WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory, combined with the Republican takeover of the Senate, may extend conservative control of the Supreme Court for another two decades.
For much of the last four years, progressives focused their energies on proposals to expand the size of the court or impose term limits on the current justices. These ideas to restructure the court depended on Democrats winning sweeping power in both the White House and the Senate.
Instead, Republicans will be in charge and positioned to preserve the conservative grip on the high court long after Trump leaves Washington.
The two oldest justices are also its most conservative jurists. Clarence Thomas, 76, joined the court 33 years ago and would become the longest-serving justice in the court’s history early in 2028. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., appointed in 2006, is 74.
If Vice President Kamala Harris had won the election, there was little chance they would have chosen to retire and have their seats filled by a liberal.
But conservative analysts think it is quite likely Alito or Thomas or both will retire during Trump’s second term.
Ed Whelan, who writes regularly in the National Review, said he expects Alito will leave first.
“I certainly have no inside knowledge. But I’d bet big on it,” he said.
He thinks the death of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg while Trump was in office will persuade Thomas and Alito they should not stay too long. She resisted calls from liberals to step down during President Obama’s last term, betting Hillary Clinton would succeed him in 2016. Instead Trump won, and a liberal seat flipped to a conservative.
Retirements by Alito or Thomas would allow Trump to appoint one or two far younger conservatives, likely selecting from those he appointed to the federal appeals courts during his first term.
Once confirmed, they could potentially sit for 30 years.
If Democrats had kept control of the Senate, they could have blocked Trump nominees they considered extreme. But Trump and his legal advisers will not face that hurdle.
In his first term, Trump appointed three conservative justices with the help of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
When Justice Antonin Scalia died early in 2016, McConnell prevented Obama from filling his seat.
Early in 2017, Trump chose Neil M. Gorsuch, who is now 57, to fill Scalia’s seat. When Ginsburg died weeks before the 2020 election, McConnell cleared the way for Trump’s quick appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who is now 52.
Along with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, 59, they cast the key votes to overturn the right to abortion in 2022, and in July, to give Trump and other presidents a broad immunity from criminal charges for their actions while in office.
All three of them can expect to serve another 20 years on the court.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the sixth conservative, will turn 70 in January. The oldest of the court’s three liberals, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, had her 70th birthday in June.
While neither of them are seen as likely candidates to step down in the next four years, Trump could appoint another young conservative if either of them retired.
President Biden will leave office having made a historic but singular appointment in Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s first Black woman.
During the same call, Shackelford accused Justice Elena Kagan—who had the audacity to endorse the creation of a committee to look into possible violations of the Court’s new ethics code—of being “treasonous” and “disloyal.” He also said that the various reform proposals were part of “a dangerous attempt to really destroy” the Supreme Court by “people in the progressive, extreme left” who were “upset by just a few cases.”
First Liberty sent a recording of the call to some supporters; it was was obtained by ProPublica. The group did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Shackelford’s comments. Instead, in a statement, the group’s executive general counsel said: “First Liberty is extremely alarmed at the Leftist attacks on our democracy and judicial independence and is fighting to bring attention to this dangerous threat. It’s shameful that the political Left seems perfectly fine destroying democracy to achieve the court decisions they favor instead of working through democratic and constitutional means.”
Sending the email to Shackelford was far from the first time Ginni Thomas has weighed in on political issues. She also sent numerous messages following the 2020 election that made baseless claims of fraud, writing in one—to then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows—that “Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.” She urged Trump not to stand down. Despite this, Clarence Thomas refused to recuse himself from cases concerning Trump and the 2020 election.
Tim Walz accurately sums up a Trump speech
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Elsewhere!
Trump Creepily Thanks Supporters’ Husbands for Allowing Them to Attend His Rallies
But when it comes to the Supreme Court, Americans have some major opinions of their own – that our confidence in the Court, the main tool it has to enforce its authority, has eroded.
It’s true that, according to Pew Research, our trust in the Supreme Court has never been lower.
Pew Research
Most Americans disagreed with the Court’s decisions on abortion and unlimited campaign donations, and then we got headlines about justices receiving gifts.
According to investigations by ProPublica, The New York Times and others, Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted more than $4 million worth of gifts from conservative billionaires, including destination vacations, private jet and helicopter flights, VIP passes to sports events, $150,000 in tuition money, and a $267,000 motor home.
Now, it is legal for justices to receive gifts of meals and lodging, provided they publicly disclose the gifts on a financial disclosure form. But Alito and Thomas did not disclose these gifts, at least until they were made public. Both justices deny any wrongdoing.
According to Harvard Law School professor and retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, “These are not errors. These are, ‘I have a right to do this, and you can’t stop me.’”
Then, there’s the business of the spouses. Clarence Thomas’ wife, Ginni, attended the January 6 Trump rally, and later texted Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, encouraging Meadows to fight to overturn the election. Citing Trump allies’ claims of fraud, Ginni Thomas texted Meadows on November 19, 2020: “Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.”
To Judge Gertner, it’s obvious that both Alito and Thomas should recuse themselves from cases that involve the January 6 uprising. “The notion that one can say, ‘Well, it was my wife, wasn’t me,’ is flat-out absurd, and really casts doubt on his honesty,” she said.
But Robert Ray, a former White House Independent Counsel who represented Trump during the former president’s first impeachment, said, “Oh now, come now! A justice’s spouse, just like anybody else, has a First Amendment right to be participating independently of the political process. My impression has been that what most people are really upset about isn’t so much the ethics of Supreme Court justices. What they really are concerned about is they don’t like the outcome of particular cases that they really, really, really care about.”
Pogue asked Gertner, “It seems like what Alito is saying is, ‘You guys are just coming after me ’cause you don’t like my decisions.’ So, would the same thing apply if it were liberal judges?”
“It did apply!” Gertner replied. “Abe Fortas resigned from the court.”
In the 1960s, Justice Abe Fortas received $20,000 from a foundation. “He actually had returned the $20,000 several months later, [but] when that came out, there was immediate, bipartisan condemnation of it,” said Georgetown Law School professor Cliff Sloan, who has written two books about Supreme Court history. “This was such a controversy that it ultimately led to Justice Fortas resigning from the Supreme Court.”
Here’s what the law says: “Any justice … shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”
But “reasonably” means one thing if you’re conservative, and something else if you’re liberal.
Robert Ray said, “Would a reasonable person question the judge’s impartiality, and I think with regard to January 6th and Ginni Thomas’s activities, for example, I think the answer clearly is no.” Meanwhile, Judge Gertner said, “You have to recuse yourself, based on the appearance of partiality. And that’s a concern, not that you actually are partial, but that it will appear that way to the public that you serve.”
So, who breaks the tie? Who’s the judge of the judges? Turns out, nobody!
Sloan said, “There is absolutely no enforcement mechanism for Supreme Court justices right now. It’s just left up to each justice’s own determination about his or her own propriety.”
But haven’t all nine justices now signed a new Supreme Court Code of Ethics? Yes, said Sloan: “They signed a Supreme Court Code of Ethics. And they made very clear that each justice will continue to make his or her own decision, and there is no other enforcement mechanism. And that is just a gaping fundamental hole with the entire structure.”
There are plenty of ideas for addressing the Court’s trust problem. Maybe there should be term limits. Maybe there should be more than nine justices. Maybe an inspector general should oversee the Court.
