Anyone wondering if laws were broken, keep reading:
“If Justice Thomas received free travel on private planes and yachts, failure to report the gifts is a violation of the disclosure law,” said Kedric Payne, senior director for ethics at the nonprofit government watchdog Campaign Legal Center. (Thomas himself once reported receiving a private jet trip from Crow, on his disclosure for 1997.)
Mostly, laws and regulations make sense and you can't evade consequences by claiming gifts are "hospitality." And you don't have to be impeached to be prosecuted.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
> unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon
And I do think it gratifies intellectual curiosity to see how the behavior is defended. But I will readily admit that the discussions don't always pan out.
Ugh. Between this and Gini Thomas activism, there really needs to be judicial reform at the SCOTUS level. As it stands today, there is effectively no recourse for Justices who misbehave. They aren't bound by the ethics rules that apply to lower courts. And impeachment is effectively a non-starter in today's political climate (requires supermajority of Senate to remove from office). So Thomas can take all the bribes he wants without fear of penalty.
He broke the law. It's not complicated. Impeachment is not the only recourse. Nothing prevents a DoJ or IRS investigation. It is not uncommon for journalists to be the first to uncover corruption.
How is noting that Justice Thomas took bribes from a conservative billionaire "politicizing" the Court? In any other branch of government and any other court with the federal judicial branch, he would at minimum be required to disclose those gifts. In most positions, he would be removed from service for receiving them.
How is noting that Justice Thomas is married to a conservative activist "politicizing" the Court?
I'm not arguing Justices's spouses shouldn't work. But, conflicts of interest should be disclosed and the Justice should be required to recuse themselves when potential conflicts arise. And Thomas sitting on cases that involve issues in which his wife is active or receiving payments for services is a MASSIVE conflict.
Of the Justices, Thomas and his wife are unique in the level of potential conflicts.
>In any other branch of government and any other court with the federal judicial branch, he would at minimum be required to disclose those gifts.
I believe that SCOTUS justices are also required to do these disclosures, FTA:
>His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said.
If you have any evidence that Justice Thomas has changed any of his judicial decisions based on the opinions of his wife or fishing buddy, then you can present it at an impeachment hearing, assuming you can get enough of the house to agree to hold one. That's the constitutional mechanism for ensuring accountability of the judiciary. By design, it's not easy to remove him from the court at the whims of this year's congressional makeup. But it's possible.
It's also not clear why you're listing the positions of the spouses of the justices. Is the Supreme Court the Supreme Clergy now? Are you implying that justices can't be married? Should we be interrogating their spouses as part of their confirmation hearings? Do you want to subpoena Mrs Alito for her texts to see what she says about gun regulation after school shootings?
Noticing Clarence's corrupt behavior is not politicizing anything. "Please stop noticing that a SCOTUS justice fails to recuse himself regarding an insurrection his wife assisted with."
> Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.
> Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.
This is not very surprising. The only thing surprising is this information made it out to the public.
The super-rich (billionaires and multi-millionaires) have been working on slowly eroding and corrupting any government institution that stands in the way of them making more money. Their success rate has been pretty good I think.
Sotomayor owns shares of a BlackRock investment fund (MDLOX), which itself is boring AF and invests in domestic and foreign bonds and it looks like large cap global companies. Her whole portfolio is deeply boring and looks like someone wealthy enough to just park their money in safe dividend-earning instruments and broad-market ETFs along with having one rental property. There's actually nothing to see there, although the substring search for "BlackRock" will cause some 20 year olds who don't understand investment to freak out on reddit.
(I just wildly guessed that you were making insinuations about Sotomayor and haven't checked the other ones out)
Kavanaugh only lists 2 investments (highly suspect), while Amy Coney Barrett lists 136 (8 pages!!!) of investments, including Black Rock Strategic Income Opportunities.
It's not relevant or insightful unless you and your buddies have a shared conflict of interest, and are influential in public life. This is corruption at the highest level.
This _should_ result in impeachment, but I doubt it will. The right tends to close ranks, dissemble, engage in whataboutism, or just simply ignore ethics violations on their side.
I'm sure if there was an impeachment proceeding it'd be a straight party vote.
Every time Trump blatantly violates the law and brags about it, Republicans rally and say that pursuit of justice is "political." While it's true that there are criminals on both sides of the aisle, they should all be under scrutiny. But the Republican party is especially blatant in their disregard for the rule of law, to the point of censuring members in favor of investigating and prosecuting obvious and well-documented violations. Will we see anything different for Thomas here? I seriously doubt it.
“If Justice Thomas received free travel on private planes and yachts, failure to report the gifts is a violation of the disclosure law,” said Kedric Payne, senior director for ethics at the nonprofit government watchdog Campaign Legal Center. (Thomas himself once reported receiving a private jet trip from Crow, on his disclosure for 1997.)
Mostly, laws and regulations make sense and you can't evade consequences by claiming gifts are "hospitality." And you don't have to be impeached to be prosecuted.