More seriously, the corrupt are no less sincere than the righteous in their devotion to the justness and innocence of their cause: we might as well ask a castle whether its cornerstone is hollow.
4: which means obviously that it would be pointless to ask them questions!
How do you not notice when you are earning hundreds of thousands from Nebraska real estate? Nebraska wants income tax on that and has a more progressive income tax than Pennsylvania, so you notice.
I'd say it's intended as wing-nut welfare but obviously deeply corrupt. The fact that it's deeply unthinkable that he could be impeached and convicted (he actually broke real laws! In ways directly relevant to his official duties!) is roughly everything that is wrong with our system.
When Crow bought the house from Thomas's family, the deal included lifetime free rent for Thomas' mother and substantial improvements to the house during her tenancy. That's not a normal real estate deal. Crow is on the board of trustees of AEI, a frequent participant in Supreme Court litigation. There's no proof of a quid pro quo on any particular case, but this is well inside the boundaries of "appearance of impropriety".
Normal wingnut welfare, or what I think of as the normal stuff, is high paying jobs handed out to ideological comrades -- think tank and media positions that are much more plentiful and better paid than their counterparts on the left. This is different: a substantial financial benefit to Thomas's family that was not a payment for legitimate work done.
Like, as much as the Founders didn't expect parties to undercut the institutional interests of the branches of government, they even moreso did not expect Supreme Court justices to be the lynchpin of multigenerational ideological projects.
The travel and so on is a little harder to quantify, but I'd call that abnormal too.
didn't expect parties to undercut the institutional interests of the branches of government
Huh? I thought they were consistently worried about the rise of parties and tried to make it institutionally less likely, but having little assurance they would succeed, outside their own PR. And of course ten years later many of the same people were passing laws to lock up their critics.
Also, they were worried enough about the immediate risk of major bribery that they explicitly prohibited gifts from foreign states or monarchies in the Constitution.
To the OP, I think the aura of incorruptibility built up around SCOTUS has led commentators to assume it's wingnut welfare (rich people helping their already-like-minded comrades in the struggle), but I think the accompanying untouchability / impunity means anything could be happening behind the scenes, including explicit quid pro quos.
Remember when we learned Kavanaugh's large credit card balance was paid off by an unknown party?
More seriously, the corrupt are no less sincere than the righteous in their devotion to the justness and innocence of their cause
Often this is true, but not always. Some know they are in it for personal gain and comfort themselves that everyone else is (Blagojevich, just to start the list).
Isn't this an example of a scandal isn't when someone does something outside the norm, but when people realize that the norm itself is corrupt and suddenly perceptions change. I know there is a way more felicitous phrasing of that principle somewhere and maybe someone will help me. I mean the whole Federalist Society "we will coddle and enrich you throughout your entire life as long as you hew to what we want you to do an demonstrate loudly that you are completely safe and predictable in voting for our interests" - that's the part that has been accepted as normal but is completely corrupt. People spending 10 years auditioning for federal Judgeships by being as openly partisan as possible, and advertising how unlikely they are ever to think independently in a way that would be inconvenient for the partisan goals of the party appointing them. Clarence Thomas's case seems like a triviality in comparison. Like "ooh, he might get caught, if all the technicalities line up right."
Obv in 24 I am not accepting the "independent minds end up in the Federalist society because they believe in those principles" way of looking at it, and the wingnut welfare is just gravy.
More seriously, the corrupt are no less sincere than the righteous in their devotion to the justness and innocence of their cause
I don't necessarily believe this, either. I think the corrupt believe that nearly everyone is corrupt, and if they weren't doing it, the next guy would, so they might as well get theirs.
I guess you could say they think it's just for them to be corrupt?
I am fascinated by the source of the money. I mean, Republican funders corrupting the Supreme Court is kind of the physical reality of the whole idea of Marxism and the material foundation of global conservatism. If you had been asked to guess what the ultimate source of the evil was, would you have guessed...
Big Oil eg Exxon?
Wall Street eg VampSquid?
The Military-Industrial Complex eg Lockmart?