And of course, there’s always the nuclear option: Impeachment. Ray said, “If it’s really a problem, and nobody’s doing anything about it, there’s a clear constitutional remedy: It’s impeachment. That’s the remedy, period.”
But any of those proposals would require both parties in Congress to work together, and that’s unlikely.
And yet, according to Gertner, something hasto change. “If the public doesn’t believe in the legitimacy of courts, then the fabric of the rule of law begins to become undone,” she said.
In Sloan’s view, “It could lead to massive defiance of the courts and great kind of civil unrest.”
But if Congress won’t take action, where does that leave us? Ray says, just trust them; they’ve gotten the message. “People are paying attention now,” he said, “and I think the Supreme Court knows that people are paying attention. I can imagine that in every one of those nine households, this issue inside the family has been discussed about how to conduct themselves in the future to avoid the problem.”
But Sloan believes that self-policing will never be enough, noting, “James Madison, in ‘The Federalist Papers,’ famously said that if men were angels, government would not be necessary. And I would hope that somehow, everybody could step back from the current controversies, to restore respect and trust in the Supreme Court.”
For more Info:
Story produced by Gabriel Falcon. Editor: Ed Givnish.
David Pogue is a six-time Emmy winner for his stories on “CBS Sunday Morning,” where he’s been a correspondent since 2002. Pogue hosts the CBS News podcast “Unsung Science.” He’s also a New York Times bestselling author, a five-time TED speaker, and host of 20 NOVA science specials on PBS. For 13 years, he wrote a New York Times tech column every week – and for 10 years, a Scientific American column every month.
Supreme Scandal: Unveiling The Perks Of Clarence Thomas’ Secret Gifts
What we KNOW; SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas thinks it’s morally okay to receive millions of secret financial gifts from a reported Hitler-highlighting MAGA mega-donor…whew!
According to The Hill, supremely sunken Thomas accepted a WHOPPING $4 million.
Is This An Honest Friendship To Trust?
Source: Alex Wong / Getty
BOSSIP previously reported that Justice Clarence Thomas, w significant figure in the Supreme Court since his nomination by former President George H.W. Bush, defended the gifts by emphasizing his long-term friendship with Crow. Thomas further justified his actions by stating that he had sought guidance early in his tenure on the Court.
If these trips were “nothing more than personal hospitality from close friends,” why did it take news outlets so long to uncover what is lawfully supposed to be public record? This unethical behavior coming to the limelight years later further just exposes the gravity of this predicament. And this is only one of many contested conflicts of interest for Thomas.
Thomas’ dear friend, Harlan Crow, defended his actions by asserting that his hospitality extended to the Thomases was no different from what he offered to his other friends.
What a friendship…
Media Coverage & Public Outcry For Justice Thomas To Resign
Source: Alex Wong / Getty
Democrats and legal experts have voiced concerns over Thomas’s ability to interpret and follow basic codes of conduct. There are growing demands for stricter judiciary oversight to prevent potential corruption.
The Hill states that this scandal has sparked a statement by Fix the Court’s Gabe Roth.
Justice Antonin Scalia received $210,164 in gifts from January 2004 until his death in 2016 (the second-highest recipient)
Justice Samuel Alito received $170,095 from January 31, 2006, to the present day (the third-most gifts)
All these numbers and things still aren’t adding up in the US government system. Many platforms are demanding reform. BOSSIP continues to update this story.
If you were worried the Supreme Court was going to ban the abortion drug mifepristone—an entirely reasonable concern given the Court’s conservative majority and the fact that it gleefully overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022—you can likely breathe easy: The consensus following Tuesday’s oral arguments is that US Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine will likely be dismissed on standing. Not because the Court’s conservatives love reproductive freedom and respect a pregnant person’s right to choose, but because the case is so embarrassingly meritless. (The plaintiffs are a group of antiabortion medical associations and doctors who don’t prescribe mifepristone themselves but claim that one day they could be put in the horrible position of treating a patient who took the drug and would be irreparably scarred from the experience—the doctors, not the patients.) So, that’s the good news.
The bad, terrifying news is that archconservatives Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—the latter of whom, in his opinion overturning Roe,cited a 17th-century jurist who supported marital rape and had women executed—can’t just dismiss the case and move on. Instead, experts fear, they plan to use FDA v.Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine to lay the groundwork for a future nationwide ban on medication abortions—and possibly even all abortions.
Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas are never ones to let an embarrassment of a lawsuit go to waste. And they were openly eager to embrace the chilling argument at the heart of ADF’s case: the notion that the Comstock Act of 1873 prohibits the distribution of abortion pills and perhaps even equipment used for procedural abortions. Under this theory, abortion is already a criminal offense under federal law, and every abortion provider in the country may be prosecuted and imprisoned immediately. Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation are already urging Trump to issue an executive order on day one banning medication abortion. Republican lawyers are preparing to use the Comstock Act to prohibit all abortions, not just pills. This reading of the zombie relic is so broad that a Justice Department and judiciary hostile enough to reproductive freedom could contort it to make all abortion care a felony.
Predictably on Tuesday, and with a case built of vapors to work with, Alito and Thomas went full Comstock. Alito scolded the FDA for letting providers mail abortion pills despite the existence of the law. “This is a prominent provision,” the justice told [Solicitor General Elizabeth] Prelogar. “It’s not some obscure subsection of a complicated, obscure law. They knew about it. Everybody in this field knew about it.” Thomas warned attorney [Jessica] Ellsworth that her client, the maker of mifepristone, lacked a “safe harbor” from prosecution over Comstock. “It’s fairly broad, and it specifically covers drugs such as yours,” he told her. (That claim is very much in dispute.) Alito and Thomas know they will likely lose this case, so they’re preparing for the next one. Maybe Trump will win and commence Comstock prosecutions. Maybe [Judge Matthew] Kacsmaryk will issue a new ban on mifepristone at the behest of red states, as he is currently threatening to do. Either way, Comstock is racing toward the Supreme Court. And two justices have already aligned themselves with a sweeping interpretation of its puritanical prohibitions.
“When you hear the justices asking repeated questions, it’s definitely something that they are interested in,” Leah Litman, a University of Michigan law professor, toldThe Washington Post, adding that she expects Alito or Thomas to write an opinion centered on Comstock. During an interview with the Post in May, antiabortion activist Mark Lee Dickson said the quiet part out loud, telling the outlet: “If a future president were to enforce these federal statutes, then they could shut down every abortion facility in America.” Donald Trump has not commented on the Comstock Act* but groups like the Heritage Foundation, with its Project 2025, have urged him order the FDA to overturn its approval of mifepristone. While Trump sometimes likes to pretend to be a moderate on abortion, he also brags about killing Roe V. Wade.
After Tuesday’s oral arguments, Representative Cori Bush called for the repeal of Comstock, writing on X: “The antiabortion movement wants to weaponize the Comstock Act as a quick route to a nationwide medication abortion ban. Not on our watch.”
*Let’s be honest, there’s a strong possibility he hasn’t heard of it.
The Supreme Court declined to take up cases challenging New York City’s rent stabilization law on Tuesday, but Justice Clarence Thomas urged the court to hear future cases over the program.
The court denied writs of certiorari for two cases that argued against the rent stabilization program, which guarantees rights to renters living in more than a million units across the city. The law places limits on how much landlords can increase rent and provides tenants a right to renew their lease.
Proponents of this law argue it ensures residents have access to affordable units, particularly as rent in New York and other cities continues to rise and cannot be evicted without cause. Critics, however, argue it is government overreach that impedes the rights of landlords.
