Justice is not a real Republican. He ran as a Democrat and switched parties to get Trump to throw federal money at the state. The idea that he will appoint five Antonin Scalias is laughable at best.
Walker and Loughry are both hard core conservatives. Neither one have ever seen a criminal defendant who had an unfair trial, or a corporate defendant they didn’t like. If the goal is a GOP stool pigeon on the Court, look no further.
Unlike most people, I believe that the lavish spending on the offices is the worst thing here. As noted above, I don’t see the big deal (in the grand scheme of things) about Loughery padding his expenses or using state gasoline cards. That’s penny ante stuff. The real theft was the idea that each Justice should spend more than most West Virginians spend on a house in order to renovate their private offices.
I support the removal of all four on those counts. I’m not sure how I would vote on the other articles.
One of my former jobs included tracking down expense paddings of public servants. It would have been part of this job to report this judge’s behavior if I had been in the same position at the W. Virginia supreme court. So, I wouldn’t agree.
On top of which, someone writing a book about the corruption of others should be super cautious in the way he’s using public money himself.
I’ve no clue what an appeal judge’s job entails, but I would tend to be pretty lenient on this one. Plenty of people have indeed mountains of documents to sign, much more than they can possibly verify the content of, even superficially. In one case I’ve seen even documents they had no reason to be knowledgeable about, and they had no possible way to verify the validity of. And, especially for public officials, this is often an obligatory part of the job (nobody else can legally sign them), so it’s not like they have a say in the matter.
I always thought this was a serious problem, in fact.
I don’t disagree. However, I think it is more criminal to spend nearly $1 million in lavish office renovations than to use state cars for personal trips to a tune of $1,500. Ketchum is pleading guilty to a felony for the latter, but the other Justices are “merely” getting impeached for the former.
Some of the other things I don’t see the problem at all. For example, Loughry went on a state trip to Montreal (now, why a WV Supreme Court Justice ever needs to be in Montreal on business is a good question that hasn’t been asked) and rented a car to drive from the airport to his hotel, where the conference was held, 13 miles away. However, the car’s odometer had about 400 miles on it when it was returned.
Well, what happened is that he took his wife and kids with him and while he was at the conference, she took the kids around sight seeing. The state did not pay for gas or for their food. As the car comes with unlimited mileage anyways, why should that be a problem?
I disagree. In the first case, it’s done openly, there are bills, it can be verified, and presumably making decisions about the renovation of the building is within the authority of the judges and the cost is supposed to be paid out of public funds. So, it might be a total waste of public money, but it’s perfectly legal, it just make the judges bad administrators and the sanction has to be political (or administrative, like dismissal, in other situations). The judges did exactly what they were supposed to do, they just did it badly. If you’re unhappy with it, you sack them.
In the second case, it’s done secretely with the intent to deceive, and it’s not within the authority of the judge to decide to pay for Aunt Martha’s trips, nor public funds should be used for it. The judge did something he was supposed not to do. It’s clearly theft/embezzlement, and the sanction must be criminal.
Possibly liability in case of accident. But I think, based on my own experience, that it’s probably simply because the rules stated the vehicles should solely be used for business purpose and/or solely driven by the judge, and he didn’t follow the rules. Again from personal experience, rules about expenses exist for a reason, even if the reason isn’t immediately obvious and/or even if in a specific case, not respecting them is of no consequences.
And in the matter of expenses, they have to be strictly enforced, believe me. If there’s any conceivable way to abuse the system, someone, and soon after many, will figure it out. If there’s any potential legal problem, it will inevitably happen. If you make any exception for any reason, you’re asking for troubles, because X, Y and Z will soon wonder why the rules can’t be bent for them as they were for W who was in the (almost) same situation. And finally, if you have to make a case study for each “peculiar” situation, no work is ever going to get done (and you’re likely to be wrong pretty much every time you can’t figure out what the problem could be, and some days later you’ll find yourself in your boss’ boss’ boss office trying to explain him why you didn’t follow the clearly delineated rules, so allowing a massive issue/fraud/PR disaster/legal nightmare).
He’s been charged with fraud? If not, then perhaps it wasn’t fraud.
In any case the difference between “(A third party) agrees to pay you $200 if you go speak” and “(A third party) agrees to pay you $200 if you go speak and submit an expenses claim” is not $200.
I just assumed this thread would be moving on to the other justices being put for impeachment. Given the timing, it creates the idea that this was a political move to make it where the Republican governor would be able to appoint replacements for a majority.
If they want me not to believe that, then they need to make sure that any replacement judges still get voted on.
Again, the governor was elected as a Democrat and switched parties to curry favor with Trump. He is not a right wing idealogue. The idea that he will appoint an entire Court full of Scalias is simply unsupported by any evidence.
Further, Davis “retired” today:
Of five members on the Court, that is two resignations, another under a 23 count federal indictment, and two* facing trial in the State Senate. Although, it seems to me that there will be just shy of 2/3s able to convict Workman and Walker. I would bet money that they survive.
*Well, Loughry is also facing trial in the Senate, but the articles of impeachment were unanimous against him. He’s a dead duck.
I generally prefer that Governors follow their state law and constitutions. Call me kooky.