Elon Musk?
Something else?
In fact it's....real estate, and specifically inherited wealth. And you know that seems dead right? it really is just the idle rich hoarding their rents?
Piketty, mutatis mutandis from the Rognlie critique.
Huh? I thought they were consistently worried about the rise of parties and tried to make it institutionally less likely, but having little assurance they would succeed, outside their own PR. And of course ten years later many of the same people were passing laws to lock up their critics.
Well, right. They thought (or pretended to think) they had solved the problem and they were wrong. Is it not commonplace to observe the Founders would be surprised to see the Senate finding it unnecessary to convict a copartisan president of very obvious and very serious crimes against Congress itself?
I guess I'm wondering if Thomas didn't spend the Obama years running around dropping hints like "My mother needs a place to live and I can't afford it unless I retire so I can get paid to give speeches and work on corporate boards. Unless there was another way.".
30: I think they'd be, as the recent commonplace has it, shocked and dismayed but not particularly surprised. I think they would have said "Welp, guess we didn't succeed in curbing the potential reach of faction, since this is exactly the kind of thing we'd expect to see if so."
Very plausibly but we'll never know.
If that's what happened, we might know. The more people you drop a hint at, the more likely it is to come out.
16: that's the part that is complicated. the value of the lodging is quantifiable, because the guy owns a resort next door., but it's tricky. If somebody lets you borrow their house that they would normally rent out, that seems really problematic, but what if somebody invites you as a guest while they are vacationing. If I crashed at LB's apartment in New York instead of paying for a hotel, would that be corrupt?
My aunt dated a Rockefeller in the 60's, and the family had a private jet. My grandfather was kind of conflicted. If they had been flying commercial and they planned to go somewhere, he would have insisted on paying and wouldn't have let them pay. But he wasn't about to say "no" when they were going on a trip, invited her, and they all travelled on the private plane.
If I crashed at LB's apartment in New York instead of paying for a hotel, would that be corrupt?
I think it would look different if LB had the top two floors of a Park Avenue co-op, two servants per occupant, private chefs, and offered helicopter tours and other perks during the stay.
And if you were, e.g., a repeat litigant in matters to which my agency clients were a party and handled by the lawyers I supervise. Under those circumstances I wouldn't let you stay even in my actual, untidy and shabby apartment.
Oh, whoops, I got the corruption backward. I wouldn't stay for free at BG's place, however nice it is or isn't, for free under those circumstances.
Yeah. My dad didn't even let lawyers buy him a drink.
My aunt dated a Rockefeller in the 60's,
It is possible that my mother's aunt Nancy made her a sandwich at some point. She was a family cook for the Rockefellers.
For some reason I don't remember learning before today about Allen West, Iraq war criminal turned Republican politician running for a range of things, recently mostly unsuccessfully, but still prominent. He seems a good candidate to also be on the take from Crow, having been the executive director of his think tank in its last year before it dissolved into recriminations.
37 and 38: Yes, of course. I was thinking less about lawyers and judges involved in litigation and more about the broader wingnut welfare and hospitality. Like personally, I find it kind of offensive that politicians stay at rich people's houses, but they also take large donations for their campaigns.
I think that Frances Perkins lived with a friend when she was Secretary of Labor and this allowed her to be fairly comfortable for a while. Her husband hadn't worked for years, and she had to pay to have him treated in a mental institution.
24: See also Matthew Kacsmaryk taking his name off a law review article (in which he was gross about transgender rights) right before he was nominated to the bench; the conservative law journal was happy to go along. (The right-wing Christian legal group, First Liberty Institute, he was then counsel for was one of the groups submitting briefs on mifepristone, natch.)
42: That's sort of the whole thing, though -- are you in a position that makes corruption possible. Public servants are -- elected officials and government employees. But if you're not in a position that makes corruption possible, like your aunt, it doesn't matter what you take from whom.
briefs on mifepristone
I think it's just a pill.
