SCOTUS - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

[LFC]

And now Roberts is caught up in a conflict of interest scandal. Yeah, if you're wife suddenly changed careers and pulled down $10.3M as a recruiter just two years after you were named Chief Justice, that's something that people should know if one of these firms appears before your court. No wonder he didn't want to talk to Congress.

Two years after John Roberts' confirmation as the Supreme Court's chief justice in 2005, his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, made a pivot. After a long and distinguished career as a lawyer, she refashioned herself as a legal recruiter, a matchmaker who pairs job-hunting lawyers up with corporations and firms.

Roberts told a friend that the change was motivated by a desire to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest, given that her husband was now the highest-ranking judge in the country. "There are many paths to the good life," she said. "There are so many things to do if you're open to change and opportunity."

And life was indeed good for the Robertses, at least for the years 2007 to 2014. During that eight-year stretch, according to internal records from her employer, Jane Roberts generated a whopping $10.3 million in commissions, paid out by corporations and law firms for placing high-dollar lawyers with them.

That eye-popping figure comes from records in a whistleblower complaint filed by a disgruntled former colleague of Roberts, who says that as the spouse of the most powerful judge in the United States, the income she earns from law firms who practice before the Court should be subject to public scrutiny.

"When I found out that the spouse of the chief justice was soliciting business from law firms, I knew immediately that it was wrong," the whistleblower, Kendal B. Price, who worked alongside Jane Roberts at the legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa, told Insider in an interview. "During the time I was there, I was discouraged from ever raising the issue. And I realized that even the law firms who were Jane's clients had nowhere to go. They were being asked by the spouse of the chief justice for business worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there was no one to complain to. Most of these firms were likely appearing or seeking to appear before the Supreme Court. It's natural that they'd do anything they felt was necessary to be competitive."

Roberts' apparent $10.3 million in compensation puts her toward the top of the payscale for legal headhunters. Price's disclosures, which were filed under federal whistleblower-protection laws and are now in the hands of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, add to the mounting questions about how Supreme Court justices and their families financially benefit from their special status, an area that Senate Democrats are vowing to investigate after a series of disclosure lapses by the justices themselves.

Sure, it might have been above board and she raked in all that big, fat cash independently of her hubby's position but that's something that should have been disclosed. AOC is thinking the same.

[LFC]

May she burn in hell (when she finally dies) for what she did.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor provided the early framework that steered the outcome in the dispute over the 2000 presidential election and ensured George W. Bush would win the White House over Al Gore, Supreme Court documents released on Tuesday show.

Memos found in the newly opened files of the late Justice John Paul Stevens offer a first-ever view of the behind-the-scenes negotiations on Bush v. Gore at the court. They also demonstrate the tension among the nine justices being asked to decide a presidential election on short deadlines.

The documents opened at the Library of Congress help reveal how the now-retired O’Connor, the first woman on the high court and a justice steeped in politics from her early days in the Arizona legislature, partnered with Justice Anthony Kennedy, effectively squeezing out an argument advanced by then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

The strong hand of O’Connor, who was at the ideological center of the court in this era, is not wholly surprising. O’Connor was also known for trying to get out ahead of deliberations, and her four-page memo was circulated to colleagues even before oral arguments. Her move may have guaranteed that she and Kennedy had the greatest influence on the final “per curiam” opinion that spoke for a five-justice majority.

That final 5-4 Bush v. Gore decision stopped county recounts for Florida’s decisive presidential electors and gave then-Texas Gov. Bush the victory over then-Vice President Gore.

The five conservative justices (O’Connor, Kennedy, Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas) sided with Bush. The four liberal justices (Stevens, with David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer) aligned with Gore and dissented angrily.

For me this was the day that right-wing SCOTUS lost any fig leaf of credibility. Congratulations, Sandra. You will go down in history as one of the early architects of American fascism.

[LFC]

Josh Marshall sums up SCOTUS, especially Alito.

