Don’t go there - I was talking to a friend recently that the late 90s Bond movies seemed to be struggling to find their ‘place’ with villains. Russia wasn’t quite the villain it was in the past, and it bounced between various overwrought tech / corporate villains. Just wasn’t quite the same. And things got better with the Craig iteration (at least the first few).
And in the last 5 years especially, I see the new Uber-Evil Russia with cartoonishly evil Putin, and Elon Musk being just childishly evil (if thankfully, with fewer guns than Putin) and think - was the earlier Bond just ahead of it’s time?
Back to the subject of Mr. Thomas - after reading Stranger’s post, I flashed to the scene in GoldenEye where the older Russian general was having… dangerous fun with the Femme Fatale Onatopp and found it terrifyingly easy to put Thomas in that role. Have all the fun, who cares if you have responsibilities and duty - those aren’t important!
From your cite, Neil Gorsuch declared that he had received $700 cowboy boots as a gift. Disclosure matters!
Meanwhile, that cite led me down a rabbit hole where I found information about Clarence’s wife’s lobbying firm, Liberty Consulting, and this billionaire friend of the family.
Thomas says he was advised it was okay. So, nothing to see here, m’kay?
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It’s always nice when donors also give advice. But seriously, Thomas is now going to follow future guidance. So, nothing to see here, m’kay?
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Oh very well. How would Canada or other countries handle these issues of pure friendship and potential secondary meetings with anyone? I mean as a judge, not as a Prime Minister.
Sure, but “everybody does it, he just didn’t report it” is a story that is going absolutely nowhere. There are many things about Clarence Thomas that make him barely fit for humanity, let alone the bench, but this is a story for people who already hate him to sit around and talk more about how much they hate him, to zero effect.
Personally I don’t care that Clarence Thomas took a bunch of free trips and didn’t declare them. I care that he’s subhuman trash and has real power over the lives of people with far less power than he has. It makes me sad and tired to watch everyone spin their wheels about another small outrage.
Which is on me, I guess. I don’t have to look. I guess I’m not even really arguing with you.
It’s a grotesque breach of ethics by a guy who likes to lecture other people about ethics. Will the hypocrisy sway conservatives to reconsider their support for him? No, not any more than revelations of Bill Clinton’s history of predatory sexual harassment and assault caused Clinton-loving liberals to consider theirs (at least, not until sexual abuse by powerful male figures became a bellwether cause, and even now he is scarcely being shunned). In any case, Thomas won’t be impeached and removed from the Supreme Court because he is giving the ascending proto-fascists exactly what they want, which should be a cautionary tale to anyone who believes that “the [federal] courts” will hold back that tide even if they aren’t conversant to how the Nazi regime took over the courts in post-Weimar Germany. In any case, there is a qualitative difference between Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Clarence Thomas, which should be a surprise to exactly nobody who has studied both of their careers and opinions.
And the same people that are defending him are accusing a NYC judge of not being impartial because he made a $15 donation to a Democratic political candidate.
I’m unclear on this aspect: is anything about his failure to report actually illegal? Should he have, for example, reported these trips and gifts on his income tax forms? Will this asshole at least be audited?
They’re not income or taxable cash gifts, and so are not reportable to the IRS. This is a breach of ethics per the financial disclosure requirements set by the Judicial Conference of the United States Committee on Financial Disclosure (part of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts), and so are really an administrative violation rather than a law. Technically, such a breach could be subject to impeachment and removal by the US Senate (good luck with that) but there is really no other way to remove or penalize a justice who breaks those rules.
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It looks like the Conference updated the rules to clarify disclosure requirements. Again, good luck with that:
Don’t forget he has not named this supposed person, that gave him this criminal advice, and that he wants to deflect all the blame to.
So, in the analogy, it should be more like “An older boy made me do it”.
A political analyst at CNN says this should be the last straw:
The ProPublica report revealed Thomas’s troubling ties to Harlan Crow, a major Republican donor. According to the report, Thomas has enjoyed a number of benefits over the past 20-odd years of their relationship, including cruises on Crow’s 162-foot yacht, stays at Crow’s properties in the Adirondacks and East Texas, and use of Crow’s private jet. According to the report, “The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Of course there is no way that Republicans would remove a reliable wingnut and allow a vacancy to be filled by a Biden nominee, so Thomas is safe no matter what he did or what he ever does in the future. Such is the sorry state of American democracy.
Politicians sometimes ask for advice from an “integrity commissioner” or whatnot. Does such a resource exist for judges or are they assumed to act to avoid the appearance of impropriety?
In Canada, there was a judge who was allegedly hit by a drunk marine while on vacation, though some reports proffer a different story. After a complaint he oddly remains on leave which is said to likely influence some future cases.
So it’s like this. “The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.” But that’s OK, although blatantly illegal. The fact that Crow is a far-right neo-Nazi is OK, too. That Thomas’ wife has a long history of advocating for far-right causes and collects grift from far-right lobbyists is perfectly fine. That she participated in the Jan 6 insurrection is OK, too.
But here’s where Republicans draw the line: the judge presiding over Trump’s 34 felony counts once contributed $15 to Biden’s campaign! That is a moral outrage that cannot stand!
