Not to Yield

Excerpt from “Shameless Corruption on the Supreme Court” “We now know that “Justice” Thomas has accepted extravagant gifts from a billionaire GOP megadonor for two decades and failed to report them. These weren’t just expensive ties or Godiva chocolates at Christmas. They included vacations on his benefactor’s superyacht and trips on his private jet as well as a week each summer at his pal’s private resort in the Adirondacks. In an act of extreme tone-deafness, reeking with irony, Thomas’s billionaire benefactor said, “he and his wife’s “hospitality” to Thomas and his wife “is no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends.” No doubt it was no different. I take care of you, and you take care of what I care about. That’s how political contributions tend to work. If it were otherwise, people with lots of money would not make big money contributions to politicians. There is no reason to think the usual rule did not apply to Thomas and his benefactor. Thomas has a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. That Thomas purportedly did not understand his higher obligation for full disclosure is beyond astonishing. I think he understood it perfectly but decided not to comply because he didn’t think anyone would force him to do so. Thomas has said that he was advised by … unnamed people … that disclosure of his billionaire friend’s largesse was not required. Not required? Even if true, and that seems absurd, Thomas had an obligation to avoid even the appearance of conflict. His decision reeks of dishonesty. There is more. We learned recently that the same billionaire benefactor bought property from Thomas, “the first known instance of money flowing from the Republican megadonor directly to the Supreme Court justice. And these were not just any old real estate parcels Thomas happened to own. Thomas’s mother lived in the house on one of the parcels involved. Federal law (5 U.S. Code § 13104) requires the reporting of such a transaction. Curiously, shortly after the sale, major improvements to the mother’s house were initiated by the buyer. According to the reporting, Crow still owns Thomas’ mother’s home, which the now-94-year-old continued to live in through at least 2020, according to public records and social media. Two neighbors told ProPublica she still lives there. Crow’s company pays the property taxes formerly paid by the Thomases. Unsurprisingly, “Thomas did not respond to detailed questions” about the transactions. “Harlan and Kathy Crow are among our dearest friends,” Thomas wrote. “As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips.” Interestingly, Thomas signed the sale paperwork personally, according to reporting. While his financial reports for the year of his Supreme Court appointment are very detailed, he failed to reveal at any time his trips at his benefactor’s expense nor the sale of the properties” Excerpt from “Another Day That Will Live In Infamy” ”The Court thus saw no conflict or inconsistency in describing Trump’s attempts to force the Justice Department to support his knowingly false claims of election fraud as mere “discussions” implicating the DOJ’s authority to investigate “allegations of election crime” and the President’s duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The intellectual dishonesty underlying this treatment of the constitutional allocation of powers is blatant and undeniable. Pandora’s Box is open. Ignoring the facts alleged in the indictment, the Court has adopted Trump’s view of Article II of the Constitution: the President can do whatever he wants. He is indeed above the law. Recall that in the end, the only thing stopping Trump’s plans to use DOJ to subvert the election was the threat of the DOJ leadership to resign if he persisted. If they had knuckled under to his unlawful demands, Trump might well have succeeded in overthrowing the election and restoring himself to power, thereby ending American democracy. What the Court’s opinion did not acknowledge is that Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, is President of the United States. What is true of Trump as President is true of Biden as well. The Sword of Damocles has been unsheathed and it has two edges. It is not hyperbole to observe that July 1, 2024, will now rank alongside December 7, 1941, and January 6, 2021, as another day of infamy. July 1, 2024, was the day the American Constitution was destroyed by the Supreme Court. The President of the United States is now free to use the Department of Justice to subvert American elections. But that’s not all.… But remember, the President is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States, the largest and most powerful military force on the planet. The President is also the directive force behind all the federal agencies. He oversees the Cabinet — the people appointed by the President and who supervise those agencies. What the Supreme Court has said about the power of the President over the Justice Department applies to the other federal departments and, indirectly, the agencies under them. If there are differences now between the U.S. President and a dictator, they are not apparent. If the President is absolutely immune from criminal responsibility for trying to or actually suborning the Justice Department to commit crimes, what prevents him from doing the same with the military? The Court’s decision in Trump v. United States ranks alongside the Court’s worst opinions in history and may be the worst of all. Raising the President to imperial status is a graver threat to democracy than the decisions holding that “separate but equal” in education was adequate and that it was in the national interest and consistent with the Constitution to relocate into detention camps Japanese-Americans during World War II Ben Franklin famously was asked, ”Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” His response: “A republic, if you can keep it.” Turns out, we can’t. Unless we are rid of Donald Trump and the so-called “conservatives” on the Supreme Court.”