The fact that one or more of the Supreme Court Justices appear to be venally corrupt in a rather fulsome fashion is a new addition to the story of the early 21st century. But the heart of it remains this: The current corrupt majority wants to wholly remake American law with little attention to precedent or any coherent jurisprudence or theory of interpreting the constitution. They’ve got the power and they’re going to use it. If you don’t like it, too bad. Yet they also want the deference and respect accorded to thoroughly apolitical players guided by restraint and an approach to the work that is more than dressing up their own policy aims with whatever theory serves the needs of the moment.

It’s this disconnect that underlies everything we’re seeing today: the “sucks to be you” jurisprudence matched with the “don’t you see this robe!” umbrage and entitlement we see on constant display. It’s richer than pure hypocrisy. In Alito’s on-going “stop criticizing me” tour he clearly takes genuine offense that people don’t get what the robe means and aren’t acting accordingly. Look at it on the bright side. It seems to cause him some real, if absurd, anguish.

They really can do almost anything they want. They are. They just can’t have it both ways no matter how much they demand it. The new revelations of sweetheart deals and billionaire gifting stems from the same arrogance and corruption at the heart of the Federalist Society project.

[LFC]

Right-wing partisan hack SCOTUS is now seen for exactly what it is.

Forty-seven percent of U.S. adults say they have "a great deal" or "a fair amount" of trust in the judicial branch of the federal government that is headed by the Supreme Court. This represents a 20-percentage-point drop from two years ago, including seven points since last year, and is now the lowest in Gallup's trend by six points. The judicial branch's current tarnished image contrasts with trust levels exceeding two-thirds in most years in Gallup's trend that began in 1972.

A Marquette poll last year had it even lower. This is not a product of American politics. They earned this.

[LFC]

TAC fluffs Alito. Get a whiff of this steaming pile of bullshit.

With all due respect to the justice, who shows in the clarity and carefulness of his remarks why he sits on the Supreme Court, he appears to be under a grave misapprehension about where we find ourselves in the march of progress. Alito has done his country a great service by rightly demonstrating that Roe and Casey are bad decisions, “egregiously wrong,” as he put it to the WSJ. But that judgment is made within the frame of a constitutional order that derives its public legitimacy from its function as a tool, a neutral technology, for arriving at certain ends. The ends are contested, but the legal structure and procedures are taken as normative, a shared mechanical device for the playing of a game called politics. Outrage at the Dobbs draft leak, at protests outside justices’ homes, at the questioning of the Court’s status as legitimate—that is to say, as neutral, or at least depoliticized—comes from these norms.

[LFC]

Thomas, again. Apparently keeping track of all those little gifts, like somebody buying you a Starbucks, covering the tip at dinner, and

In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”

Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.

The payments extended beyond that month, according to Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at the school. Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year, Grimwood told ProPublica.

“Harlan picked up the tab,” said Grimwood, who got to know Crow and the Thomases and had access to school financial information through his work as an administrator.

There's reporting that it may have been two years which would amount to a nearly $150,000 gift ... between close, personal friends.

[indy]

Imagine paying the entire tab to go on a trip with Thomas and his wife? It seems like it would be like paying to be tortured.

[LFC]

Both sides desperation from the Republicans.

[goldenvalley]

May 4, 2023 19:33:36 GMT LFC said:

Both sides desperation from the Republicans.

Writing a book in return for money from a publisher is just exactly like taking a half million dollar vacation on some rich dude's dime.  Sure.

[LFC]

May 4, 2023 20:52:06 GMT goldenvalley said:

May 4, 2023 19:33:36 GMT LFC said:

Both sides desperation from the Republicans.

Writing a book in return for money from a publisher is just exactly like taking a half million dollar vacation on some rich dude's dime.  Sure.

You mean taking multiple vacations up to a half million at a time and not disclosing it. Or having a kid's $6,000/month tuition paid and not disclosing it. Or having a house you own purchased, with lifetime resident rights for your mother, and not disclosing it. Or having your wife get hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby against the ACA that you'll be ruling on and not disclosing it. Or selling your property to a high-end lawyer whose firm will have court business days after you get on the bench and not disclosing who that is. Or having your wife change careers shortly after you become chief justice to a position that allows her to leverage that face and not disclosing it.

