? It was a lose lose for Thomas on this so long as his wife wanted to do it.
I think this is on his wife, not him. Justice Breyer defended Thomas on this [2] as well.
There are examples of other justices' spouses doing similar things. Roberts' wife for example [3]. I'm sure there are more cases as well.
I wouldn't necessarily say they're all equally crooked, but the unanimous decision in McDonnell vs United States is particularly malodorous. Even my hero RBG accepted gifts that should have been declined.
It's kinda weird that the people worried about supreme court ethics are worried about a guy with rich friends who has no business before the court, but not worried about someone with large book deals who does have business before the court.
I don't love the fact that any justices are accepting gifts like this, but, well... it's a fact of life, and they all do it. Given that I can't change it, it's not a hill I care to die on. But at least some justices comply with the reporting requirements.
reply