Congress is meant to exert checks on judicial power – to investigate or even impeach judges who abuse their office or interpret the law in ways that violate its spirit, and to affirm that the elected branches will hold more sway over policy than the appointed one. But the chief justice’s show of indifference to congressional oversight authority reflects a new reality: that there are now effectively no checks on the power of the court – at least none that Democrats have the political will to use – and that the justices can be assured that they will face no repercussions even if they act in flagrant violation of ethical standards. It seems that they intend to.
Subsequent reporting revealed that Crow had in fact bought Thomas’s childhood home in Savannah, Georgia, where the justice’s elderly mother still lives, along with several plots on the block. After paying Thomas for the real estate, the billionaire cleared local blight, made significant renovations to the house and allowed Thomas’s mother to continue living there, rent-free.
None of those transactions had been detailed on Thomas’s ethics forms, either. In addition to the soft influence Crow would have been able to buy with his extensive largesse, the billionaire’s generous gifts also seem to have created a direct conflict of interest for Justice Thomas: Crow’s firm had business before the US supreme court at least once, and Thomas did not recuse himself from the case.
It is not Thomas’s first time in ethical hot water. He was famously accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, including Anita Hill, during his time in the Reagan administration as head of the employee-rights protection watchdog, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He has been accused of having perjured himself in his subsequent testimony about his behavior toward Hill at his confirmation hearings.
During his long tenure on the court, he has repeatedly had trouble filling out his financial disclosure forms correctly. Once, he failed to report more than half a million dollars in income that his wife, the conservative activist Ginni Thomas, received from the rightwing Heritage Foundation. He said at the time that he had misunderstood the forms. That was also his excuse regarding Harlan Crow’s largesse.
Thomas claims that he was advised that he did not have to report “hospitality”. It is a loophole in the ethics code that is meant to relieve judges of having to report, say, barbecue dinners at the homes of their neighbors – not, as Thomas claims he took it to mean, luxury yacht tours of Indonesia.
Although Thomas may be uniquely prolific in his alleged ethical violations, the problem isn’t unique to him. Politico revealed this week that just nine days after his confirmation to the US supreme court in April 2017, Justice Neil Gorsuch sold a log cabin in Colorado to Brian Duffy, the chief executive of the massive law firm Greenberg Traurig. Before Gorsuch’s confirmation, the justice and the other co-owners of the home had tried for two years to sell it, without success.
Since the sale, Duffy’s firm has had business before the court at least 22 times. Gorsuch did disclose the income from the sale on financial disclosure forms, but failed to mention that the buyer was a big shot at one of the country’s largest law firms who would regularly bring cases before Gorsuch at his new job.
It’s certainly possible that Duffy simply liked the house, and that the convenient timing of his purchase so soon after Gorsuch’s confirmation to the court was a mere coincidence. And it seems reasonable to believe Thomas and Crow when they say that they are sincere friends, if less reasonable to believe Thomas when he claims that he misunderstood his disclosure obligations. But corruption need not be as vulgar and direct as a quid pro quo: it can be the subtle machinations of influence and sympathy that occur in these relationships, inflected both by money and by closeness, that lead the justices to see cases as they otherwise wouldn’t, or act in ways contrary to the integrity of their office and the interests of the law.
Bad intent by the justices need not be present for the mere appearance of corruption to have a corrosive effect on the rule of law, and both Gorsuch and Thomas have allowed a quite severe appearance of corruption to attach itself to the court. Both have claimed that they are such intelligent and gifted legal minds that they should be given lifelong appointments of unparalleled power, and also that they have made innocent mistakes on legal forms that they are too dumb to understand.
The claim strains credulity. What it looks like, to the American people who have to live under the laws that the supreme court shapes, is that Thomas has long been living lavishly on the dime of a rightwing billionaire who wants rightwing rulings, and that Gorsuch conveniently managed to sell a house he didn’t want at the precise moment when he became important enough to be worth bribing.
The chief justice doesn’t seem very worried about this appearance of impropriety. In light of these alarming ethics concerns, Roberts’ curt rejection of the committee’s invitation to testify speaks to an evident indifference to ethical standards, or a contempt for the oversight powers of the nominally coequal branches. Ironically enough, his nonchalance has made the reality even more plain than it was before: the court will not police itself.
by Moira Donegan, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Jim Young/Reuters[ed. See also: What’s Going On with Samuel Alito? (New Yorker). And: Is Rupert Murdoch OK? (Guardian):]
It’s fair to say the Wall Street Journal is not alone in the quest to make sense of Murdoch’s recent behaviour. The week after he paid $787.5m to settle the lawsuit brought against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems – Dominion’s lawyers were going to force him to take the stand – Murdoch sacked Carlson via his son Lachlan. Media outlets have been scrambling to find logical explanations for actions that arguably, to deploy a euphemism, defy logic. After all, this is a 92-year-old who only weeks ago was delighting us with news of his impending fifth marriage – a whirlwind engagement to a former dental nurse turned prison chaplain, which was hastily called off a mere fortnight later. Apparently, Murdoch had become “increasingly uncomfortable” with his fiancee’s “outspoken evangelical views”. Again: really?
The one thing we can say with certainty is that Murdoch would want us to pick over his actions and ask if he was still playing with a full deck of Happy Families cards. For decades, his newspapers have lasered in on public figures as they reach their twilight, premature or otherwise. Back in the day, a paparazzi picture of a painfully thin Freddie Mercury limping across the street was glossed with the Sun’s front page inquiry: “ARE YOU OK FRED?” – one of those newspaper questions to which the answer is patently: no. No, he’s not – what does it effing look like? So in the same solicitous spirit we must survey the recent actions of the mercurial mogul, and ask, in the way he taught us: ARE YOU OK RUPE?
Put candidly … what does it effing look like? Last October, Murdoch announced plans to merge both his public companies, Fox Corp and News Corp, before being forced in January to abandon the scheme in the face of shareholder bafflement and dismay. March brought news of the bonkers betrothal and Murdoch’s bizarre interview about how he “dreaded falling in love”; April saw the engagement’s abandonment. Murdoch was supposed to end the month testifying in the Dominion lawsuit; having settled that, he set about blindsiding even his allies by sacking Carlson. While legacy media oblige their own moguls by suggesting lucid cause-and-effect, some of the upstarts are finally breaking the glass on the word “erratic”.
“Erratic” was certainly a word that came to mind when reading the epic recent Vanity Fair article on Murdoch, in which every line was a marmalade-dropper. Take the single paragraph that revealed Murdoch had fallen and seriously injured himself on a Caribbean superyacht trip with his now-former wife Jerry Hall. Though it hastened to dock to get him to hospital, the boat was too big for the pier, resulting in Murdoch having to be precariously lowered down, after which he spent a night under a tent in a car park (the local hospital was closed). He was finally medevaced out, but, according to a family friend, “kept almost dying”. LA medics discovered a broken back, noting from the X-rays that he had previously fractured vertebrae. The paragraph concludes: “Murdoch explained it must have been from the time his ex-wife Deng pushed him into a piano during a fight.” (Ms Deng did not respond to the publication’s requests for comment.)
It feels particularly piquant that all this is taking place against the backdrop of the final series of Succession. Murdoch is extremely, extremely relaxed about the show, to the point of having it written into his divorce settlement with Jerry Hall that she was banned from speaking to its writers. Jerry reportedly realised the Oxfordshire house she got in the settlement was rigged with cameras still beaming their footage back to Fox HQ, a discovery that prompted Mick Jagger’s security guy to come and dismantle the apparatus for her.
