Clarence Thomas tuition: Why the latest revelation is the most insulting of all
This is an interesting piece done by Dahlia Lithwick. Basically taking up the history of why judges do not take gifts from commoners. Unless of course, the commoner has money and is influential. Ok, so Justice Clarence Thomas is getting a few greater than normal bucks and gifts on the side. Problem two arises in his failure to report the thousands of dollars and the generous gifts.
I told the story of being invited to the EOY Jim McMahon Chicago Bears party. Of course, I would have splurged, bought two footballs, and taken them with me to be signed. Of course, I asked my boss and he said hmmmmm, no. The point of asking was to make it public knowledge rather than sneak around. Then too as an employee the same as Clarence being an employee, my decisions resulted in the awarding of $millions in business. The results of Clarences decisions would render similar. My supplier relations were nor private and I could not get indignant if I valued my job.
As you read, you will discover Clarence believed his and his Ginni’s actions were a part of his private life not needing disclosure. Unfortunately, he wandered into the public sector with his actions. Even Harlan’s Crow’s comment of;
“Knowing how disrespectful, malicious and gossipy people can be, I have always tried to protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni.”
is BS. Clarence can not do what he did, Ginni can not accept money, and Harlan can not bribe a federal Judge. Read Dalia’s article. It gets right to the point.
Clarence Thomas tuition: Why the latest revelation is the most insulting of all, slate.com, Dalia Lithwick
In 1969, Justice Abe Fortas resigned his seat at the Supreme Court for accepting $15,000 in exchange for a series of paid lectures at American University. Part of the Fortas scandal also involved news of him accepting a stipend for doing legal work for a very rich friend (money he had actually returned when the benefactor was indicted and before the outcry).
None of Fortas’ colleagues defended him for this. No one blamed the press or even the Nixon administration (which very much orchestrated the ouster). It was widely understood Fortas had done something undermining the public legitimacy and independence of the court and he had to go.
Over the past few weeks we have learned that Justice Clarence Thomas took multiple luxury vacations, valued in millions of dollars, over many years, paid for by Harlan Crow, a billionaire GOP donor who has business before the court. We know Crow had also contributed the $500,000 seed money that became Ginni Thomas’ Liberty Central, which paid her salary. We also know Crow purchased the home in which Thomas’ mother currently resides rent-free. And late last week, we learned that Crow paid years’ worth of private school tuition for Thomas’ grandnephew, Mark Martin, of whom Thomas had legal custody and whom Thomas was, as he put it, “raising as a son.” Thomas knew that such gifts needed to be disclosed because he did so with another tuition payment gifted to Martin in 2002. But he did not report the tuition Crow paid.
In 1969, Justice Abe Fortas resigned his seat at the Supreme Court for accepting $15,000 in exchange for a series of paid lectures at American University. Part of the Fortas scandal also involved news of him accepting a stipend for doing legal work for a very rich friend (money he had actually returned when the benefactor was indicted and before the outcry).
None of Fortas’ colleagues defended him for this. No one blamed the press or even the Nixon administration (which very much orchestrated the ouster). It was widely understood that Fortas had done something that undermined the public legitimacy and independence of the court and that he had to go.
Over the past few weeks we have learned that Justice Clarence Thomas took multiple luxury vacations, valued in millions of dollars, over many years, paid for by Harlan Crow, a billionaire GOP donor who has business before the court. We know that Crow had also contributed the $500,000 seed money that became Ginni Thomas’ Liberty Central, which paid her salary. We also know that Crow purchased the home in which Thomas’ mother currently resides rent-free. And late last week, we learned that Crow paid years’ worth of private school tuition for Thomas’ grandnephew, Mark Martin, of whom Thomas had legal custody and whom Thomas was, as he put it, “raising as a son.” Thomas knew that such gifts needed to be disclosed because he did so with another tuition payment gifted to Martin in 2002. But he did not report the tuition Crow paid.
Last Thursday, we also learned that in January 2012, Leonard Leo arranged to have Ginni Thomas paid $25,000 for consulting work through Kellyanne Conway’s polling company. The funds came from the Judicial Education Project, a dark money group that listed its address as a UPS Store in Georgetown. Leo’s instruction to Conway asked her to funnel the cash to Ginni, and took care to note that the paperwork should have;
“No mention of Ginni, of course.”
