What is interesting so far is most answers that might be deemed in support of Thomas (i.e. don’t impeach him) are really deflections.
No one is defending him on the merits. Just, “Oh hey, Geithner did it too!”
Or, “Congress can impeach you if they don’t like your tie!”
Personally if Geithner did something equivalent then hell yeah, he should be impeached as well (assuming he can be). Frankly everyone will probably mess up on taxes somewhere. Pay your fine, move on. But thirteen years? On something so obvious? Does anyone here want to argue it’s just a “whoops”?
As for not liking your tie well…on that basis there is no rationale. If enough people do not like you then they will conjure a reason to oust you.
Just thought we were a country of law and tried to adhere to it.
Thomas claims he misunderstood the forms. That warrants an investigation, because I don’t find it plausible that he misunderstood what the meaning of spouse is.
This will not happen because Thomas is a Republican and Republicans are allowed to be far more corrupt than Democrats. So much so that blatant misunderstanding of the words “spouse” and “income” will suddenly be up for debate.
My guess is that it will not result in even a public call for investigation. Right now Charlie Rangal wishes he were a Republican judge. I’m all for having him testify before Congress under oath and see what it is he has to say for himself. I’d love for him to claim the 5th.
Good grief please. Ever been to Chicago or Illinois? Or Democratic New York? And Rangel is so corrupt that the comparison makes a mockery of your entire post.
As an originalist, he clearly thinks the FF did not intend to allow inter-racial marriage, therefore his wife is not a “spouse” as defined by the US of A Constitution may it ever so wave.
Had any one famous other than a Republican done this it would be investigated. But solely because he is a Republican it is not going to be investigated. A Democrat would be investigated for this, and should be. The failure to investigate a prima facie case of felony misreporting makes a mockery of our entire system of justice.
So are you claiming that he lied? That’s a big accusation. Someone can be wrong and not be a liar. (Think about the young earth creationists–they’re merely deluded.)
As for the drones and WMDs, you do know that we sold/gave Saddam those very things, right? What happened to them?
We never gave him any drones, they never existed. As for the WMDs, what there were were destroyed after the first Gulf War, or simply decayed; something we clearly knew quite well given how we made a priority of securing the Iraqi Oil Ministry and ignored all those Iraqi armories and supposed WMD sites.
It’s partisan nonsense. The disclosure is so that anyone arguing before the court can fully understand the financial details of the judges, so that any less-than-obvious conflicts of interest might be discovered. Thomas’s wife’s employment by the Heritage foundation was well-known. So, number one, I would speculate that there was not a single person arguing before SCOTUS who was unaware of this well-known (to that “inside baseball” crowd) fact; second, if this was an attempt to hide something, to defeat the purpose of the disclosure, it was a miserable failure and Thomas could not possibly have thought he was doing so (however careless this omission was). Does anyone truly think Thomas was laughing an evil cackle at the time of the filings, saying to himself, “Ha ha! One more year where no one knows my wife worked for the Heritage Foundation!”
I was specifically responding to a statement that Thomas lied to Congress by pointing out that he had not lied to Congress.
I think Thomas is a poor judge who shouldn’t be on the Supreme Court. But I also don’t think he’s done anything impeachable here.
Calling for Thomas’ impeachment is just a partisan attack - it’s people who don’t want Thomas in the Supreme Court and are looking for an excuse to remove him.
And the same was true of Clinton. He did not commit any impeachable offense. The people who impeached him were making a partisan attack against somebody they didn’t want in the White House.
I’m not “for” Thomas or “for” Clinton. I’m against blind partisanship and the misuse of impeachments for political theatre.
I agree. I thought the impeachment of Clinton was a despicable misuse of political power. I changed parties in reaction (though after several years I did switch back).
For 13 years he made this mistake? This was all so obvious to everyone (except apparently Justice Thomas) the mistake was only recently pointed out? A federal law can be shrugged off because it is not a big deal? Her “well known” work with the Heritage Foundation that paid her $700,000 kind of well known?
Yep…has a mere “whoops” written all over it. :rolleyes:
One tiny nitpick: I think he did commit an impechable offense – a federal crime.
However, the only reason he committed that crime was that he was placed into an unwinnable dilemma.
The government would never have spent the time and effort they did going after a private citizen. And Clinton would not have had to lie in the deposition if he were a private citizen. If he had forthrightly answered Jones’ questions in the deposition, you KNOW that notwithstanding and gag order or secrecy provisions, his answers would have been leaked. Nor could he, politically, claim a Fifth Amendment privilege, even though a private citizen in the same position could have.
So the blatant unfairness in Clinton’s situation was not the corpus delecti itself, but the manner in which Clinton was boxed in: collusion between the government prosecution team and the provate counsel for Jones, and the “cruel trilemma” of silence, lie, or Fifth Amendment, with the impermissible threat of publicity forcing him down the road he chose.
By not keeping Slick Willie in his pants?
If you want to get into “If he were a private citizen.” what would have happened to a private citizen caught banging his intern? Loss of job and a sexual harrassment lawsuit probably.
I agree that the Republicans went overboard but you need to remember two things:
At the time, perjury was the current fad for impeachment. There was a string of judges that had just been convicted of it by the Senate.
Sure Clinton committed a horrible crime. The Starr Commission and other investigations cost over 80 million . They investigated the Clinton’s entire life ,from every dalliance to Whitewater and anything else they could dig up. They came up empty over and over. Then they found a sex story they coud run with. His action were not illegal in any case. He was acting like a Republican and having sex with followers and workers.
He should have told Starr it was none of his business, but he decided to attempt a cover up. The Starr Commission was a lowpoint for the Republic. It was a terrible use of tax funds to try to bring down the Dems.
But wait, its not about that. It about Clinton lying after the Starr Comm. kept their endless attacks up for over 5 years. They were dark days for America. The abuse of power and the waste of taxpayer funds on a shameful Republican witch hunt will go down in history as a huge black mark for our country.