This Supreme Court Justice Definitely Does NOT Have a Sugar Daddy
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Public trust in the Supreme Court is sinking into Middle Earth, Gallup found last year, and it might have something to do with the conservative movement's brazen campaign to capture the high court and make policy from the bench. (Remember when conservatives were all worked up about Activist Judges?) It began with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell's scorched-earth assault on then-President Barack Obama's constitutional prerogative to appoint members of the Judicial Branch, then came to a crescendo with President Donald Trump's shameless outsourcing of court nominations to the right-wing corporatists at the Federalist SOociety. Now we've got an astroturfed 6-3 conservative majority that stripped millions of American women of their abortion rights. When judges become politicos, the integrity of the judicial system suffers.
In related news, ProPublica has a new investigation out Thursday into the activities of one Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court Justice. It's old hat that Thomas, along with his departed pal Antonin Scalia, would make appearances at retreats for conservative megadonors organized by the Koch Brothers and their ilk. But Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski are out with a report that suggests Thomas is not just a regular on the right-wing richie-rich circuit. They found he has one sugar daddy in particular.
If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000. Fortunately for him, that wasn’t necessary: He was on vacation with real estate magnate and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, who owned the jet — and the yacht, too.
For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.
The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.
We may someday learn that the "known" in "no known precedent" is doing a lot of work there. (Crow told ProPublica in a statement that there's nothing untoward going on and the two are just friends. It is certainly possible that Thomas would rule how he rules regardless of all this, but that isn't how conflicts of interest work.) After all, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously back in June 2016—it was 8-0 because McConnell was holding a seat hostage as part of his assault on the Constitution's separation of powers—that former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell's conviction on corruption charges should be overturned on the basis that federal prosecutors had used a "boundless" definition of what kinds of acts might constitute bribery. "A more limited interpretation of the term 'official act' leaves ample room for prosecuting corruption," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, later continuing: "Conscientious public officials arrange meetings for constituents, contact other officials on their behalf, and include them in events all the time." A jury had convicted McDonnell on 11 counts—including a fraud statute, extortion, and conspiracy—after he and his wife accepted vacations, a Rolex, and designer clothes from a businessman looking for the state's help peddling his "tobacco-based dietary supplement."
If Roberts's sweet-summer-child innocence sounds familiar, you might hear echoes of Anthony Kennedy's opinion in Citizens United v. FEC: "We now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption." This is the world that Thomas (and perhaps others in the black robes) have been traveling in, the world of megadonors writing big checks, sometimes to dark money groups, to influence elections and the decisions of the politicians they backed to win them. They're all rubbing shoulders, hearing about the crucial importance of deregulating this or privatizing that, making plans to get the right people elected and the right redistricting maps drawn so that they can write broadly unpopular policies the law. Or, failing that, their plans to get the right judges installed to make the policy behind a veneer of legalese.
Yes, this is just another signal that judges have inched ever closer to becoming outright politicians, and ProPublica found some hilarious drivel from Clarence Thomas that indicates he's picked up the politician's flare for phony populist bullshit.
In Thomas’ public appearances over the years, he has presented himself as an everyman with modest tastes.
“I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States,” Thomas said in a recent interview for a documentary about his life, which Crow helped finance.
“I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it,” Thomas said. “I come from regular stock, and I prefer that — I prefer being around that.”
Maybe Mr. Crow took Thomas to some RV parks in between yacht trips. (Crow told ProPublica in a statement that there's nothing untoward going on and the two are just friends.) It is certainly possible that Thomas would rule how he rules regardless of all this, but that isn't how conflicts of interest work.)Meanwhile, ProPublica brought the political judge discussion full circle by highlighting a commissioned painting that hangs in one of Crow's real-estate holdings showing him and Thomas smoking cigars and chatting it up with Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society jefe to whom Trump handed over the business of populating the Supreme Court. These people are not playing by any kind of rules.
It doesn't exactly burnish his image as a sober and impartial adjudicator of the law that Thomas is married to an outright lunatic who spent a lot of her time between the 2020 election and January 6 looking for ways to secure Electoral Votes for Donald Trump in states he did not win. That Thomas has faced no repercussions for refusing to recuse himself from election interference cases, considering his obvious conflicts with regard to Ginni Thomas's behavior, is not a great omen when it comes to whether he'll face accountability for anything ProPublica dug up here. The report points out he may have run afoul of public disclosure laws that date back to the Watergate aftermath, but it's hard to have much faith when we're served up reminders on the daily that the rule of law is for people outside the club. It certainly seems he'd have a warm enough reception should any questions come before the Supreme Court, where, we should point out, all the liberal justices went along with the McDonnell ruling back then.
If we ever get a grip and accept that many of these judges have become political actors, we might gather the gumption to take some action. (Justice Samuel Alito once signaled during oral arguments that he'd already decided to strike down a 110-year-old New York gun law so as to bring a vigilante shootout to a subway car near you. They might as well have skipped the hearings.) On the far end of things, some are beginning to question the Court's basic authority of judicial review. A 15-year term limit for Supreme Court justices would be nice, both because it would remove some of the life-and-death stakes around each nomination that generates such cutthroat behavior on the Hill and because it would offer these upstanding citizens a chance to make a buck after they leave office like every other politico type. It's not great, but it's better than them getting this stuff while they're actively making the law that governs us all.
I won't be holding my breath, but I'll choose to take some heart from the election result out of Wisconsin Tuesday, the latest to indicate that the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization was a political play with political costs. Thomas is free to discuss with his yachting buddies whether the SCOTUS conservatives' decision to de facto ban abortion in many states was a political miscalculation, because that's the business he's in.
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