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Last night Rachel Maddow had a fascinating conversation with Rep Louise Slaughter from NY about legally pursuing Justice Clarence Thomas for what appear to be deliberate attempts to hide his wife's salary on his income tax returns over the last several years.
Apparently Ginny Thomas,as head of right wing lobbying group, "Liberty Central," is paid handsomely by the Koch Brothers but this salary (around $700K) has not been reported on her husband's tax returns for some years. The whole issue of a Supreme Court Justice's "not understanding instructions on the form" stretches credulity, of course, but the implications go beyond questions of his culpability on tax matters. The SCOTUS Citizens United decision is chief case in point.
There are formal expectations (if not laws) against a member of a SCOTUS Justice's family being involved in matters that could come before the court. The Thomas's have been violating this convention or law for many years. The Citizens United case in particular is in the cross hairs. While Clarence was involved in deciding the case, Ginny was involved in lobbying for the Koch Brother's position that corporations are people and should be allowed to give as much money as they want to candidates.
The Thomas's behavior suggest a clear violation. It turns out that Clarence could be required to recuse himself from that decision. The law provides for him actually recusing himself retroactively. If that were to happen, the decision would be overturned since it was a 5-4 vote with Clarence as the deciding vote. Is it too grandiose to say that overturning Citizens United could shift the advantage in 2012? A lot of freaking money would be out of the picture...!
I do not understand who has legal standing to bring this charge and establish a finding, but this is pretty blatant and could fall to the Chief Justice. Of course the Justice Department can pursue the tax issue but I don't think they have jurisdiction over SCOTUS conflict of interest/recusal matters. Anyone know who does?
UPDATE: My error: This was actually discussed initially and, again, tonight, on Countdown,not RMS. Keith O. interviewed John Dean on the legal machinations involved in retroactive recusal. Dean said the action would have to be initiated by the injured party; in the case of Citizens United, it would be whomever was on the losing side of the case. There is a one year statute of limitations, though. His take was that it was highly unlikely to happen at this point in the process. Retroactive recusal has never been applied to SCOTUS, only to lower court rulings.
However, there could be a better shot at removing Thomas in the upcoming HCR case that SCOTUS will hear in this term. In this case the pro-HRC forces can begin now to marshal evidence that Clarence Thomas should recuse himself because his wife has taken lots of money from the anti-HCR forces over the past years. This could go somewhere but only if the other Supremes pressure Thomas. It might actually require a majority of the high court to force him off the case. Not crystal clear on that part of the process. But the Dems in the U.S. House of Representatives are all over this scandal and this rather obscure remedy. It seems they will continue to pursue all options.
by Linda Greenhouse (Opinionator): Judicial opinions on the constitutionality of the new health care law are pouring out of the federal courts. With the general expectation that the Supreme Court will have to resolve what is now a clear conflict between two federal courts of appeals, the individual lower-court decisions have pretty much ceased to make news. By the time the Supreme Court rules, if and when it does, a decision earlier this month by the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., throwing out Virginia's challenge to the statute without reaching the ultimate constitutional question, will be all but forgotten.
[Text removed for copyright violation. Please restrict use of copyrighted pieces to short excerpts - wt]
On April 3, 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously struck down a ban on gay marriages and simultaneously lit a fire under extremists who are willing to say and do anything in order to marginalize or eliminate the third branch of our government.
The nearly 19-month long campaign in Iowa that followed the decision, which was paid for by reckless special interest groups and encouraged by out-of-state politicians, ended on November 2, 2010 when the extremists won, and three justices were voted off the bench.
Throughout the retention campaign, prospective presidential candidates pandered to the Iowa extremists who were attacking the judiciary:
Rick Santorum traveled across the state to raise the campaign’s profile
Newt Gingrich said the retention vote would be a “clarion call” to the legal secular elite
Mitt Romney attacked the nonpartisan group of Iowa justices by calling them members of an “activist court”
Tim Pawlenty encouraged the radicals to oust the judges if they disagreed with their ruling
Mike Huckabee campaigned for the most radical gubernatorial candidate who later led the effort to oust the judges
After the dust had settled after the election, it became clear which presidential candidate had been working the hardest to pander to the extremists: Newt Gingrich.
