Worst ever? Well, he's awfully bad. But he does have competition. There's Roger B (Dred Scot) Taney but I could cast a vote for James Clerk McReynolds. This is a guy who refused to sit next to Justice Brandeis because Brandeis was Jewish (he hated a whole bunch of other people, too .....) He also did the same with later Jewish justices. And there's Stephen Johnson (Plessy v. Ferguson) Field, who was also opposed to any form of government regulation whatsoever.
Agreed. Thomas is surely in the mix, and however that shakes out he's been an embarrassment to the Court and to the judiciary since before his appointment. The thing is that his written work is at best derivative (mostly of Scalia's, which is a problem all its own) and at worst just weird. My own vote for the worst ever is Scalia, whose contribution -- "originalism" (which, as far as I can tell, is the conviction that the Constitution really means whatever Scalia thinks it should mean) -- is the single most reductive development in legal interpretation since the gavel.
Consider too that for more than 20 years Thomas didn't stand out as uniquely awful. He didn't stand out at all -- the phrase "bump on a log" frequently came up in describing him. Even after he was joined on the right flank by Roberts (2005) and Alito (2006) we didn't hear much from him. Then after the election of the twice-impeached once-indicted (so far) one they were joined by Gorsuch (2017), Kavanaugh (2018), and Coney Rabbit (2020) and the reactionary apocalypse went into overdrive.
Short version: None of those candidates for "worst" would have been so terrible if they hadn't been enabled/supported by several other justices. And just thinking about all this rekindles my fury at all those purists who sat out the 2016 election out of pique.
Clarence Thomas is abhorrent, but it's hard to argue he is the single worst justice of all time. In trying to find who wrote the Dred Scott decision (Roger Taney) and Plessy v. Ferguson (Henry Billings Brown), I came across this Think Progress article, which counts Clarence Thomas as one of the five worst justices in our history. Oddly, the list does not even include Brown. https://archive.thinkprogress.org/the-five-worst-supreme-court-justices-in-american-history-ranked-f725000b59e8/
I just watched a Frontline program this past week about Clarence and Ginni Thomas's paths to power. I hadn't known much about either of them personally before that. I was struck by how much both of them have craved acceptance and respect all their lives, and have adopted the goals, principles, and world outlook of whatever group was currently giving them that acceptance and respect. Thomas as a student at Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts was a member of the Black Panthers and was very into the Black Power movement, very understandable given how much racism he experienced growing up. But he became disenchanted with the Panthers and all left-wing activities after a subset of the ~100,000 people who attended the Moratorium against the Vietnam War on the Boston Common in April 1970 (I was there with my mother) including Clarence Thomas and other Panthers marched over the Harvard Square in Cambridge and threw a violent riot. This link shows the clip about his disillusionment and has another link where you can stream the whole Frontline episode about the Thomases:
The documentary strongly suggests that both Clarence Thomas and Ginny are people who felt a big hole inside that they have always been trying to fill. Clarence thought that by going to Yale Law School he would graduate and be automatically assured of a highly paid future at a prestigious law firm. When racism prevented him from getting those jobs, he took a far less remunerative job working for Republican Senator John Danforth. Thomas began thinking about becoming a judge and set his eye on rising to the Supreme Court quite early. And he noticed that the line for a Black judge to be nominated by a Democratic president was quite long with many aspirants, while the line of Blacks who sought to be nominated by a Republican was a lot shorter. So he became a Republican. And because he has always become a fierce advocate for whatever belief system he adopted at the time, he has adopted and championed the most extreme views of the Republican Party's right wing.
A fascinating read, Elizabeth! Thanks for writing it.
A footnote: An ordained Episcopal priest who poses as a moderate, John Danforth voted with the GOP far right when he was a Senator. He mentored Josh Hawley for the Senate and repudiated him on 7 January 2021. He sponsored Clarence Thomas for SCOTUS and his loyalty to Thomas never wavered during the hearing, nor has it since.