The Supreme Court filing describes the law as “the most sweeping and onerous rent control provisions” the United States has ever seen.
The cases asked the court to address three questions—whether the laws are “expropriating Petitioners’ right to exclude,” whether they “effect a confiscatory taking by depriving Petitioners of a just and reasonable return” and if they constituted an “unconstitutional use restriction of Petitioners’ property,” “expropriating Petitioners’ right to exclude.”
Thomas wrote in a filing released Tuesday that while the court would not take up the cases due to how they were brought up, he would like to see the court hear other arguments about rent control if it is raised again in the future.
“The constitutionality of regimes like New York City’s is an important and pressing question. There are roughly one million rental apartments affected in New York City alone,” he wrote.
He noted that the challenge would “require a clear understanding of how New York City regulations coordinate to completely bar landlords from evicting tenants,” and that previous pleadings “do not facilitate such an understanding.”
“However, in an appropriate future case, we should grant certiorari to address this important question,” he wrote.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas poses for an official portrait on October 7, 2022. Thomas wants the court to consider future challenges to New York City’s rent stabilization law. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas poses for an official portrait on October 7, 2022. Thomas wants the court to consider future challenges to New York City’s rent stabilization law. Alex Wong/Getty Images
Newsweek reached out to New York City Mayor Eric Adams for comment via email.
New York City Councilor Keith Powers described the court’s decision as “good news for rent stabilized tenants in New York” in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Attorney Daniel Suitor noted, however, the ruling is “at best, a temporary reprieve, because conservative justices have pointedly asked for landlords to try again.”
New York’s rent stabilization law was first passed in 1969, and most rent-stabilized units are found in buildings containing six or more units built before 1974. As of 2021, there were at least 1,048,860 rent-stabilized units across the city’s five boroughs, and almost half of all units in the city are stabilized.
A 2021 citywide survey found that the median rent in stabilized units was $1,400 per month, compared to $1,825 in private, unregulated units.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver detailed the corruption of Clarence Thomas and offered him $1 million a year for the rest of his life to resign from the Supreme Court.
John Oliver Offers Clarence Thomas $1 Million Per Year To Resign
Oliver said:
Clarence Thomas is arguably the most consequential Justice on the court right now and he’s never really seemed to like the job he said it’s not worth doing for the grief so what if he could keep the luxury perks that he clearly enjoys without having to endure all of that grief well I think there might actually be a way to do that because Justice Thomas we have a special offer for you tonight we are prepared to offer you $1 million a year for the rest of your life if you simply agree to leave the Supreme Court immediately and never come back. It is that simple: just sign this contract, resign, and the money is all yours. This is not a joke. If you watch our show, you know jokes aren’t really our thing. This is real: a million dollars a year until you or I die.
We have spoken to experts who’ve all told us the best they can tell this is somehow legal which seems crazy to me cuz it really feels like it shouldn’t be but as they keep pointing out there are no rules in place to stop me from doing this and let me be clear HBO is not putting up the money for this I am personally on the hook for years but this offer is not forever you have exactly 30 days from Midnight tonight to make your resignation effective and if you are still on the fence I actually have a little deal sweetener that I’m excited to show you so please come with me just come this way because we know you’ve got a lot on your plate right now from stripping away women’s rights to hearing January 6th cases you definitely shouldn’t be hearing to potentially help roll back decades of federal regulations deserve a break you know away from the meanness of Washington so you can be surrounded by the regular folks whose lives you made demonstrably worse for decades now and the good news is I think we can help you there because since your favorite mode of travel might be in need of an upgrade.
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We are excited to offer you this brand new top-of-the-line Marathon motor coach look at this beauty Clarence it’s worth $2.4 million and it’s got a full bedroom yes that is a king size bed one and a half baths a fireplace four TVs a washer dryer and and I quote a residential size fridge and if you’re thinking what will my friends say if I take this offer will they judge me as they sit in their boardrooms and mega yachts and Hitler shrines will they still treat me to luxury vac occasions and sing songs about me off their phones that’s the beauty of friendship Clarence if they’re real friends, they’ll love you no matter what your job is so I guess this might be the perfect way to find out who your real friends actually are so that’s the offer a million dollar a year Clarence and a brand new condo on wheels and all you have to do return is sign the contract and get the off the Supreme Court talk it over with your totally best friend in the whole world because the clock starts now 30 daysClarence let’s do this.
John Oliver Is Making A Point About The Lack Of Rules And Oversight On SCOTUS
John Oliver was making a point that it is legal to try to pay off a Supreme Court Justice to quit, which is exactly why there needs to be more regulation and oversight of the Supreme Court. Oliver could literally buy a Supreme Court seat vacancy if Justice Thomas would take his offer.
The odds are that Justice Thomas is getting more than a million dollars in cash and perks.
However, the fact that Oliver was able to legally make the offer is a big part of the problem with the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court is a threat to democracy in its current lawless condition, and John Oliver is shining a bright light on how easy it is to buy a Supreme Court Justice.
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We have been honored to be able to put your interests first for 14 years as we only answer to our readers and we will not compromise on that fundamental, core PoliticusUSA value.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
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Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) said that Justice Clarence Thomas’s failure to recuse himself in the Trump ballot disqualification case added to the Supreme Court crisis.
Rep. Goldman tweeted, “Having recused from a prior case related to Jan 6 due to his wife’s involvement, Justice Thomas’s participation in Trump’s ballot case is a shocking and intentional violation of his ethical obligations. Clarence Thomas is not above the law. This is a true crisis at the Court.”
Rep. Goldman was reacting to the fact that Justice Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, was involved in the Trump coup plot and has admitted to discussing it with her husband. Yet the conflicted Justice Thomas is on the bench today hearing a case to determine whether or not Trump’s actions to overturn the election and the 1/6 attack have disqualified him from the ballot.
Thomas should not be hearing this case, and he was bending over backward to accept Trump’s argument, as you can hear in the audio below:
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Clarence Thomas really stretches it to buy the Trump argument by getting into should have beens ” It would seem that particularly after reconstruction and after the compromise of 1877 and during the period of redeemers that you would have that kind of conflict.” pic.twitter.com/GgBQTkwHQP
Clarence Thomas is corrupt, and if he had been interested in being a serious jurist instead of a partisan political activist on the bench of the highest court in the land, he would have recused himself. Justice Thomas is on the bench today to keep Donald Trump on the ballot.
Thomas is the epicenter of the Supreme Court’s ethical crisis, and until he is gone, the American people are correct to distrust the conservative Supreme Court majority.
A Special Message From PoliticusUSA If you are in a position to donate purely to help us keep the doors open on PoliticusUSA during what is a critical election year, please do so here.
We have been honored to be able to put your interests first for 14 years as we only answer to our readers and we will not compromise on that fundamental, core PoliticusUSA value.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
“To attract female voters, we would probably have to color the elephant logo pink and give it long eyelashes, and then we’d need to come up with a backstory for her. Maybe we’d call her Enid the Elephant and she’d be a mother of three adorable baby elephants. It’d just be such a headache.”
Two Supreme Court cases could completely change gun control laws, one affecting who can legally own a firearm and the other defining what modifications may be made to existing weaponry.
The rulings, to be given sometime this term, could affect hundreds of thousands of people under restraining orders, their alleged victims and half a million gun owners.
