This article remains highly relevant.
Oh so we knew, we just didn’t do anything about it then either.
Yup. America is pretty okay with oligarchy.
Ha!
U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas has been offered $1 million a year and a $2.4 million motor coach if he agrees to resign from the nation’s highest court.
Comedian John Oliver, host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, made the offer at the end of his show on Sunday and showed off the motor coach he was offering to the Supreme Court’s longest-serving member.
The underlying point of the offer is to show that there is absolutely no legal mechanism preventing someone from making such an offer or Thomas accepting it.
Is the resignation part important?
Seems if they wanted to make the point you suggest they’d just offer him that money.
No. Would be nice though.
Would it still be OK if Thomas was offered a million dollars, and all he had to do was to let the donor write his next SC opinion for him?
That would land Oliver (or even Nazi Napkin Collector) in jail. Thomas’s patrons are keeping him happy so he stays on the court. He already rules the way they want. Oliver is just making the reverse offer.
Is Thomas mulling over the offer is my question. Hopefully he is.
A million a year won’t cover the lifestyle provided to him by his wealthy benefactors, and of course they’d stop lavishing him with gifts if he resigned.
Accepting Oliver’s move might violate the harsh but non-binding “Best Practice Guidelines” that the Court set out for itself, resulting in severe penalties, including but not limited to a few snarky Internet comments.
While John Oliver himself expressed surprise that this was all legal, I don’t see the legal problem. Thomas isn’t being offered the money to make an unethical ruling, he’s being made the offer in order to remove himself from the picture. The only thing his acceptance would prove is that he’s an unethical money-grubbing grifter with absolutely no principles – something that we already know.
I’m pretty sure he won’t take the offer because he can probably pry a better deal out of the (at least) four billionaires already supporting his grift. Harlan Crow, the devoted collector of Nazi memorabilia, may be the most shockingly egregious, but he’s not the only one. Oliver may be reasonably wealthy, but he can’t compete with a cabal of billionaires when it comes to influencing the Supreme Court – after all, this is America!
Oliver’s little dig at the end about “if they’re really your friends you have nothing to worry about” was brilliant,
Some more detail:
Supreme Court justices have received nearly $5 million in gifts since the early 2000s, and one justice in particular, Justice Clarence Thomas, accounts for nearly all of it.
Data released Thursday by watchdog group Fix the Court unveils a list of gifts justices have received since January 2004. The dataset was released ahead of an expected release of the justices’ financial disclosure reports Friday.
$4 million that we know of so far.
Some more detail on the overall court acceptance of “gifts.” I know this thread is about Thomas but I think this is fair to include to put his malfeasance in context.
U.S. Supreme Court justices reported receiving gifts including a stay in a Bali hotel and tickets to a Beyoncé concert, as well as nearly $1.6 million in book advances and royalties in annual financial disclosure forms for 2023 released on Friday.
Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, who has come under criticism for failing to disclose gifts from businessman and Republican donor Harlan Crow, revised his 2019 form to acknowledge he accepted “food and lodging” at a Bali hotel and at a California club.
So is there a crime committed by the people bestowing the gifts? Can they be brought to justice for bribery or something?
Gawd, I’m sick of the fucking corruption everywhere.
Bribery of a federal official is a crime.
But what “official act”, specifically, were they attempting to influence, and where is the proof? What fraud was committed (and again, where is the proof)? Or what specific official act or duty did your gift induce them to not do (and proof, duh)?
Just giving gifts alone isn’t a crime, there’s other stuff that you need to prove.
Now, receiving gifts without actually doing anything else can get you in trouble if you are a government person. I have rules even for my job as low as I am in state government. But then, I’m not a Supreme Court Justice who we’ve learned have the “ability” to police themselves in this regard.
That’s what I’ve been wondering.
If the judges can’t be trusted to be moral and report properly, pass a law that requires any individuals (other than immediate family) or corporations who give a “gift” to a judge to report its full value.
Also require them to give a matching amount to the federal treasury, as a civil matter, not a criminal matter. You want to bribe Thomas with a trip worth a million bucks? Fine. Then you pay a matching million bucks to the people of the United States.
But there would be a matching criminal offence: failure by the briber giftor to declare the amount of the bribe “gift” would be a criminal offence, with a year in jail, minimum. And a fine of ten times the amount of the bribe “gift”.
And, take it out of the bribery law. No need to prove quid pro quo. It’s just a requirement of federal law to report any “gift” to a federal judge.
The crime is failure to report. That’s what triggers a year in jail, minimum.