"Bribes" and [wing nut] "welfare" are such harsh terms for Clarabelle's ancillary income streams. Even "grifting" is out of place. These are straight up payments for services rendered. He's still an attorney, the money he gets is simply a retainer to the firm of Thomas, Alito & Partners.
j bouie crisply articulated the line that needs to be enforced here:
https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/1646871003358720000?t=_OeNySarhvVgl1l_Ee0kBA&s=19
of course as a californian i'm not even able to get feinstein to resign so completely discouraged that thomas will suffer any consequences let alone be swiftly impeached as he should be *but* continuing to insist on the correct line in all my phone calls to electeds' offices!
Amazing that public figures who see themselves as serious and non-Trumpy are actually problematizing the "is it really corruption if Thomas is sincere?" question on Twitter. As comics curmudgeon Josh F. writes:
anyway, this is just to say that "what would the founders think" is a dumb game bc (a) they're dead so who knows and (b) a lot of the stuff they thought was wrong and bad, but "supreme court justice gets fun gifts from rich guy" is DEFINITELY something that would've set em off
like yes, thomas jefferson didn't know what a germ was and shat in a bucket, but if you told him "oh, this wealthy man is simply good friends with the justice and that's why he lavishes him w/expensive vacations" he'd look at you like you were the dumbest person alive
44: Frances Perkins actions went against class interest. I think my grandfather had a firm belief that a lady paid her own way. I guess there was some thinking about sexual corruption back then or something, because you weren't supposed to accept expensive gifts either.
Who were the friends she stayed with? Were any thought to be lovers?
(I looked up the National Register entry for what's been registered as the Frances Perkins House, 2326 California St NW. It says she lived there 1937-1940, but doesn't say she owned it. I also learned there was an attempt to impeach her in 1939, which she headed off at a committee hearing. Not in Wikipedia!)
10: I agree with Spike (if I'm reading Spike correctly) that the whole WaPo piece on Nebraska real estate is a bit of a nothingburger.
Thomas reported some income under the wrong name. The Post doesn't seem to be claiming that the actual income was misstated, or that the source of the income was importantly misrepresented, or that Thomas is evading taxes.
Here's how the WaPo justifies the story:
The previously unreported misstatement might be dismissed as a paperwork error. But it is among a series of errors and omissions that Thomas has made on required annual financial disclosure forms over the past several decades, a review of those records shows.
The Post makes no case that this was something more than a "paperwork error." But by grouping this issue in with the actual corruption, it makes it sound like the other "errors and omissions" are equally inconsequential.
The good news is that this means the Post is on the case. The newspaper is so desperate to advance the story that they'll even publish this non-event. This kind of coverage is normally reserved for Democrats (see: Whitewater). So I'm not going to fret about the injustice being done to Thomas here.
My thought was that selling an asset while continuing to claim income from it is a way to launder money and I wouldn't want to suggest someone was laundering money without proof but I might point at it and tap my fingers.
51: Mary Harriman Rumsey. Unclear, but possible.
You were plainly told that 53 is irresponsible.
I stand corrected. We have learned that it would be irresponsible not to speculate.
57 to 53, and in contradiction to 55.
Same. If I understand the story correctly the asset was only sold from one entity controlled by the Thomas family to another. I'm not worried about injustice to CT, and I approve of the story as evidence that they're really going through his disclosures carefully now, but I'm not expecting there to be anything interesting at all here.
Free rent for his mother is really unambiguous, and I like sticking with that as the core story. A nice little wrinkle is that it's not irrevocable. Anytime Mr. Crowe is unhappy with his Justice, the mother could end up needing to find a place to stay, or at least to start paying rent.
That same was to 52. I don't really see the potential here.
Free rent for his mother is really unambiguous, and I like sticking with that as the core story.
Yeah, as bad as the travel and other perks are, this is the one that would prompt a resignation if Republicans experienced any measurable amount of shame.
Changes from one family-controlled entity to another that are carefully hidden for years make me wonder if another relative didn't get taken care of at the expense of someone unrelated.
62: "Carefully hidden" seems incorrect. The Post is citing presumably accurate state records to indicate that Thomas's disclosure was inaccurate.