A few short months later, the Judicial Education Project filed an amicus brief in Shelby County v. Holder, arguing for the dismantlement of the Voting Rights Act. Shelby County was a 5–4 decision, with Thomas in the majority.
The insult-comic response to all these revelations has been some sighing version of:
“I sure wish I had friends like Harlan Crow” and “I sure wish I had friends like Leonard Leo.”
The problem is, most of the justices, and certainly most politicians and judges and people of generalized fanciness, already do have friends like Harlan Crow. American governance is so inextricably bound up with capitalism and cronyism that the shocker would in fact be if justices didn’t have a few friends who were the sort of wealthy political operatives who could buy them a pony or two on demand.
Which means that the difference is not that there aren’t other Harlan Crows out there—surely there are. The difference is that most politicians and judges don’t take millions of dollars of gifts and air travel and luxury vacations and rent-free housing and tuition payments from those friends. To the extent that they do, they disclose them. The problem with Thomas is not that wealthy donors to institutions and organizations with interests at the court all want to be his friend. The problem with Thomas is that he thinks that every single aspect of his life is private and that any scrutiny of these “private” affairs is an intrusion. Indeed, Leo swiftly defended his “No mention of Ginni, of course” comment with a statement:
“Knowing how disrespectful, malicious and gossipy people can be, I have always tried to protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni.”
So that—right there—is the problem. It’s not that Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo aren’t free to pick who their friends are. It’s that they happened to be in charge of spending a ton of money to use the courts to restructure democracy, and they deliberately picked the friends who would help them do it. The problem is that everyone seems to have acceded to an arrangement in which those millionaire donors get to give stuff to their “friends,” and that this ought to be a secret, because otherwise it would compromise their privacy. If you are a justice, you have to disclose this kind of stuff. If that bothers you—if you are so committed to living a private life beyond the reach of disclosure—you can go be a urologist or something.
Which is why the real answer to why you don’t get to have rich friends like Harlan Crow is not that Harlan Crow wouldn’t like you if he knew you. He probably would. It’s just that Harlan Crow doesn’t want or need to know you. His claim that he met Thomas and found himself “sympatico” has less to do with the nature of private friendship than with the nature of public power.
And the way power currently works in this country is that you get to buy it.
If you don’t see the straight line between Citizens United, Leonard Leo, Shelby County, and the concerted effort to take power from regular you and give it to Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo, you are not seeing the plan clearly.
There’s also something specifically infuriating about the way defenders of the deep spiritual kinship between Harlan Crow and Clarence and Ginni Thomas root their argument in the fact that paying for an at-risk youth’s private school tuition is a noble act—“charity” even. The problem with that is, this is a conservative legal movement that is racing to subvert voting, public education, the administrative state, and (at present) the possibility of student loan forgiveness. So Harlan Crow’s replacement of an entire New Deal safety net with an ad hoc charitable benefits system administered by himself and directed only at the offspring of personal friends is specifically infuriating. Because the kids who receive the generosity of the Crow’s private charity are not yours, and the kids who receive the protections of EPA regulation are not yours, and the kids who receive the benefits of going to schools where nobody will shoot them are not yours.
The beauty of Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow is that they always get to determine who benefits—and guess what? Unless and until you are related to a sitting Supreme Court justice: It will be not you.
The lesson we are learning from the new scandals at the high court go way beyond “ethics” reform. This is no longer an ethics problem. This is a democracy reform problem, and it signals first and foremost an effort to deform democracy to serve the Harlan Crows and the Leonard Leos of the world. It also signals a view of democracy in which they will determine whose private life is private and who are the “gossips.” (You may still know them as “journalists.”)
Indeed, that’s the latest defense that Thomas’ allies have cooked up:
His wealthy pals had to funnel the cash and lavish gifts to him and his wife in secret, because if they had done it publicly, or disclosed it, regular people would cruelly intrude upon their cherished privacy with the unspeakable horror of public criticism. (Leo raised this exact argument to explain why he concealed the payment to Ginni, which is akin to a crooked lobbyist saying he had to bribe a congressman in secret, because if people found out, they might tarnish his reputation.)