‘United States vs. Rahimi’: Restraining Orders & Gun Rights
One of the cases involves Zackey Rahimi, an alleged small-time marijuana and cocaine dealer, who was having an argument with his girlfriend in an Arlington, Texas, car park in December 2019.
As he became aggressive, she tried to flee but Rahimi grabbed her wrist and knocked her to the ground.
“He then dragged her back to his car, picked her up, and pushed her inside, causing her to hit her head on the dashboard. Realizing that a bystander had seen him, he retrieved a gun and fired a shot,” according to a Solicitor General petition to the Supreme Court.
While he was firing the shot, his girlfriend, identified only as C.M. in court documents, escaped from the car and ran.
Police mugshot of Zackey Rahimi, who won the right to own a gun after an appeal court struck down a law that banned people under restraining orders from gun possession. The government is now challenging that decision before the U.S Supreme Court. Arlington Police Department, Texas
Rahimi later called her and threatened to shoot her if she told anyone about the assault. In February 2020, a Texas state court granted C.M. a restraining order, which was valid for two years. The order also suspended Rahimi’s handgun license and warned him that possessing a firearm while the order remained in effect may be a felony.
“Rahimi, however, defied the restraining order. In August 2020, he tried to communicate with C.M. on social media and approached her house in the middle of the night, prompting state police to arrest him for violating the order,” the Solicitor General petition states.
In November 2020, he threatened another woman with a gun and was charged in Texas with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
The following month, after someone who had bought drugs from him “started talking trash” on social media, the Solicitor General petition states, Rahimi went to the man’s home and fired an AR-15 rifle into it.
The next day, after colliding with another vehicle, he got out of his car, shot at the other driver, fled, returned to the scene, fired more shots at the other car, and fled again. Three days later, Rahimi fired a gun in the air in a residential neighborhood in the presence of young children.
A few weeks after that, a truck flashed its headlights at Rahimi to caution him against speeding. In response, Rahimi slammed his brakes, cut across the highway, followed the truck off an exit, and fired multiple shots at another car that had been traveling behind the truck. Finally, in early January 2021, Rahimi pulled out a gun and fired multiple shots in the air after a friend’s credit card was declined at a fast-food restaurant, the Solicitor General notes.
Amy Coney Barrett on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on October, 1, 2020. Justice Coney Barrett drew attention to the terms of Zackey Rahimi’s restraining order during Supreme Court oral arguments in Rahimi’s gun rights case on November 3, 2023. Greg Nash/Getty Images
The petition, filed in March 2023, notes that a later police search of Rahimi’s room “uncovered a .45-caliber pistol, a .308-caliber rifle, pistol and rifle magazines, ammunition, approximately $20,000 in cash, and a copy of the restraining order.”
To the seeming disbelief of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Rahimi won his right to gun ownership after a Texas federal appeal court struck down a 1994 law that prohibits people under a restraining order from owning a gun.
“That holding was profoundly mistaken,” the Solicitor General’s petition told the Supreme Court, which has agreed to hear a government appeal to the Texas court’s decision.
In oral arguments on November 3, Coney Barrett appeared to have barely disguised contempt for Rahimi, whatever her view of the Second Amendment arguments. When Justice Clarence Thomas asked Rahimi’s lawyers how criminal danger could be determined by a civil restraining order, Coney Barrett pulled out a copy of Rahimi’s restraining order and read from it.
She said Rahimi was instructed to stay at least 200 feet away from his girlfriend and child because of the physical risk he posed to their safety.
Rahimi is one of two major cases that will help shape gun control law, legal analysts believe.
‘Cargill v. Garland’: Bump Stock Ban
The other is Cargill v. Garland, on the issue of whether a bump stock device is a “machine gun” because it is designed and intended for use in converting a rifle into a rapid-fire machine gun.
A bump stock is attached to a semi-automatic firearm to enable it to fire bullets more rapidly.
The case is a challenge to a regulation issued after America’s worst-ever mass shooting, in which 60 people were killed and over 850 were injured at a county music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The killer, Stephen Paddock, had used semi-automatic rifles equipped with bump stocks while firing at the music festival from his hotel room.
Amid public outrage, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives [ATF] issued a rule concluding that bump stocks are machine guns and ordered that anyone who owned one should destroy it or drop it at a nearby ATF office to avoid facing criminal penalties.
Stock images. The Supreme Court will hear two cases this term that could completely change gun control laws. George Frey / Stringer / designer491/Getty Images
That order is now being challenged by Michael Cargill, an army veteran and Texas gun shop owner, who says he purchased two bump stocks and that the ban violates his Second Amendment rights.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance, which supports Cargill’s Supreme Court challenge, said the bump stock ban affects over 500,000 gun owners.
According to New York University constitutional law professor, Peter Shane, Rahimi and Cargill could help bring clarity to gun ownership after the confusion caused by last year’s decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, in which the Supreme Court urged lower courts to ensure that gun laws are “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition.”
“There are a lot of gun regulations on the books throughout the country. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court decision in Bruen has generated huge uncertainty as to what kinds of regulation are permissible,” Shane told Newsweek.
Justice Clarence Thomas’s decision for the majority in Bruen caused major confusion, especially as it urged lower courts to look to historic precedent without defining that precedent. His ruling struck down New York’s 1911 Sullivan Act, which required a person applying for a concealed pistol permit to show “special cause” for doing so.
Thomas wrote that, for a gun law to be constitutional, “the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition”—a phrase that has been interpreted in many ways by the lower courts.
Research by Jacob Charles, a law professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, shows that 12 state and federal laws have been struck down, either completely or in part, since the Bruen decision, with little consistency in how it has been interpreted.
Writing in the Duke Law Journal last January, Charles was highly critical of the historic legacy approach of Bruen, which he says is “an extension of an increasingly historically-focused Supreme Court” that “imbues an absent past with more explanatory power than it can bear.”
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Washington — The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to vote to issue subpoenas to two wealthy Republican donors and an influential conservative legal activist after their involvement in luxury trips provided to two Supreme Court justices was revealed this summer, marking a significant escalation into Democrats’ investigation into the ethics practices at the high court.
The committee could vote as soon as Nov. 9 to authorize the subpoenas for donors Harlan Crow and Robin Arkley II, as well as Leonard Leo, who played an instrumental role in the confirmations of several of the current Supreme Court justices. Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse announced Monday that the panel would vote to issue the subpoenas.
The 11 Democratic members of the Judiciary panel could authorize the subpoenas without Republican support. GOP members of the committee have accused Democrats of targeting the conservative justices following a series of decisions on abortion, affirmative action, guns and religious rights.
Judiciary Committee Democrats have been seeking information from Crow, Arkley and Leo since the summer after a series of reports from the investigative news outlet ProPublica revealed ties between Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito with the Republican donors.
Senate Judiciary Committee member Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse displays a copy of a painting featuring Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas alongside other conservative leaders.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
According to ProPublica, Thomas accepted lavish trips on Crow’s private plane and yacht, and vacationed at his resort in the Adirondacks over the course of their 25-year friendship, and did not report the gifts on his financial disclosure forms. His latest disclosure form, filed in August, did include details about a 2014 real estate transaction with Crow for three Georgia properties he purchased from Thomas and his family.
ProPublica also reported that Arkley, the owner of a mortgage company, provided lodging to Alito during a luxury fishing trip to Alaska in 2008. Alito, who did not disclose the lodging he received or trip aboard a private jet for the outing, refuted the notion that it should have been reported, citing exceptions for personal hospitality.