I remember that line of thinking being out there at the time of the confirmation hearings, entwined with another one that became apparent as the hearings went on: white Democratic senators were afraid to be too critical of Thomas for fear of being called racist, because the seat being vacated by Thurgood Marshall was popularly designated "the Black seat" -- therefore, so the guilt-stricken white liberal thinking went, it would be racist to reject a Black person (i.e., man) for it. Need I say that sexism and misogyny also played a role . . .
As if anything could have deterred Thomas from playing the race card!
"And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I'm concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S.—U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree."
And hardly anyone at the time -- meaning "no one in mainstream politics or media" -- said "You're the one who's kowtowing to an old order, and it's getting you what you want, isn't it?" Because there weren't enough people of color in those positions to call BS on Mr. Grievance.
Anyone who had would have been hung out to dry. But Hill's testimony did switch at least one brave vote (may have been more—I've forgotten). Thomas's mind is so twisted taking him on is as pointless as taking on trump.
I just looked it up: The vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee on reporting the nomination favorably split 7-7 so the nomination went to the full Senate without recommendation. The vote on that was 13-1. The Senate voted to confirm 52–48, which was close considering that before the Bork nomination (1987) SCOTUS nominees were generally confirmed with near-unanimity. (The 2 Republicans voting against were Bob Packwood (OR) and Jim Jeffords (VT), who left the GOP in 2001 and became an independent who caucused with the Democrats.)
Thanks, Susanna. I was curious but too tired to deal with it. When I read those vote tallies all I can think of is Biden's role. If only he'd had Bernie then to pressure him in the right direction, where the giants of that era failed … How anyone with a conscience could have listened to Anita Hill's testimony and voted for Thomas still mystifies.
I remember reading in Sandra Day O’Conner’s Memoir she couldn’t get a job after graduating law school and she ended up as an unpaid “intern”. Women were considered unsuitable and not to be considered for a paid position.
What is so discouraging is that Thomas' reasoning is sheer insanity and doesn't make any sense. How can you reason with a Supreme Court Justice who holds himself above the law? He defies explanation.
Such a great column about the law (from a West Point graduate, yet) and the ethics-free, grievance-riddled Clarence Thomas. And he's not our only problem. Another Substacker has written about "Gorsuch's Revenge" against federal agencies.
Mr. T. writes, "Justice Thomas has decided that because there were no bans on AR-15s in 1791, there can't be any bans on that weapon of war today." Take this to its logical (well, really illogical conclusion) and we could circle back to making slavery legal ... because it once was.
Trump has proven to be The Great Destroyer, and so it follows that he will be destroyed -- but with so much damage in his wake, who will care?
If Thomas’s logic continues to prevail, why aren’t guns limited to the types and models of 1790? Why allow bullet firing guns, since bullets weren’t invented until sometime around 1840 in France? Come on, folks! Stop the cherry picking!
He's a small, petty, grievance-filled, envious monster of little ability. Any claim he has to intellectual consistency is belied by the political ramifications of his decisions. All we can do is echo Henry II, "will no one rid of us of this troublesome scourge?"
Aside from his awful decisions, this guy has serious ethical issues. In the past, a few Justices had occasional lapses. Sometimes a spouse or the Justice would get involved in a questionable transaction. These were ignored by the public. However, Justice Thomas and his wife have been fully involved in corrupt practices for years. His excuse is he did not know the law..
But any judge or constitutional scholar who claims to be an “originalist” is full of it.
Prof. Reich it would be nice to see your take on e.g. Compact Magazine, an online pseudo-intellectual cesspool of the so-called American “new right”, headed up by a chaired Harvard Law professor (Vermeule) among others. It’s a blatantly reactionary house organ for those who believe that human virtue peaked during the Roman Empire (when the Pope appointed emperors) and that everything we consider progress after that point has in fact been a downhill slide. In their view, the enduring questions of philosophy are answered by theocracy; the U.S. and Europe need to return to ‘common good’ jurisprudence as opposed to individual liberty. The ‘common good’ view accepts tribalism as a basic component of human nature. Who decides what constitutes the common good? The Church. Extraordinarily scary.