And if there’s one thing we know about Thomas, it’s that he views public criticism (at least of himself) as a profound evil to be avoided at all costs. Bending disclosure rules is, to his mind, perpetually justified by the desire to shield his good name from any scoundrels who would dare speak ill of him. Whether or not he’s adhering to the law is, at most, an afterthought.
It would be painful in the extreme to have to confront the fact that your closest, dearest friendships are sometimes in fact almost wholly transactional. But that is not the issue that is up for debate just now. What is up for debate is whether justices exist in a sphere of privacy so impenetrable that neither disclosure rules, nor corruption concerns, nor journalism, nor accountability of any kind may intrude. That is the world Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo have been building for themselves. Let me assure you, it is not a world that will admit you. They don’t actually need friends like you. You and your kids are on your own.
“Successful people have successful friends,” Angry Bear, run75441
There’s a podcast from the NY Times which suggests that Supreme Court Justices should just be paid a lot more (a meeellion dollars?), so that they don’t need to scrounge for donations, as apparently some have been doing.
Current pay:
Chief Justice, Supreme Court $298,500
Associate Justices, Supreme Court $285,400
Looks to be about the same as an Ivy League professor. Ivy League president make more, but I bet they work harder.
Hewlett and Packard had life-time tenure (had they so chosen). The longest CEO since John Young (who they installed) lasted 6 years.
If Thomas and Crow are such good friends, why can’t they enjoy each others’ company without Thomas receiving money in the process? It is possible for two families to go on vacation together without one paying all the bills. The fact that Crow is a billionaire and Thomas a SCOTUS justice should make it even more important to make sure there is no hint of impropriety. Should have, but obviously didn’t.
I doubt that very many private yacht owners ask their guests to pay a share of the costs. Thomas also has lots of free time, so finding time to vacation might be easier. Be unhappy about the reporting and the issues where money actually changed hands.
Seems obvious that Justice Thomas has never gotten over his contentious nomination hearings with the Senate, although Joe Biden (committee chair) made them work for him, and Ted Kennedy gave him a pass (due to his own troubles with women.) At least Thomas didn’t get Borked.
Anita Hill Started A Conversation
NPR – September 28, 2021
In 1991, attorney Anita Hill testified that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her when he was chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and she worked there as an adviser to him.
Hill’s testimony was unlike anything heard before at a Supreme Court nominee hearing. A committee of 14 white men, chaired by then Sen. Joe Biden, grilled her in a televised live hearing.
The Senate ultimately confirmed Thomas’ nomination in a 52-48 vote, and Hill went home to a new life, condemned by many and facing death threats. Nevertheless, she has no regrets about stepping forward.
“I had important information about an individual who was picked to sit for a lifetime appointment on our country’s highest court,” she says. “It was not just a professional duty as a lawyer, but I believed it was my ethical responsibility to come forward in the best way and the most effective way that I could — and that’s what I did.” …
Remember Abe Fortas? Oh, yeah; that’s right; he was a Democrat.
(Abe Fortas was by some accounts a brilliant lawyer (and also a close associate of LBJ,) who was removed from the Supreme Court by Dick Nixon and AG John Mitchell.)
Wikipedia: Abraham Fortas was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1965 to 1969. Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Fortas graduated from Rhodes College and Yale Law School. He later became a law professor at Yale Law School and then an advisor for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Fortas worked at the Department of the Interior under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and was appointed by President Harry S. Truman to delegations that helped set up the United Nations in 1945.
In 1948, Fortas represented Lyndon B. Johnson in the hotly contested Democratic senatorial second primary electoral dispute, and he formed close ties with the president-to-be. … Nominated by Johnson to the Supreme Court in 1965, Fortas was confirmed by the Senate, and maintained a close working relationship with the president. As a Justice, Fortas wrote several notable majority opinions including Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District.
In 1968, Johnson tried to elevate Fortas to the position of chief justice of the Supreme Court, but that nomination faced a filibuster and was withdrawn. Fortas later resigned from the Court after a controversy involving his acceptance of $20,000 from financier Louis Wolfson while Wolfson was being investigated for insider trading. The Justice Department investigated Fortas at the behest of President Richard Nixon, who saw the idea of replacing Fortas as a chance to move the Court in a more conservative direction. Attorney General John N. Mitchell pressured Fortas into resigning. After retirement, Fortas returned to private practice, sometimes appearing before the justices with whom he had served. …