Still, Durbin and White House said it is “imperative that we understand the full extent of how people with interests before the Court are able to use undisclosed gifts to gain private access to the justices.”
“By accepting these lavish, undisclosed gifts, the justices have enabled their wealthy benefactors and other individuals with business before the court to gain access to the justices while preventing public scrutiny of this conduct,” the Democratic senators said in a joint statement announcing the vote on subpoenas.
Arkley and Leo have declined the committee’s requests for information, and a lawyer for Leo told the panel in a letter dated Oct. 19 that it is acting without a valid legislative purpose and engaging in political retaliation. Durbin, of Illinois, and Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, said Crow offered to provide the Judiciary committee with limited responses to some of its requests, which the Democratic senators said is “wholly inadequate.”
Leo said in response to the committee’s plan to vote on subpoenas that he “not bow to the vile and disgusting liberal McCarthyism that seeks to destroy the Supreme Court simply because it follows the Constitution rather than their political agenda.”
The revelations about Thomas’ relationship with Crow and Alito’s trip to Alaska has led to increased pressure on the Supreme Court to adopt a binding code of ethics, which it currently does not have. The Judiciary Committee advanced legislation in July that would require the Supreme Court to adopt an ethics code, though it is unlikely to win approval by the full Senate and even be considered by the GOP-led House.
At least three of the justices, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, have publicly suggested that they favor adoption of a formal set of ethics principles or indicated the court is considering doing so.
Chief Justice John Roberts also said in May that there is more the high court can do to “adhere to the highest standards” of ethical conduct and that the justices “are continuing to look at the things we can do to give practical effect to that commitment.”
The committee’s plan to authorize subpoenas as part of its investigation into ethics issues at the Supreme Court is likely to increase pressure on Roberts to impose ethics policies at the court.
“The Chief Justice could fix this problem today and adopt a binding code of conduct,” Durbin and Whitehouse said. “As long as he refuses to act, the Judiciary Committee will.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee is moving to subpoena Clarence Thomas‘s Republican donors after complaining of an ethics crisis in the Supreme Court.
The committee said that some Supreme Court justices have been “joining billionaires with business before the Court on their private planes and yachts or receiving gifts such as private school tuition for a family member.”
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin said the committee would vote on issuing subpoenas after the “intransigence” the donors have shown in refusing to come before the committee to explain their relationship with Thomas, the longest-serving member of the Supreme Court.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas speaks at the Heritage Foundation on October 21, 2021 in Washington, DC. He is now under increasing pressure to explain his relationship with Republican Party donors (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The donors include Texas real-estate billionaire Harlan Crow; Leonard Leo, a former aide to the Trump presidency; and Robin Arkley II, who allegedly gave trips to Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
In September, Thomas said that he took three trips last year aboard Crow’s private plane. He did not acknowledge any earlier travel at Crow’s expense, including a 2019 trip in Indonesia aboard his yacht.
Durbin and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, said in a statement that “the Supreme Court is in an ethical crisis of its own making,” while accusing Leo and Arkley of “outright defiance” in refusing to respond to the committee’s queries.
The committee accused Supreme Court justices of accepting “lavish, undisclosed gifts” that have “enabled their wealthy benefactors and other individuals with business before the Court to gain private access to the justices while preventing public scrutiny of this conduct.”
Durbin and Whitehouse said that they had unsuccessfully sent separate inquiries to Crow and the three holding companies that own his private jet, yacht, and 105-acre estate, Topridge Camp, in upstate New York. Thomas was a frequent guest at the property.
“In order to adequately address this crisis, it is imperative that we understand the full extent of how people with interests before the Court are able to use undisclosed gifts to gain private access to the justices,” Durbin and Whitehouse said in their statement.
The inquiries the Committee has sent to Crow, Leo, and Arkley “are critical to this work,” Durbin and Whitehouse added.
“However, they have either refused to comply or offered to produce certain limited information that fell well short of what the Committee needs and to which it is entitled.
“Due to Crow, Leo, and Arkley’s intransigence, the Committee is now forced to seek compulsory process to obtain the information they hold. Therefore, Chair Durbin will be asking the Committee to grant him authorization to issue subpoenas to these individuals.”
Durbin and Whitehouse said the Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts could fix the problem by adopting a binding code of conduct. “As long as he refuses to act, the Judiciary Committee will,” the pair said.
The subpoenas are part of the committee’s aim to create new ethics rules for the Supreme Court.
In July, the Senate Judiciary Committee moved the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency (SCERT) Act to the full Senate. The bill would require Supreme Court Justices to adopt a code of conduct; create a mechanism to investigate alleged code violations; improve disclosure; and require justices to explain when they recuse themselves from a Supreme Court case.
Durbin and Whitehouse said they have been urging for a code of conduct for more than 11 years.
The pair said that Leo’s and Arkley’s responses to the Committee’s initial July 11, 2023, requests were “blanket refusals to comply”. Neither individual engaged in any private discussions with the Committee. “The Committee reiterated its requests to both Leonard Leo and Robin Arkley on October 5, noting that they had identified no proper basis to withhold information from Congress. Both repeated their refusals to cooperate,” Durbin and Whitehouse said.
Crow’s “proposal to provide the Committee with responses to only a small subset of its requests, and only for the past five years, is wholly inadequate. Additionally, tying this insufficient response to an agreement that the Committee would pursue no further inquiries regarding Crow’s relationship with Justice Thomas would inappropriately and prospectively undermine the Committee’s constitutional oversight authority,” Durbin and Whitehouse added.
The subpoenas would be bad news for Clarence, who is under increasing pressure to explain his relationship with Republican donors.
In September, the ProPublica investigative website revealed that not only has Crow been hosting Justice Thomas at the private Bohemian Grove club over the last 25 years, but billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch also stayed there with Justice Thomas. The Koch brothers have been funding a Supreme Court challenge to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to enforce environmental law without judicial oversight.
Newsweek has sought email comment from Justice Thomas’s office and from Harlan Crow, Leonard Leo and Robin Arkley II.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Washington — Most of a $267,000 loan that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas received from a wealthy friend to buy a luxury RV may have been forgiven, according to Senate Democrats.
In 2008, nine years after Thomas’ friend Anthony Welters lent him money to purchase a motorhome, the health care executive forgave the balance of the loan, according to a report from Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee.
“While additional documents pertaining to the loan agreement may exist, documents reviewed by Democratic staff suggest that Justice Thomas did not repay a significant portion of the loan principal,” the report said.
The allegation comes as Thomas remains under scrutiny for his failure to disclose gifts and luxury trips that he accepted from Republican donor Harlan Crow and amid debate over whether the Supreme Court should adopt an ethics code.
Democrats launched their inquiry after the New York Times reported the loan’s existence in August.
When Thomas borrowed the money in 1999, he agreed to pay 7.5% interest a year and fully repay the loan within five years, the Senate report says, citing information and documents voluntarily provided by Welters. In 2004, the loan repayment period was extended another 10 years.
But Welters forgave the balance of the loan in 2008 “in recognition of the payments made by Thomas which Welters characterized as interest only payments that exceeded the amount of the original loan,” the report said.
Welters told Thomas in a handwritten note that he “did not feel it was appropriate to continue to accept payments even though he had the right to them,” according to the report.
The report said Welters provided only one receipt of payment, which showed that Thomas paid him $20,042 in 2000 — the amount of one yearly interest payment.