Lucian, a fine analysis of the relevant cases. My comment is slightly off-topic. I am not a Supreme Court insider. Ever since Thomas’ grifting became known to the public, I’ve wondered whether the other justices knew about these things (the lavish vacations, the tuition payments, the house for mother) as they were occurring. The Court is a very peculiar culture. Not too long ago, Justice Sotomayor talked about how well the justices get along and how much they like each other. A few months ago, now-retired Justice Breyer described Thomas as a man of “integrity.” And, of course, the Chief Justice--except for his laughable “ethics” paper--has said absolutely nothing. It may be that they simply did not know. They may have bought into Thomas’s descriptions of his RV/Walmart parking lot stories. On the other hand, they may have known about all or most of these things and concluded that Thomas’s shenanigans were not technically “illegal.” I wonder if we’ll ever know what the other justices knew and when they knew it.
This goes beyond the idiosyncrasies, biases, and predilections of individual Supreme Court justices. What we have, essentially, among justices Thomas, Gorsuch, and the Chief Justice himself, John Roberts, is a scheme to defraud the United States Government, or to put it in the language of criminal indictments, a scheme to defraud the United States of America, a violation of title 18, United States Code, section 371. At least in the cases of justices Thomas and Roberts, we have what amounts to a criminal conspiracy, but also a civil conspiracy to defraud, based upon the justices participation in cases in which their spouses have significant financial interests. Mandatory recusal of a justice, judge, or magistrate judge is required by the United States judicial Code, Title 28, section 455. In previous comment postings I have mentioned this section repeatedly as a basis for a civil action against the spouses of those justices who appear to be supinely indifferent to their statutory obligation to refrain from participating in cases in which their spouses have a significant financial interest, or which would give the appearance of a conflict of interest. In addition to Justice Thomas' willing acceptance of hospitality, gifts, favors, and financial benefits from a billionaire, Thomas' wife Ginny has been the conduit for tens of thousands of dollars associated with donors to the Federalist Society, money used to influence federal legislation, policy, and not the least, Supreme Court decisions. People who donate large sums of money expect something significant in return for their investment. Likewise, Chief Justice Roberts' wife has been reported to operate an extremely lucrative headhunting operation for the most influential law firms in the nation's capital, with consulting fees running into the millions of dollars; and her marriage to the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court would appear to be her principal asset. Many of the lawyers whom she recruited and who were eventually hired by these mega law firms appear as counsel in cases coming before the Supreme Court. This is truly a case of having friends with benefits; and who can say that one of those law firms would not have a leg up in particular cases where one of the lawyers fortunate enough to have been recruited by the Chief Justice's wife was a member of the firm. It does not matter whether the lawyer himself or herself appears on the moving papers before the court, the damage is done simply by the unlawful intrusion of financial influence; identified with the spouse but also benefiting the member of the court.
Make no mistake, this is corruption, and it is done right out in the open, just the way former President Trump did it. There is no denial; and the mantra seems to be, 'This is the way we do business.'
My proposal was simply for the government to file suit against the spouse of the justices who refuses to abide by his obligations under 18 USC 455. If there is no way to directly penalize the errant justice for refusing to abide by the statutory mandate, a civil action aimed at the errant spouse would be entirely appropriate, because it is her financial interest that gives rise to the conflict. The solution of the problem is to enforce the statute indirectly by taking away the financial incentive from the noncompliant justice and his wife as a couple, each of whom has an undivided interest in the financial interest in question. It would not matter that the couple had decided between themselves that the wife's lucrative business income would be nominally hers alone to keep, because those business arrangements themselves arise as a consequence of their marriage. The husband of the income-earning spouse continues to have an equitable interest in his wife's income; but more importantly, the mandate of the law itself cannot be flouted with impunity. The solution, then, is to disregard those inter-spouse arrangements entirely by requiring the forfeiture of the proceeds of that business. And he would not matter that the lawyers recruited by the Chief Justice's wife practice their profession in cities far distant from Washington DC. The taint that attaches to this illicit arrangement spreads to the law firms themselves, wherever they happen to be practicing. Most Supreme Court cases do not arise in the nation's capital, but law firms and their lawyers are generally permitted to practice anywhere in the United States if they fulfill certain procedural requirements, and they will typically engage local counsel within the District of Columbia who regularly practice before the court to provide the appropriate liaison with the court, and with any governmental agency that may be involved in the litigation.
