Thomas the fundraising draw
Pro Publica has more on the ever-expanding “Clarence Thomas has multiple conflicts of interest” scandal.
On Jan. 25, 2018, dozens of private jets descended on Palm Springs International Airport. Some of the richest people in the country were arriving for the annual winter donor summit of the Koch network, the political organization founded by libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch.
Libertarian meaning extremely conservative and pro-rich people & anti-poor people.
One passenger on one private jet was Clarence Thomas.
During the summit, the justice went to a private dinner for the network’s donors. Thomas has attended Koch donor events at least twice over the years, according to interviews with three former network employees and one major donor. The justice was brought in to speak, staffers said, in the hopes that such access would encourage donors to continue giving.
That puts Thomas in the extraordinary position of having served as a fundraising draw for a network that has brought cases before the Supreme Court, including one of the most closely watched of the upcoming term.
That’s in addition to the extraordinary position of taking all these bribes in the first place and going to all these highly political events and conferences and retreats in the first place.
Thomas’ involvement in the events is part of a yearslong, personal relationship with the Koch brothers that has remained almost entirely out of public view. It developed over years of trips to the Bohemian Grove, a secretive all-men’s retreat in Northern California. Thomas has been a regular at the Grove for two decades, where he stayed in a small camp with real estate billionaire Harlan Crow and the Kochs, according to records and people who’ve spent time with him there.
Shorter: Thomas is dirty. Very, very dirty.
The code of conduct for the federal judiciary lays out rules designed to preserve judges’ impartiality and independence, which it calls “indispensable to justice in our society.” The code specifically prohibits both political activity and participation in fundraising. Judges are advised, for instance, not to “associate themselves” with any group “publicly identified with controversial legal, social, or political positions.”
But the code of conduct only applies to the lower courts. At the Supreme Court, justices decide what’s appropriate for themselves.
“I can’t imagine — it takes my breath away, frankly — that he would go to a Koch network event for donors,” said John E. Jones III, a retired federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush. Jones said that if he had gone to a Koch summit as a district court judge, “I’d have gotten a letter that would’ve commenced a disciplinary proceeding.”
“What you’re seeing is a slow creep toward unethical behavior. Do it if you can get away with it,” Jones said.
Hey, I thought. Judge Jones? THE Judge Jones? So I googled. Yes, THE Judge Jones – the intelligent design ruling Judge Jones.
The Koch network is among the largest and most influential political organizations of the last half century, and it’s underwritten a far-reaching campaign to influence the course of American law. In a case the Supreme Court will hear this coming term, the justices could give the network a historic victory: limiting federal agencies’ power to issue regulations in areas ranging from the environment to labor rights to consumer protection. After shepherding the case to the court, Koch network staff attorneys are now asking the justices to overturn a decades-old precedent. (Thomas used to support the precedent but flipped his position in recent years.)
In short, Thomas is strikingly corrupt.
Mind you, I’m confident he would rule for Koch-thought anyway, even if they’d never given him so much as a sandwich, but all this partying and holidaying and festivity with the billionaires who want everyone else to have less of everything is kaka anyway.
And to show how consistent Republicans are on the conflict-of-interest rules, Robin Vos of Wisconsin’s gerrymandered Republican Majority, is threatening to impeach and remove the newly-elected State Supreme Court Justice Janice Protasiewicz because she had made gerrymandering in Wisconsin a campaign theme and has not agreed to recuse herself from an upcoming case on redistricting. They say she has a conflict-of-interest because she had an opinion on that, and also on abortion. This is the same Republican majority that held a special session after the election of a Democratic governor to replace Scott Walker so that they could restrict the powers that a governor may exercise. They claimed that their intent had been to do so no matter which party won due to an imbalance of power that took away from the rights of the people to govern. Freedom!
And the Kochs. They have a refinery southeast of Saint Paul that requires gigawatts of electricity, but since they were tired of paying XCel Energy for power, they built a huge solar array in their backyard to convert oil to petrol and plastic; but they continue to lobby against solar power. Billionaires. Yuck.
Like you, I don’t think there’s any quid pro quo going on here. Thomas is an ideologue and a true believer.
I think there’s three things going on here:
1) Conservatives want to keep justices like Thomas “in the fold.” There has long been a belief in the conservative legal and political world that Republican appointees like Stevens, O’Connor, Souter, and even Kennedy have gone “soft” and turned into moderates because they were co-opted into the Washington cocktail party circuit, or trying to curry favor with the liberal intelligentsia or whatever. (This used to be called the “Greenhouse Effect,” named for then-NYT legal reporter Linda Greenhouse — the idea being that Republican justices would shy away from conservative rulings so that Greenhouse would say nice things about them.) This is probably nonsense, but many conservatives believe it. So I think a large factor here is wanting to keep the Thomases and Alitos surrounded by a social network of hard-core conservatives, and using luxury vacations and stuff to facilitate that.
2) The opportunity for backchannel legal strategizing. I’m sure these gatherings include late-night conversations over cigars and bourbon in which Thomas comments on which conservative legal goals would probably get five votes on the Court, and which ones aren’t there yet, and what kinds of test cases might win over the swing votes. They may not be explicitly mapping out strategy (“if you bring this kind of challenge, I can get five votes for it, so tee that up this year”) — though I don’t rule it out — but if Thomas/Alito are leaking enough gossip about the justices’ views, it’ll amount to the same thing. Of course, this kind of thing would still go on even if no justices ever attended such events, because there’s an extensive network of SCOTUS clerks who serve two-year posts and then move on to positions at private law firms or conservative legal groups or whatever. The only difference is that instead of Recent Former Thomas Clerk gossiping about what the boss said the other justices think, it’s Thomas directly.
3) The opportunity to fundraise based on access to the justices.
Should this stuff be prohibited, and subject to criminal punishment and/or impeachment? I don’t know. I lean towards no. Just disclose it, and the public know the slimy stuff that’s going on. The justices really do tend to care about their reputations and legacies — there’s a reason Thomas, who generally doesn’t care about drawing criticism, keeps concealing this stuff — so that isn’t nothing. Enough to deter it from continuing? Probably not in the cases of Alito and Thomas. But I can imagine other justices looking at this stuff and thinking that a weekend in Palm Springs isn’t worth the damage.
I wrote this 10 years ago
The Judgment of Clarence
https://theworld.com/~swmcd/steven/crypt/clarence.html
I didn’t know for a fact that Thomas was corrupt; he just seemed like that kind of guy to me.
[…] a comment by Screechy Monkey on Thomas the fundraising […]
Well said about ‘libertarians’ – ‘libertarianism’ is a contemptible ideology, a fantasy that once accepted allows believers to ignore reality and its complexity in favour of nice, big, simplistic ideas.
With Linda as Eris.