Nine years of interest payments would have totaled about $180,400.
The committee said it was not given additional documents that could offer more clarity on the agreement.
“None of the documents reviewed by committee staff indicated that Thomas ever made payments to Welters in excess of the annual interest on the loan,” it said.
Senate Finance Chairman Ron Wyden of Oregon said the committee wants answers from Thomas, but said he hasn’t made a decision about whether to subpoena the Supreme Court justice.
“What we need to know is Justice Thomas’ justification for this,” Wyden said Wednesday. “Why wouldn’t he put this on ethics forms? What has he done with respect to tax laws? Has he paid taxes on this?”
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas never paid back the full amount of a quarter-million-plus loan that financed his high-end RV, according to an investigation by Senate Democrats.
A report that Democratic members of the Senate Finance Committee released on Wednesday found that the Supreme Court justice, who has been the subject of multiple ethics questions this year relating to gifts from wealthy friends and associates, “never repaid” a friend’s $267,230 loan in full after using the money to purchase a high-end Prevost Marathon Le Mirage XL RV in 1999.
The New York Times first reported in August that Thomas’ friend Anthony Welters, a health care executive, provided the loan on terms that were very favorable: For five years, Thomas only had to pay off the interest, or around $20,000 annually. That time frame was later extended to 10 years.
However, the committee said, Thomas did not appear to have paid any of the principal of the loan. Documents provided to the committee suggested that the justice had never paid the loan in full, though the committee noted that it was possible other documents related to the loan existed. (The Times first reported the committee’s findings.)
Among the documents the committee reviewed were handwritten promissory notes for the loan, at an interest rate of 7.5%, and a bank check showing a single payment of $20,042.23 — the annual interest payment — on Dec. 21, 2000. Also included was a November 2008 note handwritten by Welters that indicated Thomas had only been paying interest on the loan and that Welters was not seeking further payments because he believed that the interest payments had exceeded the total purchase price of the RV.
However, if Thomas had paid the annual interest of $20,042 for nine years, he would have paid off approximately $180,000 — or $87,000 short of the total loan amount.
If the principal of the $267,000-plus loan was forgiven, that would have significant tax and ethics implications for the Supreme Court justice. The forgiven loan balance would count as taxable income for Thomas, who would then be required to report it on tax documents. The report also notes that Thomas did not disclose the discharged debt on his 2008 financial disclosure report.
“Justice Thomas should inform the committee exactly how much debt was forgiven and whether he properly reported the loan forgiveness on his tax returns and paid all taxes owed,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the Finance Committee chair, said in a statement. “I have also directed the committee to share our findings with the Judiciary Committee to evaluate the ethics implications of this disclosure.”
A Supreme Court spokesperson did not immediately reply to HuffPost’s request for comment from Thomas.
Justice Clarence Thomas sits as he is introduced during a 2018 event at the Library of Congress in Washington.
AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File
In a statement to the Times, Welters said: “While I understand the attention given who this involves, the difference between what you’re comparing to and what happened here is that a friend lent another friend money. As anyone who has borrowed from or lent to family or friends knows, it’s simply not the same as a bank.”
Thomas’ relationships with wealthy, gift-giving benefactors have come under close scrutiny in recent months. InApril, ProPublica reported on Thomas’ close relationship with billionaire and Republican donor Harlan Crow, finding that Crow had hosted the justice for extravagant trips and luxury vacations, all unreported on Thomas’ ethics disclosures. Since then, a number of other financial gifts have been revealed, including flights on private jets, Crow’s funding of private school tuition for Thomas’ nephew, and his purchase of a house where Thomas’ mother lived.
Thomas has said in response that the trips and flights were personal invitations from a friend and that he did not believe they had to be disclosed.
The revelations have intensified public calls to formalize an ethics code for the Supreme Court, an idea that legislators and even some members of the court have backed. While justices are required to disclose their financial interests and sources of income, there’s little transparency or oversight and few consequences if the rules are not followed.
Thomas’ RV is considered a luxury model with many customizable features, although Thomas reportedly purchased it secondhand. It also features heavily in the justice’s image of himself, with Thomas describing his usual summer vacation as driving on a cross-country road trip, parking at Walmart overnight.
“We get insulated from the rest of the world, if not isolated. And I kind of like that world. I like the part we fly over,” he said in a courtroom talk in 2019.
Washington — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from conservative attorney John Eastman that involved his efforts to shield his emails from investigators with the House select committee probing the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Notable in the unsigned order turning away Eastman’s case was a note that Justice Clarence Thomas “took no part in the consideration or decision of this petition.” The justice did not provide an explanation for his recusal. Eastman clerked for Thomas on the Supreme Court, and emails obtained by the House panel showed that Ginni Thomas, the justice’s wife, corresponded with the conservative lawyer.
Eastman, a former law professor at Chapman University, helped craft the legal strategy in which he claimed former Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to unilaterally reject state electoral votes cast for Joe Biden or delay the certification of Electoral College votes during the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6.
In August, Eastman, former President Donald Trump and 17 others were charged in a sprawling racketeering case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Eastman faces nine counts related to an alleged plan to send a slate of fake presidential electors in Georgia to Congress in order to change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. He pleaded not guilty.
The case before the Supreme Court stemmed from an effort by Eastman to keep his emails from the House select committee examining the Capitol attack. Eastman argued the subpoena for his records sought attorney-client privileged communications and attorney work product.
A federal district court ordered Eastman to turn over a tranche of emails to the panel, 10 of which the judge said were “closely tied” to the committee’s investigation and subject to the crime-fraud exception, which applies to documents and communications that were in furtherance of illegal or fraudulent conduct.
U.S. District Judge David Carter had previously determined that Trump and Eastman “likely committed obstruction of an official proceeding” when they allegedly attempted to disrupt the joint session of Congress convened on Jan. 6.
Eastman sought review of the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, but provided the select committee with eight of the disputed documents in order to comply with the district court’s order. After the emails were disclosed to the public, the 9th Circuit dismissed the case as moot and declined to wipe away the district court’s finding that some of the messages were subject to the crime-fraud exception..
In urging the Supreme Court to take up his case, Eastman said the district court’s conclusion”has cast aspersions not just on Dr. Eastman but also on his former client, the former President of the United States who is a candidate for the office of President in 2024.”
“The ramifications, both political and legal, of such a holding are significant, and petitioner, both on his own behalf and for his former client’s benefit, should not have to be subjected to those ramifications on an ongoing basis when he was deprived of his right to appeal by the unilateral actions of the government — the party that prevailed in the District Court — that mooted the appeal,” he wrote in a filing.
Washington — Justice Samuel Alito on Friday rejected demands from Senate Democrats that he step aside from an upcoming Supreme Court case because of his interactions with one of the lawyers involved, in a fresh demonstration of tensions over ethical issues.
Alito attached an unusual statement to an otherwise routine list of orders from the court. “There is no valid reason for my recusal in this case,” Alito wrote in a four-page statement.
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee have been highly critical of Alito and the rest of the court for failing to adopt an ethics code, following reports of undisclosed paid trips taken by Justice Clarence Thomas and, on one occasion, by Alito. The committee approved an ethics code for the court on a party-line vote, though it is unlikely to become law.
Last month, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin of Illinois and other Democrats on the committee sent a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts calling on Alito to not participate in a tax case that will be argued in the late fall.