I practiced law in the District of Columbia for five years as an employee of the federal government. Consequently, I know a thing or two about how things work. I'm also a nonpracticing admittee to membership in the Bar of the United States Supreme Court, from November 1973. Consequently, my sense of things would be that the Public Integrity Division of the Department of Justice is probably looking into this matter; and I can't be the only lawyer who conceived of this solution that I outlined above. What these justices are doing are demeaning the status of the Supreme Court as an impartial arbiter of justice in the cases that come before it. They demean the integrity of the United States government, and the reputations of those who work for it.
I guess I should go to a law school that can explain to me why gun fetishists like Thomas who claim to be originalists always ignore the plain language of the Second Amendment that specifically restricts guns to members of a well regulated militia. Because the only remaining militia is the National Guard, they apply reverse logic to rationalize the fact that guns were always regulated in this country until the NRA bought a political party and a majority of the Supreme Court. Does Clarence know that the gunfight at the OK Corral happened because Wyatt Earp did not allow cowboys to carry guns in Tombstone and the Clantons refused to comply?
This is so ass backwards. Until the courts decide that it is more important to protect innocent people and their children instead of whacked out gun owners, we will continue to see rising death rates.
Worst ever? Well, he's awfully bad. But he does have competition. There's Roger B (Dred Scot) Taney but I could cast a vote for James Clerk McReynolds. This is a guy who refused to sit next to Justice Brandeis because Brandeis was Jewish (he hated a whole bunch of other people, too .....) He also did the same with later Jewish justices. And there's Stephen Johnson (Plessy v. Ferguson) Field, who was also opposed to any form of government regulation whatsoever.
Agreed. Thomas is surely in the mix, and however that shakes out he's been an embarrassment to the Court and to the judiciary since before his appointment. The thing is that his written work is at best derivative (mostly of Scalia's, which is a problem all its own) and at worst just weird. My own vote for the worst ever is Scalia, whose contribution -- "originalism" (which, as far as I can tell, is the conviction that the Constitution really means whatever Scalia thinks it should mean) -- is the single most reductive development in legal interpretation since the gavel.
"Originalism" might be the most brilliant code word ever coined for "white male supremacy."
More like a “sleeper cell”, waiting for orders to make his move.
Consider too that for more than 20 years Thomas didn't stand out as uniquely awful. He didn't stand out at all -- the phrase "bump on a log" frequently came up in describing him. Even after he was joined on the right flank by Roberts (2005) and Alito (2006) we didn't hear much from him. Then after the election of the twice-impeached once-indicted (so far) one they were joined by Gorsuch (2017), Kavanaugh (2018), and Coney Rabbit (2020) and the reactionary apocalypse went into overdrive.
Short version: None of those candidates for "worst" would have been so terrible if they hadn't been enabled/supported by several other justices. And just thinking about all this rekindles my fury at all those purists who sat out the 2016 election out of pique.
We’re they corrupt as well or just hate filled people?
Taney died during the civil war so his cowardliness did nothing.
Historical perspective is the antidote to impulse buying. Our decisions need to be seen in a larger context.
