With this Supreme Court everything is about politics.
Newsflash: Justice Clarence Thomas finally learns how to recuse himself at age 75.
Seems like the bigger piece here is that he clerked for Thomas. Nothing to do with the Trump stuff
I think it’s still surprising he recused himself regardless of why, he’s never cared about ethics before and his attitude has always been “so? What are you going to do about it?” every other time there was a conflict of interest.
More info on John Eastman from a 2022 NPR article.
Eastman has a long background in conservative law, having clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in the late 1990s and was a chairman in the Federalist Society. He worked at a law firm in California before leaving to teach at Chapman University, where he also served as dean, but left shortly after addressing the “Save America” rally before the attack on the Capitol.
I’m not willing to give Thomas credit for even this. Eastman’s appeal was never going anywhere, with or without Thomas. He recused himself on what is fundamentally an uncontroversial case. He gets a little political reprieve for pretending to have suddenly discovered ethics, but nothing was on the line. There’s not a chance he’d recuse himself if his vote had any chance of undermining democracy or human rights.
More like shamed and pressured into doing the right thing. If this was a month ago he would not have recused.
I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a sense of shame, and does not care at all about external pressure. He is a Supreme Court justice for the rest of his life. Nobody, not even the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, can do anything to him in a punitive sense. The USSC will never do anything to limit its own power or those of its justices.
Congress could impeach him and throw him out of office. Will it happen? Probably not since you would need 67 senators to vote to convict and that chamber is evenly divided at the moment. But they do have the power.
One of our two political parties has fully abandoned any semblance of good faith negotiation, objectivity, or bipartisanship. As a result:
- if a shitty judge is Democratic, there’s a chance they could actually be impeached and removed from office, as the impeachment mechanism is intended to allow.
- if a shitty judge is Republican, there is zero chance that they could actually be impeached and removed from office, because absolutely zero republicans would vote for the judge’s removal.
This is the game we’re forced to play. I’m getting pretty fucking sick of the blatant double standards.
I’m just surprised he proactively recused himself from literally anything.