The Democrats complained that Alito himself had cast doubt on his ability to judge the case fairly because he sat for four hours of Wall Street Journal opinion page interviews with an editor at the newspaper and David Rivkin, one of the lawyers for the couple suing over a tax bill. Rivkin also represents Leonard Leo, the onetime leader of the conservative legal group The Federalist Society, in his dealings with the Senate Democrats, who want details of Leo’s involvement with the justices. Leo helped arrange a private trip Alito took to Alaska in 2008.
In the second of two articles the interviews produced, Alito said Congress lacked the authority to impose a code of ethics on the Supreme Court.
The statement was issued a day after Justice Brett Kavanaugh said he is hopeful, without offering specifics, that the court will soon take “concrete steps” to address ethical concerns.
Justices typically do not respond to calls for their recusals, except in the rare instances in which they are made by parties to the case. But Alito said he was responding because of the attention the issue already has received.
He noted that many of his former and current colleagues have given interviews to reporters and then taken part in cases involving the reporters’ media outlets.
Describing the Democrats’ argument as “unsound,” Alito went on to write, “When Mr. Rivkin participated in the interviews and co-authored the articles, he did so as a journalist, not an advocate. The case in which he is involved was never mentioned; nor did we discuss any issue in that case either directly or indirectly. His involvement in the case was disclosed in the second article, and therefore readers could take that into account.”
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas released an updated financial disclosure on Thursday showing the took multiple trips on a private jet owned by GOP megadonor Harlan Crow. Thomas’s relationships and vacations with welathy conservatives have been criticized by Democrats, though he says he followed long-standing rules. CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford reports from the Supreme Court.
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The group of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ former clerks who signed on to a letter this week defending the justice from “attacks on his integrity, his character [and] his ethics” included one individual whose integrity has been drawn into serious question: John C. Eastman.
Eastman is accused of undermining the core of American democracy — free and fair elections — by scheming to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Prosecutors there charged him earlier this month as part of a sprawling racketeering case that also implicates former President Donald Trump.
In late 2020, when Trump’s election loss was becoming clear, Eastman wrote a memo outlining the steps then-Vice President Mike Pence could take to stop the formal certification of the election in Congress. He also helped concoct a plan to have an “alternate” slate of electors falsely certify that Trump won in Georgia and elsewhere.
In their open letter, the former clerks called upon Thomas’ incredible life story. The son of a young single mother living in poverty, Thomas eventually went to live with his grandparents and studied at a segregated Southern school. He fell in alongside the Black Power movement before heading to law school and turning heel, later joining the Reagan administration.
“And yet, the stories most often told of Justice Thomas are not these,” the signees complained. “Lately, the stories have questioned his integrity and his ethics for the friends he keeps. They bury the lede.”
These trips were not disclosed before reporters started digging into them, fueling accusations that Thomas — and the high court itself — may not actually exhibit “unimpeachable” integrity as his former clerks maintain. Thomas’ wife’s exploits have also sparked alarm; Virginia “Ginni” Thomas has stood by the idea the 2020 election was fraudulent.
Other signees include James C. Ho, now a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit who recently argued that anti-abortion doctors “experience an aesthetic injury” when a patient chooses to end a pregnancy; Fox News pundit Laura Ingraham; and Judicial Crisis Network President Carrie Severino, who has helped shape the federal court system by recommending judicial appointments like those of Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
Clarence Thomas and another oft-criticized conservative justice, Samuel Alito, asked for a 90-day extension to file their 2022 financial disclosure forms earlier this year.
But determining whether Thomas violated ethics rules and laws by failing to disclose that hospitality is tricky.
The law in question is the Ethics in Government Act, and how it should be applied to the extravagant travel that Thomas and other justices have been treated to has been a subject of debate.
The debate centers on what counts as “personal hospitality” – i.e., accommodations and entertainment that judges are treated to personally by their friends – which does not have to be reported on annual financial disclosures under certain contexts.
The Supreme Court’s critics note that, even if Thomas was not technically in violation of the rules, his pattern of accepting – and not reporting – lavish experiences such as skybox tickets to major sporting events and far-flung trips on mega-yachts shows that the high court cannot be trusted to police itself under the current standards. Some argue that more stringent ethical reforms – perhaps in the form of legislation – are needed.
Further complicating the picture is that the regulations laying out when personal hospitality need not be reported have recently been tightened. Thomas’ defenders have pointed to those changes, announced earlier this year, to argue that the old regime did not require the justice to report the types of hospitality now under scrutiny. Thomas himself – in a rare statement released in April, when ProPublica published its first investigation into the extravagant travel perks he has received – noted that reworked ethical guidance and vowed to follow it going forward.
But assessing whether the gifts and hospitality described in the latest ProPublica report – which puts the tally at 38 destination vacations, 26 private jet flights, eight helicopter trips and a dozen VIP tickets to sporting events – would require disclosure, either then or under the tightened rules, is a complicated question. It sometimes depends on details about how the high-end trips were financed that were not fully fleshed out by the report.
“The question is: Who is absorbing the cost?” said Stephen Gillers, a New York University School of Law professor who has written extensively about legal ethics and rules.
Thomas is not the only justice who has engaged in such jet-setting. When Justice Samuel Alito was the subject of a ProPublica report detailing a 2008 private flight he took to Alaska on a plane owned by a GOP megadonor, he argued in a preemptive essay published by Wall Street Journal’s opinion section that he was not required to disclose it under ethics rules in place at the time. Alito claimed that plane trip fit the definition of “facility” in the requirements’ exemptions for personal hospitality extended to judges “on property or facilities owned by (a) person”
Ethics experts have pushed back on the idea that a private flight could be interpreted to fall under the term “facility.” The new guidance announced in March makes clear that going forward, private plane trips cannot be excluded from the reporting requirements because “substitutes for commercial transportation” are not part of the exemptions.
ProPublica’s latest report, published Thursday, surfaces several helicopter trips that Thomas took apparently at the expense of his billionaire benefactors. Even under the new guidance, there could be some argument that certain helicopter trips may not require disclosure, according to Gillers, who gave the example of a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon.
Since such a ride would not be a replacement of a commercial flight, but instead a form of entertainment offered by a friend, disclosure could potentially be avoided. But another key question, under the new guidance, is whether the helicopter ride was being paid for personally by the friend of the judge.
The new guidance states that accommodations offered to a judge that are not paid for out of the personal pocketbook of an individual – but through a third-party entity, which could include the friend’s company or another business – would require disclosure. If the person footing the cost is seeking a tax deduction for the expense of the accommodation or gift, that would also trigger a judge’s reporting requirement.
Justice Roberts wrote ‘condescending’ letter to Senate when asked to testify about ethics
That means if the helicopter rides described in the ProPublica report – which Thomas occasionally enjoyed in the mid-2000s because of his friendship with the late corporate titan Wayne Huizenga – were on a helicopter owned by Huizenga’s business, Thomas would have to disclose them under the new rules. Even if Huizenga owned the helicopter personally, if he put the cost of the rides toward a tax exemption, that would also mean Thomas’ helicopter jaunts would fall outside of the exemptions.
Thomas’ friendships with oil baron Paul “Tony” Novelly and real estate mogul Harlan Crow have led to the billionaires hosting him on their mega-yachts. Those trips have included ventures with Novelly in the Bahamas and island-hopping with Crow in Indonesia. Since Thomas presumably was sleeping on the yachts, he can argue they’re covered by the disclosure exception for accommodations personally offered by friends.