Clarence Thomas is abhorrent, but it's hard to argue he is the single worst justice of all time. In trying to find who wrote the Dred Scott decision (Roger Taney) and Plessy v. Ferguson (Henry Billings Brown), I came across this Think Progress article, which counts Clarence Thomas as one of the five worst justices in our history. Oddly, the list does not even include Brown. https://archive.thinkprogress.org/the-five-worst-supreme-court-justices-in-american-history-ranked-f725000b59e8/
I just watched a Frontline program this past week about Clarence and Ginni Thomas's paths to power. I hadn't known much about either of them personally before that. I was struck by how much both of them have craved acceptance and respect all their lives, and have adopted the goals, principles, and world outlook of whatever group was currently giving them that acceptance and respect. Thomas as a student at Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts was a member of the Black Panthers and was very into the Black Power movement, very understandable given how much racism he experienced growing up. But he became disenchanted with the Panthers and all left-wing activities after a subset of the ~100,000 people who attended the Moratorium against the Vietnam War on the Boston Common in April 1970 (I was there with my mother) including Clarence Thomas and other Panthers marched over the Harvard Square in Cambridge and threw a violent riot. This link shows the clip about his disillusionment and has another link where you can stream the whole Frontline episode about the Thomases:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/clarence-thomas-black-power-movement/
The documentary strongly suggests that both Clarence Thomas and Ginny are people who felt a big hole inside that they have always been trying to fill. Clarence thought that by going to Yale Law School he would graduate and be automatically assured of a highly paid future at a prestigious law firm. When racism prevented him from getting those jobs, he took a far less remunerative job working for Republican Senator John Danforth. Thomas began thinking about becoming a judge and set his eye on rising to the Supreme Court quite early. And he noticed that the line for a Black judge to be nominated by a Democratic president was quite long with many aspirants, while the line of Blacks who sought to be nominated by a Republican was a lot shorter. So he became a Republican. And because he has always become a fierce advocate for whatever belief system he adopted at the time, he has adopted and championed the most extreme views of the Republican Party's right wing.
A fascinating read, Elizabeth! Thanks for writing it.
A footnote: An ordained Episcopal priest who poses as a moderate, John Danforth voted with the GOP far right when he was a Senator. He mentored Josh Hawley for the Senate and repudiated him on 7 January 2021. He sponsored Clarence Thomas for SCOTUS and his loyalty to Thomas never wavered during the hearing, nor has it since.
I remember that line of thinking being out there at the time of the confirmation hearings, entwined with another one that became apparent as the hearings went on: white Democratic senators were afraid to be too critical of Thomas for fear of being called racist, because the seat being vacated by Thurgood Marshall was popularly designated "the Black seat" -- therefore, so the guilt-stricken white liberal thinking went, it would be racist to reject a Black person (i.e., man) for it. Need I say that sexism and misogyny also played a role . . .
As if anything could have deterred Thomas from playing the race card!
"And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I'm concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S.—U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree."
And hardly anyone at the time -- meaning "no one in mainstream politics or media" -- said "You're the one who's kowtowing to an old order, and it's getting you what you want, isn't it?" Because there weren't enough people of color in those positions to call BS on Mr. Grievance.
Anyone who had would have been hung out to dry. But Hill's testimony did switch at least one brave vote (may have been more—I've forgotten). Thomas's mind is so twisted taking him on is as pointless as taking on trump.
I just looked it up: The vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee on reporting the nomination favorably split 7-7 so the nomination went to the full Senate without recommendation. The vote on that was 13-1. The Senate voted to confirm 52–48, which was close considering that before the Bork nomination (1987) SCOTUS nominees were generally confirmed with near-unanimity. (The 2 Republicans voting against were Bob Packwood (OR) and Jim Jeffords (VT), who left the GOP in 2001 and became an independent who caucused with the Democrats.)
Thanks, Susanna. I was curious but too tired to deal with it. When I read those vote tallies all I can think of is Biden's role. If only he'd had Bernie then to pressure him in the right direction, where the giants of that era failed … How anyone with a conscience could have listened to Anita Hill's testimony and voted for Thomas still mystifies.
I remember reading in Sandra Day O’Conner’s Memoir she couldn’t get a job after graduating law school and she ended up as an unpaid “intern”. Women were considered unsuitable and not to be considered for a paid position.
Eilizabeth, yes I watched the documentary Frontline did on Thomas and Ginni and thought
it was excellent and well done.
What is so discouraging is that Thomas' reasoning is sheer insanity and doesn't make any sense. How can you reason with a Supreme Court Justice who holds himself above the law? He defies explanation.