Democrat JoAnne Kloppenburg has declared victory over incumbent and Walker supporter, David Prosser (R), in a State Supreme Court race in Wisconsin. Apparently 19 counties flipped since the election of Scott Walker as Governor and voted for the Democrat. The overall margin is just a couple hundred votes but, because the state has so many Independents, this flip is considered huge.
This election means that the Governor's bill to strip away union bargaining rights will likely not be heard until the new Court member is sworn in in August. It also spells good news for the recall effort which Dems are mobilizing against Republican Senators.
This is the first chance people in WI have had to vote since the Walker election. And their voices will be heard around the country. This is a great day (barring some recount glitch) for Wisconsin and for all the states whose governments are out of control!
John Cole of Balloon Juice has collected his new list of requirements for a Supreme Court justice. They include:
2.) Ed Whelan demands a valid driver's license and there will be a proficiency test to demonstrate "mastery" of the subject...
5.) Somewhat related to #4, K-LO has decided that four out of over one hundred justices have been women, and this poses a grave threat to the white male, so no more va-jay-jays- women need not apply...
9.) Michael Steele is demanding that you not question the Constitutional Right to practice of slavery.
Justice's wife launches 'tea party' group
The nonprofit run by Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is likely to test notions of political impartiality for the court.
http://www.latimes.com/news/na...
Clarence Thomas should resign his appointment or be impeached.
How can New Hampshire protect the integrity of its election process from the disastrous decision by SCOTUS to let the money flow freely from corporations? Rep. Jim Splaine is working on it:
The court found that corporations, for the purposes of campaign spending, are people with respect to their free speech rights. One look in a mirror demonstrates the flaws in that logic. People, for example, can vote; corporations cannot.
In New Hampshire, Portsmouth Democratic Rep. James Splaine is again sponsoring a bill that would prohibit companies from donating to campaigns directly from their own coffers. Instead, his bill would permit companies to set up political action committees if they wanted to donate to campaigns. The court's recent ruling likely makes it impossible to impose an outright ban on corporate contributions to fund ads that support or oppose a candidate. So Splaine may have to settle for a bill that doesn't prohibit them but does require full and immediate public disclosure. That's the next best thing.
And on the federal level, today Congressman Paul Hodes has called for a constitutional amendment in this direction:
"I've been fighting to stop the power of money in politics and now, after consulting with constitutional scholars, I believe a constitutional amendment is necessary. It will empower the people of the Granite State to stop unlimited special interest money from drowning out their voices. If we delay action, we let business as usual in Washington continue," Hodes added.
Hodes will introduce the exact language of the amendment in the coming days.
If 30 minute spots are the mother's milk of a campaign, its time to switch to soy, buy stock in WMUR, then shoot your tv. The unlimited spending by outside groups will proliferate and metastasize this cycle, based on the Supremes expected ruling on the Hilary case.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01...
The United States Chamber of Commerce, the goliath of the lobbying world, is expected to outline its battle plan next week for the midterms. It spent $25 million on advertisements and get-out-the-vote efforts in the 2006 elections and $36 million in 2008, and will spend far more this year, chamber officials say. And in the last election it was already probing the limits of the court's rulings with commercials like one in New Hampshire denouncing Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, as "a taxing machine."
FORMER SENATOR ALAN SIMPSON from Wyoming was one of the few conservative GOP senators I respected - being pro-choice, he complained about the "Hundred-Percenters" who got on his case for any deviation from the party line.
This past Friday he had an Op-Ed essay in the Washington Post, explaining why he submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in a case coming before the US Supreme Court. It will determine whether it is constitutional to sentence a teenager to life-without-parole (for a crime that did not involve the taking of a life). Alan Simpson explains why he believes the answer is no .....