“Thomas could say that, just as a weekend at a country home at the invitation of a friend is personal hospitality, a week on my friend’s yacht is also personal hospitality. It’s just that one is on the land and one is on the water,” Gillers said.
Another area of scrutiny in the new ProPublica report is tickets to major sporting events – often for skybox seats – that Thomas received from his wealthy friends. Government ethics experts quoted in the story raised the disclosure requirement for gifts valued at more than $415 as potentially problematic for Thomas.
However, according to Gabe Roth, who heads the organization Fix the Court, the ethics questions over the tickets hinge more on the entertainment exemption for judges when they are receiving personal hospitality.
“You could make the argument that sporting tickets count as entertainment,” said Roth, whose group advocates for ethics reform and more transparency in the judiciary.
Thomas is not the only justice who has failed to report sporting event tickets on their disclosures. Justice Elena Kagan attended a University of Wisconsin football game – sitting in the Chancellor’s Box – in 2017 that went unreported on her disclosure for that year, according to a Fix the Court review.
Still, ProPublica points to the example of 60 lower court judges who reported sporting event tickets on their annual forms between 2003 and 2019.
It is a particularly complicated endeavor to decipher Thomas’ reporting obligations for the access he reportedly got, via his friendship with Huizenga, to an exclusive Florida golf course. The report describes a “standing invitation” Thomas had to the members-only course, the Floridian, but ProPublica said it was not clear whether Thomas was granted a full-fledged membership or whether he was just able to visit the course as a guest of Huizenga.
However, there are signs pointing toward disclosure for judges who do receive gifted golf club memberships. In his filing for 2008, Chief Justice John Roberts reported honorary memberships to two golf courses – valued in the thousands of dollars – that he was gifted, while even noting in the disclosure forms that he didn’t use the memberships.
“If that’s John Roberts’ interpretation of the federal disclosure law, I am going to side with him on this,” Roth said.
The latest investigation into Thomas’ conduct also hit on an issue that has emerged around several of the justices: whether their activity with certain charities and other organizations violates ethical standards limiting judges’ participation in fundraising.
ProPublica, piggybacking off recent reporting by The New York Times, dug into Thomas’ involvement with the Horatio Alger Association, which offers scholarships and mentorships to students, and which connected Thomas to some of the billionaire benefactors highlighted in the report.
Thomas, according to The Times and ProPublica, facilitated events for the organization that were hosted at the Supreme Court, with the latest investigation reporting that access to one such event cost $1,500 or more in contributions per person.
Under a set of ethics rules for the judiciary that are separate from the financial disclosure requirements, judges are barred from allowing the “prestige” of their office to be used for the purpose of fundraising.
“You can attend an event of an organization, a non-profit that serves as a fundraiser,” Gillers said. “But the justice or judge cannot be identified as an attraction for people to come and donate money.”
Josh Gerstein says he didn’t expect Politico’s leaked Dobbs draft opinion to be an inflection point in Supreme Court coverage. When Gerstein, Politico’s senior legal affairs reporter, and national security reporter Alexander Ward obtained and published the initial draft majority opinion ending federal protections for abortion last year, “I thought they would just sort of batten down the hatches and pretend like nothing was going on—and I guess I kind of felt like the press would respond in the same way,” he tells me. After the historic scoop came out—never in the modern history of the Court had an entire draft decision of this magnitude been leaked to the press—Gerstein remembers “at least one editor” saying to him, “Oh, no, this is gonna change the way the Supreme Court is covered from here on out.”
Indeed, in the year or so since the Dobbs leak, and amid increasingcalls for deeper, more sustained coverage, we have seen “a dramatic increase in the amount of resources that they put into it,” Gerstein notes. The job of the Supreme Court reporter has traditionally been to track cases, and translate the final opinions to readers. But this term, as the conservative supermajority ruled on hot-button issues including affirmative action, LGBTQ+ rights, and student-debt relief, reporters both on the SCOTUS beat and beyond took a broader approach, with more scrutiny of the justices’ business dealings, relationships, and ethical issues. ProPublica published a series of revelatory stories about Justice Clarence Thomas’s undisclosed gifts from billionaire GOP mega-donor Harlan Crow and Justice Samuel Alito’s undisclosed luxury fishing trips with billionaire GOP mega-donor Paul Singer, who later had cases before the Court. Politico reported how Justice Neil Gorsuch in 2017 failed to disclose a property sale to a CEO whose law firm has since argued at least 22 cases before the Court. The Associated Press examined the ethics practices behind Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s staff prodded colleges and libraries to buy her books.
“To some extent this coverage has existed, just not on a consistent basis,” says investigative reporter Jesse Eisinger, the editor of ProPublica’s SCOTUS coverage. Back in 2004, the Los Angeles Timesreported on the “wealth of gifts” that Thomas had disclosed. Some details of his relationship with Crow have emerged over the years too. “People understood that the Court had politicking, but not politics,” says Eisinger. “The end result of the coverage focused on the opinions, and not the influence and politics that went into the making of those opinions.” The Court’s most recent session highlighted these gaps in coverage as well; just days before the high court essentially gave some businesses the right to discriminate against LGBTQ+ patrons, The New Republic published a remarkable article that raised the possibility that the plaintiff’s lawyers—a conservative anti-LGBTQ+ legal advocacy group—had falsified evidence. (The reporter Melissa Gira Grant called up the allegedly gay man cited in the Court filing as a client who requested a same-sex wedding website from a website design business owner, only to find the man claiming to have never made such a request, and married to a woman.) The eleventh hour report begs the question: Shouldn’t mainstream outlets give similar scrutiny to the origins of cases in the Supreme Court’s docket from the get-go?
Perhaps now, Eisinger wonders, the post-Dobbs public is more primed for this kind of coverage. “Maybe the reason why it’s resonating has nothing to do with us, but just the moment—that people were ready to read it and see it and acknowledge it. Sometimes you just have to have that. The reporting is much less important than the readers.”
The press has treated the Supreme Court with a unique reverence compared to the other two branches of government. Among the legal experts who have made this point is Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, who in a recent essay, titled “Imagine if the Press Covered the Supreme Court Like Congress,” noted that the SCOTUS press corps “has been largely institutionalized to treat anything the court produces as the law, and to push everything else—matters of judicial conduct, how justices are chosen and seated, ethical lapses—off to be handled by the political press.” Lithwick points to scoops related to the Court, aside from Gerstein, largely coming from reporters not directly on the beat. “It speaks volumes about the way the Court has been covered that only in the past year have some legacy news outlets hung out ‘Help Wanted’ ads seeking reporters to cover the Court as though it’s an actual branch of government and not the oracle at Delphi.”
To Lithwick’s point, The New York Times indicated it was rethinking its approach to the beat in hiringAbbie VanSickle of the Marshall Project to, as the announcement put it, “cover the world of the court including its role in politics and the lives of the justices.” The role, Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander told me, “is new, expanding the Times’ coverage of the court.” Earlier this month, the Times’ Sunday front page was devoted to an investigative piece—co-bylined by VanSickle—into Thomas’s ethical standards and relationship with an elite circle of “extraordinarily wealthy, largely conservative members,” to whom Thomas granted “unusual access to the Supreme Court.” The Washington Post, too, has been putting moreenergy into SCOTUS ethics reporting, from scoops on the tens of thousands of dollars that conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo told Kellyanne Conway to pay Ginni Thomas, wife of Clarence, to analysis of justices’ long-running tensions over ethics.