Such a great column about the law (from a West Point graduate, yet) and the ethics-free, grievance-riddled Clarence Thomas. And he's not our only problem. Another Substacker has written about "Gorsuch's Revenge" against federal agencies.
Mr. T. writes, "Justice Thomas has decided that because there were no bans on AR-15s in 1791, there can't be any bans on that weapon of war today." Take this to its logical (well, really illogical conclusion) and we could circle back to making slavery legal ... because it once was.
Trump has proven to be The Great Destroyer, and so it follows that he will be destroyed -- but with so much damage in his wake, who will care?
If Thomas’s logic continues to prevail, why aren’t guns limited to the types and models of 1790? Why allow bullet firing guns, since bullets weren’t invented until sometime around 1840 in France? Come on, folks! Stop the cherry picking!
He's a small, petty, grievance-filled, envious monster of little ability. Any claim he has to intellectual consistency is belied by the political ramifications of his decisions. All we can do is echo Henry II, "will no one rid of us of this troublesome scourge?"
Yes and Alito is a close second.
Aside from his awful decisions, this guy has serious ethical issues. In the past, a few Justices had occasional lapses. Sometimes a spouse or the Justice would get involved in a questionable transaction. These were ignored by the public. However, Justice Thomas and his wife have been fully involved in corrupt practices for years. His excuse is he did not know the law..
Yes, he is the worst Supreme Court Justice.
But any judge or constitutional scholar who claims to be an “originalist” is full of it.
Prof. Reich it would be nice to see your take on e.g. Compact Magazine, an online pseudo-intellectual cesspool of the so-called American “new right”, headed up by a chaired Harvard Law professor (Vermeule) among others. It’s a blatantly reactionary house organ for those who believe that human virtue peaked during the Roman Empire (when the Pope appointed emperors) and that everything we consider progress after that point has in fact been a downhill slide. In their view, the enduring questions of philosophy are answered by theocracy; the U.S. and Europe need to return to ‘common good’ jurisprudence as opposed to individual liberty. The ‘common good’ view accepts tribalism as a basic component of human nature. Who decides what constitutes the common good? The Church. Extraordinarily scary.
Didn't Prof Reich leave the building?
Oopsie.
Lucian, a fine analysis of the relevant cases. My comment is slightly off-topic. I am not a Supreme Court insider. Ever since Thomas’ grifting became known to the public, I’ve wondered whether the other justices knew about these things (the lavish vacations, the tuition payments, the house for mother) as they were occurring. The Court is a very peculiar culture. Not too long ago, Justice Sotomayor talked about how well the justices get along and how much they like each other. A few months ago, now-retired Justice Breyer described Thomas as a man of “integrity.” And, of course, the Chief Justice--except for his laughable “ethics” paper--has said absolutely nothing. It may be that they simply did not know. They may have bought into Thomas’s descriptions of his RV/Walmart parking lot stories. On the other hand, they may have known about all or most of these things and concluded that Thomas’s shenanigans were not technically “illegal.” I wonder if we’ll ever know what the other justices knew and when they knew it.
I venture to say that they all know and many of them have surely accepted "contributions"
of one kind or another.
I've previously posted my feelings about the gun issue, especially the AR-15 but Lucian's piece leaves me speechless. I sit here in silent rage.