As for conflicts of interest, Antonin Scalia also got free (to him) expensive vacations hunting with Dick Cheney, but said it posed no conflict of interest when he had to make rulings that impacted his personal friend.

But yeah, same thing.

[AnBr]

Newly discovered documents track the beginnings of the Supreme Court's illegitimacy.

www.cnn.com/2023/05/02/politics/bush-gore-oconnor-supreme-court-2000/index.html

(CNN) — Justice Sandra Day O’Connor provided the early framework that steered the outcome in the dispute over the 2000 presidential election and ensured George W. Bush would win the White House over Al Gore, Supreme Court documents released on Tuesday show.

Memos found in the newly opened files of the late Justice John Paul Stevens offer a first-ever view of the behind-the-scenes negotiations on Bush v. Gore at the court. They also demonstrate the tension among the nine justices being asked to decide a presidential election on short deadlines.

The documents opened at the Library of Congress help reveal how the now-retired O’Connor, the first woman on the high court and a justice steeped in politics from her early days in the Arizona legislature, partnered with Justice Anthony Kennedy, effectively squeezing out an argument advanced by then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

The strong hand of O’Connor, who was at the ideological center of the court in this era, is not wholly surprising. O’Connor was also known for trying to get out ahead of deliberations, and her four-page memo was circulated to colleagues even before oral arguments. Her move may have guaranteed that she and Kennedy had the greatest influence on the final “per curiam” opinion that spoke for a five-justice majority.

That final 5-4 Bush v. Gore decision stopped county recounts for Florida’s decisive presidential electors and gave then-Texas Gov. Bush the victory over then-Vice President Gore.

The five conservative justices (O’Connor, Kennedy, Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas) sided with Bush. The four liberal justices (Stevens, with David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer) aligned with Gore and dissented angrily.

[LFC]

May 4, 2023 23:29:55 GMT AnBr said:

Newly discovered documents track the beginnings of the Supreme Court's illegitimacy.

talkradiosucks.proboards.com/post/22124/thread

[LFC]

The Chairman of the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo, directed payments to Virginia Thomas be made to a non-profit and her name kept off of it. We're talking another $80,000. Gawd, these people are totally corrupt shitbags and Thomas can't be touched other than through impeachment. It's a better racket than Trump had as president.

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.

Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

Conway’s firm, the Polling Company, sent the Judicial Education Project a $25,000 bill that day. Per Leo’s instructions, it listed the purpose as “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting,” the documents show.

In all, according to the documents, the Polling Company paid Thomas’s firm, Liberty Consulting, $80,000 between June 2011 and June 2012, and it expected to pay $20,000 more before the end of 2012. The documents reviewed by The Post do not indicate the precise nature of any work Thomas did for the Judicial Education Project or the Polling Company.

The arrangement reveals that Leo, a longtime Federalist Society leader and friend of the Thomases, has functioned not only as an ideological ally of Clarence Thomas’s but also has worked to provide financial remuneration to his family. And it shows Leo arranging for the money to be drawn from a nonprofit that soon would have an interest before the court.

[LFC]

[LFC]

[LFC]

Yep, it's clearly a problem.

[goldenvalley]

I guess the appearance of impropriety doesn't matter if one is a USSC justice?  

I do wonder who else has received "hospitality" and under the table support for spouses/children/family members that we don't know about...besides Scalia who died while on a hospitality hunting trip.  

I seem to recall unsubstantiated rumors that Justice Kennedy's son who worked with Deutsche Bank was the reason the Justice resigned...but if true that's not quite the same thing as what has gone on with the Thomas family.

[pnwguy]

And now Amy is angry at her puny deal 

www.theonion.com/amy-coney-barrett-pissed-she-s-been-doing-whatever-cons-1850409448

[goldenvalley]

May 6, 2023 16:47:14 GMT pnwguy said:

And now Amy is angry at her puny deal 

www.theonion.com/amy-coney-barrett-pissed-she-s-been-doing-whatever-cons-1850409448

Love it.  

