ProPublica released a new report on Friday detailing Justice Clarence Thomas’ close relationship with the Koch brothers with previously undisclosed and extraordinarily damning new details.
According to ProPublica, the justice developed a friendship with the Kochs as they were funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into right-wing causes, many of which ended up before the Supreme Court. The brothers then used Thomas to raise money for their sprawling network, inviting him to speak at “donor events” that brought in millions of dollars.
He disclosed none of these activities on his annual disclosure forms, an obvious violation of federal ethics law.
It literally doesn’t matter. The republicans don’t care and they’ve gerrymandered control away from the democrats so it can’t change.
Even if democrats had control it would just be more of the same bullshit with some sugar coated feel good nonsense that still funnels wealth to the real owners of the country while appearing to make a difference.
What do you do with the democratic process when the same people control the judges, the legislative branch, and the executive branch? The answer is nothing. You just continue on getting f’d like the cows we all are.
This is not a nation of the people, it’s a nation of the owners.
What do you do with the democratic process
There’s more than one way to run a democracy, and more than one way to tally votes; it just so happens that the way we’re currently doing it —First Past The Post Voting— is utter shit; it’s the lynchpin of the two party system and systemic corruption.
If we commit grassroots focus to electoral reforms in favor of Ranked Choice Voting then all these insidious actors will find power to be much more slippery.
You people make it sound like Thomas is somehow responsible for the slew of right-wing decisions of the court and not the fact that trump got 3 judges in there
They are both problems, but if blatant corruption concerns you less than which way they naturally lean, you might be a partisan moron.
The republicans aren’t calling for him to step down so this is partisan politics, not an actual call for ethics reform.
That is because one party at least tries to be ethical most of the time and the other doesn’t even have the courtesy to pretend. Ethics shouldn’t be a party issue but here we are.
And Trump should have been removed when he was impeached.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/13/politics/mitch-mcconnell-acquit-trump/index.html
Clarence Thomas has been a skeevy moron for a loooong time. Of course Trump’s three appointments are why certain cases are getting pushed to SCOTUS, and why they’re being ruled on the way they are, and I don’t think anyone is trying to put that on Thomas alone.
The court has shifted hard right, and Thomas is corrupt.
Did I say he wasn’t? The fact that he’s being targeted alone is the issue I have, there’s 0 articles posted here talking about any other judge
I’ve seen Alito come up a time or two, especially in the context of his insistence that there are no checks on the judicial branch. But he’s been in some comprimising ethical situations like Thomas has, too.
People are only able to post here about news that is reported. The dominos are falling fast on Thomas. I’d bet that there is some kind of investigation already going on into Thomas’ and other SCOTUS justices around unethical payments, and that so much is being discovered about Thomas that the presumed investigation will become public quite soon. The other justices? Maybe they’re being looked at very closely, too, but their dominos aren’t falling as fast.
We don’t know exactly why so many details about Thomas’ receiving payments under the table are reaching the media to be reported on, but somebody is digging, and they’re digging like it’s their job, because it very likely is. There’s a lot that is not publicly known, so quit acting like randos on the internet should be posting news stories that don’t exist. Or if they do exist, post them your fucking self.
Oh shit, do you have evidence of other justices engaging in a similar level of corruption?? I’m very interested to see any articles or evidence you have to that effect.
Otherwise engage with the topic at hand, which is Thomas and the Koch brothers.
it’s almost like having appointed supreme court judges without term limits is a colossally bad idea
Like many things, the core concept was good for the time… To try to insulate the court from unstable politics and presidential whims, in the interests of a stable legal system that doesnt have to be afraid of being replaced when they displease the president.
its just no one had the foresight to see that one side would betray the country 200 years in the future and turn the court into a corrupt, bought and paid for factory from which the undermining and destruction of democracy could be launched.
The Supreme Court was thrown into chaos because republicans refused to appoint any justices under Obama (Edit. I neglected to specify in his last year, Thanks to the next poster for pointing that out), This giving them more than enough picks under their guy to permanantly damage the court and skew it forever in their favor short of radical action.
The Supreme Court was thrown into chaos because republicans refused to appoint any justices under Obama
Now, now, Obama DID get Sotomayor and Kagan. McConnell only blocked Merrick Garland.
That being said, in my lifetime, Democratic Presidents have only put FIVE members on the court, Republicans got 15. Carter is the one who drew a blank.
Nixon/Ford got as many in their two terms as all the Democrats since then COMBINED.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/members_text.aspx
Ginsburg, Ruth Bader - Clinton
Breyer, Stephen G. - Clinton
Sotomayor, Sonia - Obama
Kagan, Elena - Obama
Jackson, Ketanji Brown - Biden
Burger, Warren Earl - Nixon
Blackmun, Harry A. - Nixon
Powell, Lewis F., Jr. - Nixon
Rehnquist, William H. - Nixon
Stevens, John Paul - Ford
O’Connor, Sandra Day - Reagan
Scalia, Antonin - Reagan
Kennedy, Anthony M. - Reagan
Souter, David H. - Bush, G. H. W.
Thomas, Clarence - Bush, G. H. W.
Roberts, John G., Jr. - Bush, G. W.
Alito, Samuel A., Jr. - Bush, G. W.
Gorsuch, Neil M. - Trump
Kavanaugh, Brett M. - Trump
Barrett, Amy Coney - Trump
I don’t think “in his last year” matters. That’s some calvinball nonsense McConnell pulled out of his ass to justify grinding the function of his branch of government to a halt and everyone just… went along with it. The year isn’t what mattered, what mattered was that Obama was a black Democratic president and McConnell thought he could get away with it.
A lot of the shit Thomas has slipped into his writing over the years has been used to justify the worst parts of the recent terms.
Thomas is the most right-wing of the current justices, so much so that he has actually (partially) dissented when the other right-wingers don’t go far enough for his tastes.
One of the others will write something, and he’ll come in with a concurrence and try to take it so much further, and he does it every single time he’s not given the majority opinion.
If he’s the deciding vote, which he was on Citizen’s United IIRC, then yes, he’s got a LOT to answer for because apparently he should have been recusing himself on quite a number of cases where he basically voted the way he’d been paid too.
Banana republic
I’ve seen this term thrown around on Lemmy in different contexts, so I looked it up and the wikipedia page gives a very specific definition of that term relating to a type of economic situation. I don’t think that particular definition applies in this case, or does it?
It’s less the economic definition than it is this:
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/banana-republic
noun - Usually Disparaging.
-
a small, poor country, often reliant on a single export or limited resource, governed by an authoritarian regime and characterized by corruption and economic exploitation by foreign corporations conspiring with local government officials.
-
any exploitative government that functions poorly for its citizenry while disproportionately benefiting a corrupt elite group or individual.
Of course, none of this actually matters in the slightest unless those ethics violations have consequences.
We need to look forward to 2024, take back the House and get a 60 vote majority in the Senate, along with the White House…maybe then, things will change.
I don’t see any scenario where Democrats take 60 seats in the Senate. The states have polarized so much, and the system favors the Republican states too much.
Unlike the House, Senate races are state wide and can’t be gerrymandered.
It’s going to take a major effort focused on reforming the Supreme Court to flip those seats, but looking at 2020, we flipped BOTH seats in Georgia which is about as red as it gets.
That’s true. We just have to work on getting through the disenfranchisment.