This goes beyond the idiosyncrasies, biases, and predilections of individual Supreme Court justices. What we have, essentially, among justices Thomas, Gorsuch, and the Chief Justice himself, John Roberts, is a scheme to defraud the United States Government, or to put it in the language of criminal indictments, a scheme to defraud the United States of America, a violation of title 18, United States Code, section 371. At least in the cases of justices Thomas and Roberts, we have what amounts to a criminal conspiracy, but also a civil conspiracy to defraud, based upon the justices participation in cases in which their spouses have significant financial interests. Mandatory recusal of a justice, judge, or magistrate judge is required by the United States judicial Code, Title 28, section 455. In previous comment postings I have mentioned this section repeatedly as a basis for a civil action against the spouses of those justices who appear to be supinely indifferent to their statutory obligation to refrain from participating in cases in which their spouses have a significant financial interest, or which would give the appearance of a conflict of interest. In addition to Justice Thomas' willing acceptance of hospitality, gifts, favors, and financial benefits from a billionaire, Thomas' wife Ginny has been the conduit for tens of thousands of dollars associated with donors to the Federalist Society, money used to influence federal legislation, policy, and not the least, Supreme Court decisions. People who donate large sums of money expect something significant in return for their investment. Likewise, Chief Justice Roberts' wife has been reported to operate an extremely lucrative headhunting operation for the most influential law firms in the nation's capital, with consulting fees running into the millions of dollars; and her marriage to the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court would appear to be her principal asset. Many of the lawyers whom she recruited and who were eventually hired by these mega law firms appear as counsel in cases coming before the Supreme Court. This is truly a case of having friends with benefits; and who can say that one of those law firms would not have a leg up in particular cases where one of the lawyers fortunate enough to have been recruited by the Chief Justice's wife was a member of the firm. It does not matter whether the lawyer himself or herself appears on the moving papers before the court, the damage is done simply by the unlawful intrusion of financial influence; identified with the spouse but also benefiting the member of the court.
Make no mistake, this is corruption, and it is done right out in the open, just the way former President Trump did it. There is no denial; and the mantra seems to be, 'This is the way we do business.'
My proposal was simply for the government to file suit against the spouse of the justices who refuses to abide by his obligations under 18 USC 455. If there is no way to directly penalize the errant justice for refusing to abide by the statutory mandate, a civil action aimed at the errant spouse would be entirely appropriate, because it is her financial interest that gives rise to the conflict. The solution of the problem is to enforce the statute indirectly by taking away the financial incentive from the noncompliant justice and his wife as a couple, each of whom has an undivided interest in the financial interest in question. It would not matter that the couple had decided between themselves that the wife's lucrative business income would be nominally hers alone to keep, because those business arrangements themselves arise as a consequence of their marriage. The husband of the income-earning spouse continues to have an equitable interest in his wife's income; but more importantly, the mandate of the law itself cannot be flouted with impunity. The solution, then, is to disregard those inter-spouse arrangements entirely by requiring the forfeiture of the proceeds of that business. And he would not matter that the lawyers recruited by the Chief Justice's wife practice their profession in cities far distant from Washington DC. The taint that attaches to this illicit arrangement spreads to the law firms themselves, wherever they happen to be practicing. Most Supreme Court cases do not arise in the nation's capital, but law firms and their lawyers are generally permitted to practice anywhere in the United States if they fulfill certain procedural requirements, and they will typically engage local counsel within the District of Columbia who regularly practice before the court to provide the appropriate liaison with the court, and with any governmental agency that may be involved in the litigation.
I practiced law in the District of Columbia for five years as an employee of the federal government. Consequently, I know a thing or two about how things work. I'm also a nonpracticing admittee to membership in the Bar of the United States Supreme Court, from November 1973. Consequently, my sense of things would be that the Public Integrity Division of the Department of Justice is probably looking into this matter; and I can't be the only lawyer who conceived of this solution that I outlined above. What these justices are doing are demeaning the status of the Supreme Court as an impartial arbiter of justice in the cases that come before it. They demean the integrity of the United States government, and the reputations of those who work for it.
I guess I should go to a law school that can explain to me why gun fetishists like Thomas who claim to be originalists always ignore the plain language of the Second Amendment that specifically restricts guns to members of a well regulated militia. Because the only remaining militia is the National Guard, they apply reverse logic to rationalize the fact that guns were always regulated in this country until the NRA bought a political party and a majority of the Supreme Court. Does Clarence know that the gunfight at the OK Corral happened because Wyatt Earp did not allow cowboys to carry guns in Tombstone and the Clantons refused to comply?
As soon as I hear either of their names, I start into a burn. Despicable.
Worst in our lifetime, in any case. Don’t know about the 19th century.
This is so ass backwards. Until the courts decide that it is more important to protect innocent people and their children instead of whacked out gun owners, we will continue to see rising death rates.