[LFC]

One big reason why our nation is so f***ed up.

[LFC]

Right-wing partisan hack SCOTUS is preparing to reinstitute Jim Crow gerrymandering. We already know that John Roberts loves that kinda' shit.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a challenge brought by South Carolina Republican officials seeking to overturn a lower court ruling requiring them to redraw their “stark racial gerrymander” of a congressional district in the state.

The First Congressional District had reliably elected a Republican for decades until Rep. Joe Cunningham (D-SC) flipped it in 2018 in an enormous upset. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) won it back in 2020, but only by about one point.

Seeking to put the seat more reliably in their column, South Carolina Republicans cut more than 30,000 Black voters from the district during the decennial redistricting that was completed last year, enabling Mace to glide to reelection in 2022 by 14 points. Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), a powerful Democratic force in the deep red state, participated in the Republican overhaul to ensure that his district would be flooded with an influx of dependable Democratic votes, according to a ProPublica report.

A lower court panel, consisting of three Democrat-appointed federal judges, found the first district to be unconstitutionally contorted to virtually guarantee Republican control.

The map drawing “ultimately exiled over 30,000 African American citizens from their previous district and created a stark racial gerrymander of Charleston County and the City of Charleston,” the panel wrote in its January decision. It ordered a redraw of the congressional district’s lines.

The Supreme Court — which has done massive, historic damage to the legal safeguards that once blocked partisan and racial gerrymanders — taking up South Carolina officials’ challenge to that order does not bode well.

[LFC]

Yes, they're not only partisan hacks but they are stupid, or at least willfully ignorant to a fault. How can you expect somebody this out of touch with reality to be a functional justice even in traffic court? Of course for Republican picks for SCOTUS, willful ignorance is a feature.

[LFC]

John Roberts proving, out loud, that he's either worthless or uninterested in cleaning up his wildly corrupt court. Note how his dishonest minions are trying to block having to follow ethics rules. There's a reason for that. So many have proven themselves to be unethical, including past justices Scalia and Kennedy.

Chief Justice John Roberts said there is more the Supreme Court can do to “adhere to the highest standards” of ethical conduct, an acknowledgment that recent reporting about the justices’ ethical missteps is having an effect on public perception of the court.

Speaking at a law dinner Tuesday where he was honored with an award, Roberts provided no specifics but said the justices “are continuing to look at the things we can do to give practical effect to that commitment.”

He said he is “confident there are ways to do that consistent with our status as an independent branch of government and the Constitution’s separation of powers.”

The court has resisted adopting an ethics code of its own, and Roberts has raised questions about whether Congress could impose a code of conduct on the court.

All nine justices recently signed a statement of ethics that Roberts provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee. His remarks Tuesday suggested he knows that statement is not enough to quiet critics.

[goldenvalley]

May 24, 2023 16:25:47 GMT LFC said:

Yes, they're not only partisan hacks but they are stupid, or at least willfully ignorant to a fault. How can you expect somebody this out of touch with reality to be a functional justice even in traffic court? Of course for Republican picks for SCOTUS, willful ignorance is a feature.

Rounding up families and sending them to concentration camps during WWII for the sin of being Japanese American is a far greater intrusion into civil liberties than what happened during a public health crisis.  And back then, no one was offering to supplement unemployment insurance, business loans, child credits etc...as was done during Covid.

[pnwguy]

May 24, 2023 16:25:47 GMT LFC said:

Yes, they're not only partisan hacks but they are stupid, or at least willfully ignorant to a fault. How can you expect somebody this out of touch with reality to be a functional justice even in traffic court? Of course for Republican picks for SCOTUS, willful ignorance is a feature.

And the over half century of chattel slavery since the Constitution was adopted?  No those civil liberty intrusions gets downgraded by 3/5ths, so the ranking is lowered, eh?

At least Gorsuch was savvy enough to say "peacetime".  Rationing, blackouts, manufacturing takeovers, and compulsory male draft service doesn't count in his eyes either.