If the family were hiding something, they'd be hiding it from the state.
But I also feel compelled to note: The reasonable default assumption with people like Thomas is that any transaction they engage in could be corrupt. All I'm saying is that there is nothing in the Post story that indicates that this transaction was crooked, except that crooks were involved.
20.2 I haven't followed this all the way to the bottom of the rabbit hole, but I do remember reading something that was at least vaguely reputable making a case that there was less there than met the eye wrt Kav's various debts. I'm fine with my conviction that he's a lying liar, and don't need to have convictions one way or the other about his finances to think that he doesn't belong in the job he has.
Free rent for his mother is really unambiguous
It's worse than that. Free rent for his mother until she dies, at which point he is *quoted* saying he intends to build a Clarence Thomas Museum on the property. Trade Harlan Crow for George Soros and Thomas for any liberal justice and the impeachment hearings would already be underway.
OT: If you stole 2 million dimes, how could you even spend enough of them to make it worth the effort to move them without getting caught?
Melt them down for the copper and nickel?
That seems like a lot of work. I'm just thinking that instead of stealing dimes from a truck in the Wal-Mart parking lot, just go steal something from the Wal-Mart. Or a vehicle, but not a vehicle full of dimes.
Free parking at parking meters for life
... I can't remember the last time I saw a parking meter that took dimes, and not just quarters.
We still have them but they are being retired because you can't buy parking meter parts anymore. Now they have these stupid kiosks where you have to pay with a card and remember your license plate number.
I just found out that tax day isn't until tomorrow. Sweet reprieve! Now I have 24 more hours to dawdle.
Tax day for most of California isn't until October because of how much we got rained on. I don't quite get how it was wrangled but I'm certainly not capable of doing anything on time right now.
Melt them down for the copper and nickel?
I believe there was a time about 15 years ago during a commodity spike that a UK penny actually contained more than a penny's worth of copper...
That's been the case here at times.
I've got all the best quality copper you could ever want.
64: I saw the same; I can't recall if it was Campos at LGM, but it was at least plausible that it was simply a parental gift. Obviously we shouldn't discount naked corruption, but the evidence may be weaker than it seems.
76. Pre-1982 US pennies are 95% copper, metal is worth about 2 cents with copper at today's price of $4/lb. Melting them is forbidden though, so the only legit avenue to profit involves sorting and storing in anticipation of demonetization. Mechanical sorting is pretty straightforward since they're heavier. Might be worthwhile for retiree tinkering in the countryside, would need to take them across a border to proceed or a long life. A 5 gallon bucket would give maybe $800 metal for $400 face value spent.
Hmm, an opportunity to appeal to a new voting group that probably isn't reliably voting for one party or another. "Vote for me and the penny will be eliminated, and you can turn them in or do what you like with them. Also, plentiful cheap electricity for any private foundries out there."
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/09/heres-the-truth-about-brett-kavanaughs-finances/
82. An OK starting point. The real opportunity is to set up two political consulting shell companies, one to profit from slides explaining 82, and the second to profit from pointing out that Lincoln is on the penny and Illinois has 19 electoral votes.
And speaking of Kav, he wrote today's unanimous decision in New York v New Jersey. NJ won.
NY and NJ have had a compact since the 50s sharing regulation and law enforcement over the Port. NJ wanted to end it, and NY didn't want it to end.
OT: Everyone is much older here than the last time I saw Natalie Merchant.
Like six guys have the hat that I didn't buy because I thought it was too much the hat I'm supposed to buy.
Let me suggest that if you go see Natalie Merchant (which I recommend), you don't try to film the show with your phone. And that if you do, you stop the first time she asks.
OT but if any new female commenters out there are worried we aren't taking them seriously, let me suggest a change of pseud to TITAN INVICTUS.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/life/pronatalists-save-mankind-by-having-babies-silicon-valley/
90: I'm paywalled, but does the article acknowledge that this is from Warhammer 40,000?
That couple didn't look real to me either.
In the context of a senior judge, the distinction between being actively on the take and wingnut welfare escapes me. Am I being naive?