An arrangement
Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.
And when Republican activists do things about voting rights, they’re not working to expand or protect them.
Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conwaythat he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”
Conway’s firm, the Polling Company, sent the Judicial Education Project a $25,000 bill that day. Per Leo’s instructions, it listed the purpose as “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting,” the documents show.
In all, according to the documents, the Polling Company paid Thomas’s firm, Liberty Consulting, $80,000 between June 2011 and June 2012, and it expected to pay $20,000 more before the end of 2012.
All in secret.
The arrangement reveals that Leo, a longtime Federalist Society leader and friend of the Thomases, has functioned not only as an ideological ally of Clarence Thomas’s but also has worked to provide financial remuneration to his family. And it shows Leo arranging for the money to be drawn from a nonprofit that soon would have an interest before the court.
An ideological ally and a secret source of large amounts of $$$. Peak squalor.
Every new regulation digs deeper – and Roberts still insists he will not revisit Court rules, that the legislature should not have say over the court. (Which is, as I understand it, part of the separation of powers, that each branch is a safeguard against wrongdoing by the others).
iknklast, I assume you meant every new “revelation”?
It’s a moot point at the moment, because the House GOP will never pass any legislation affecting the Court now, but there’s the potential for a dangerous constitutional crisis down the road.
The boundaries of what Congress can do in this area are ill-defined. There’s some easy questions, of course: you can’t impose term limits on justices given that the Constitution says they have lifetime tenure. But it also seems pretty clear that the justices shouldn’t be exempt from laws regarding bribery of public officials, to pick an example entirely not at random. In between, who knows?
That, of course,is nothing unusual — there are always gray areas in the law and the Constitution. The problem is that the Court has arrogated to itself the power to declare what laws are and aren’t constitutional. Which is generally fine in my view, but the prospect of the Court overturning a statute regulating the ethical behavior of its members is not pleasant.
In theory Congress holds the trump card of impeachment, but of course practically speaking you’re not getting 2/3 of the Senate to remove a conservative justice for anything, so that’s out.
So effectively the only check on the Court in today’s climate is the conscience of its members. Which… is not encouraging these days, is it?
I wonder about their tolerance for degradation though. I don’t expect these horrors to have a conscience, but a dislike of being seen to be self-serving and corrupt is another thing.
Yeah, they definitely care, or at least some of them do.
You only have to read the irritated, bitter comments of Sam Alito to get how annoyed he is by criticism. For him, it’s not enough that he’s on the highest court in the land, lots of people kiss his ass, and he finally has a majority with which to impose his whacky ideology on a country that doesn’t subscribe to it. He wants to do all that, and be universally respected for it.
Thomas doesn’t publicly express his irritation the way Alito does, but he still comes across as incredibly bitter. And we saw Kavanaugh’s massive sense of entitlement when he lashed out at his hearing.
They may or may not care that you think they’re corrupt — they may allow you the freedom of thought — but they are enraged at anyone who has the temerity to voice it. But I have my doubts that they’ll see the solution to their problems as “be less obviously corrupt.”
Roberts I think does care. He’s the Chief, so it’s always going to be known as the “Roberts Court,” and he’s an institutionalist by nature, so I think he genuinely does care about the Court’s reputation. But I don’t know where that gets us. He is ultimately just the first among equals. He has some administrative authority, but otherwise he’s just one vote like the rest. And I think he’s increasingly aware of the fact that the other five conservative justices don’t need his vote in a lot of cases, and they’re aware of it, too. So anything he does to try to reign them in risks them just deciding to openly defy him rather than work with him.
Screechy, yes, I did mean revelation. Thanks. My fingers don’t always behave well, and my brain seems to be on holiday right now.