That’s not too far off what you want, given the timing, but appointments are part of the process. From Article 8 Section 7 of the WV Constitution;
The Governor has issued a directive to fill the remainder of Menis Ketchum’s vacated term during the election in November (Cite) There’s a constitutional process. It’s being followed. There hasn’t been an appointment to fill Ketchum’s vacancy for an intervening couple of months…yet. There may well be. Elections are almost three months away and completely closing up the court in the interim might be problematic.
Your theory about the timing really doesn’t fit the WV system. It’s pretty crappy timing to accomplish what you think the ulterior motive is. We’ve already gotten two vacancies in a time frame that makes any appointments very short lived. If it was the plan, they were too incompetent to wait a little and increase the odds of more long term appointees.
Who said anything about Scalias? (Though nice for you to admit he’s just a conservative idealogue and doesn’t actually just follow the law.) He’s a Trump supporter who lied by running as Democrat just to switch over. He’s the type of guy who is trying to take power.
None of the rest of your post is really relevant. It shows that they would get 3 people, a majority, on the court. That’s enough.
Of course they need to follow the law and constitution. But that means they need them completely impeached and convicted (or not) before the time is up. Or they need to get together and pass a law to give them more time.
Because, unless my sources are bad, they have at most a couple weeks before the governor gets to appoint them. That seems to be what you are referring to, too.
If they get voted upon, fine. If they don’t, then I’m calling foul. I’m glad one more has quit to keep them from pulling this off, but it shouldn’t be down to judges quitting to keep this from happening.
How it works is that they had until this evening to get on the November ballot. So Ketchum is going to be voted on in November as well as Davis. The other three will be appointees until their term is up. This means that Republicans will control all three branches of government during redistricting. It’s an attempt to essentially destroy the Democrats chances of holding control for at least the next decade. They changed the law and impeached the only branch not under their control. It’s absolutely disgraceful and I know personally one of the Delegates leading this and he should be ashamed and I’m telling his mama so next time I see her.
Gov. Justice is not a hard core Republican. He will not appoint five Rufus Peckham’s to the Court.
In a situation where the entire Court has committed bad acts, should we not do anything for fear of being looked at as partisan?
In any event, Gov. Justice’s appointments will not be effective past 2020. The voters will decide. It’s not like the United States Supreme Court where they get life tenure.
If it is a witch hunt, why include Walker or Loughry? Both are very conservative and far to the right of even me, and that’s saying something.
Redistricting is not an issue in West Virginia. Never has been. Is not today. Show me one bill that attempts a partisan gerrymander in this state. I’ll bet you cannot. There is not even a way to do it; we don’t have urban and rural areas that vote this way or that way.
This whole diversion is an attempt to save Justice Workman who was the first female Supreme Court Justice in West Virginia. Notwithstanding that, her opinions are nonsensical. She wrote an opinion requiring the state to pay for elective abortions (Constitutional amendment on the ballot this fall to reverse that) which if I wrote it in law school would earn me a D. For some reason, the Dems love her and are posturing this way just to save her seat because no appointment, even from a Democratic governor, would be someone so ill-suited for the job.
He wanted to appoint Tim Armstead to the court. (Republican Speaker of the House.) Yep, that’s a real neutral arbiter there. There is still debate over the legality of this.
Three of them were never accused of doing anything illegal. They were given a budget approved by the legislature and used that budget to renovate their offices. Was it bad optics in a time of budget crunches? Definitely. Was it illegal? Definitely not. Impeachable? Of course not. They were given a budget and used it how they were legally entitled to use it.
That time period is enough to allow gerrymandered districting to get through, which is the point.
Loughry they were stuck with as well as Ketchum because they are the only ones that actually did anything illegal. This left a bench of 2 Democrats and a Republican. Ketchum dropped out, so he will get an elected replacement. If his replacement is a Democrat, then the Republicans wouldn’t gain control of the Court. That means they had to remove at least one of the Democrats. Unfortunately, the Democrats didn’t do anything wrong other than renovate their offices which is the exact same thing that Walker did. If the legislature was to impeach everyone except Walker, there’s no way they have any plausible deniability, so she had to get swept up as well.
Redistricting is not an issue because Democrats had complete control of the legislature for the past 60 years. It’s only in the last decade that Republicans were able to gain control. We certainly have areas that vote Republican and Democrat. The I-79 corridor votes predominantly Democrat. Morgantown is certainly Democrat. If you were to chunk Morgantown into three districts balanced with rural areas, you could crush a Democratic stronghold quite easily.
Why does Workman need saved? She is the one who spent the least on her office renovations. Slightly more than 100 thousand. She’s the least guilty of all of them and I’m not even really sure that a 100 thousand dollar renovation is even egregious. Her biggest ticket item was an 8000 dollar sofa which is pretty much in line with what you’d expect a large commercial sofa to cost.
Now there is question of whether Jenkins is eligible to be on the Supreme Court. He received his law license in 1988 and practice until 2000 when his license went on inactive status. He reinstated his law license a few weeks ago. The WV Constitution says:
So two questions arise:
Jenkins was appointed and not elected. This is like the semi-annual question we have here about whether a twice elected president can be VP and then succeed to office that way.
Is the ten year requirement a “ten years immediately prior”?
In any event, I fail to see how someone who has not practiced law for nearly twenty years should serve on the state’s highest court. Justice really screwed up with both picks, IMHO, not because of the people involved, but because it feeds into the narrative that this is a court packing scheme.