Term Saw High Court Move to The Right
Roberts-Led March Likely to Continue
OK so this isn't exactly shocking, but I'm glad the Post put it on the record. It's clear from the article that Roberts wanted to move it further.
On the verge of declaring the key provision of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional, but then stepping back. Looking hard at whether some protections of minorities amount to violations of the Constitution, then leaving the topic for another day. Appearing sympathetic to school officials for their decision to strip-search a 13-year-old student, but shielding them only from any liability for their actions.
Doesn't lack of liability essentially mean it's allowed?
The court's conservatives made it harder for those pressing civil rights claims to get into court, and the same for environmentalists. Conservative justices raised the bar for those alleging age discrimination, a decision that liberal Justice John Paul Stevens called "an unabashed display of judicial lawmaking." They declined to find a constitutional right to DNA testing for prisoners who say the tests could prove their innocence.
I suppose, if one takes a strict constructionist view, that videotaped testimony could be excluded. No mention of that in the Constitution.
It is a familiar ideological split: Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. on one side; Stevens, Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Souter on the other. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy remains in the role of the decider, finding himself in the majority more than any other justice and siding twice as often in 5 to 4 votes with conservatives as he did with liberals.
I know Jeffrey Rosen has annoyed some people lately, but his book The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America is quite good, and he and Jeff Toobin, in The Nine, shaped my negative view of Justice Kennedy. You're almost better off with Scalia -- almost. Scalia has been known to shift to make the wind blow to the right.
Yale law professor Jack M. Balkin, who runs a popular liberal blog on the court, wrote that the court's decision to stop short of finding the provision unconstitutional -- as well as its decision to put aside equal-protection questions about Title VII of the Civil Rights Act -- was due to the country's changing political climate.
"If I am correct, what put the conservative Justices (and especially Justice Kennedy) on the defensive was the assumption that they would risk sacrificing the Court's legitimacy in a climate in which neither the President nor the Congress would support their gambit and would in fact do everything possible to undermine their legitimacy," he wrote.
I can remember when I thought the court was nine great legal minds doing their best for our country. I still think that, sometimes, in the same way I irrationally believe baseball players don't do steroids. Then they get tested, and I have to face the truth. It's not pleasant.
"President Obama announced on Tuesday that he will nominate the federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, choosing a daughter of Puerto Rican parents raised in Bronx public housing projects to become the nation's first Hispanic justice." - PETER BAKER and JEFF ZELENY for the NY Times
Sotomayor has been blocked by Republicans in the past which speaks well of her time on the bench but not so well about the upcoming confirmation hearings. Other than that I am not really familiar with her.
I think it is nice that Obama chose a woman and a Hispanic. It is about time a Hispanic was represented in the highest court and IMHO we need more women in every aspect of government but truth be told I'd get behind the whitest, whitest old man on the planet if his decision reflected my ideals.
With that in mind, what do we know about Sotomayor's positions on important issues. What is her history with choice issues and civil rights?
That's just a hook: Although he's a Dartmouth alum, Shribman wouldn't know the last New Englander if that Yankee impaled him on a maple syrup tap. He suggests Yaz and San Mateo's Tom Brady (!?!) as quintessential New Englanders. Now, class, if you want to list a Sox player of recent decades in that role, who is it? (Hint: he's from Charlestown or Bellows Falls, they argue about it.)
This is a good reminder, just when we need it, that it's good that we won:
Ginsburg has recently told her former law clerks and others that she envisioned serving on the court into her 80s, although those comments were made before the latest diagnosis.
Ginsburg is one of only two female justices ever. The other is Sandra Day O'Connor, who retired in 2006.
In her previous bout with cancer, Ginsburg received treatment throughout the court's term and never missed a day on the bench.
This editorial hits the nail on the head about the precarious nature of the court today. It is one vote from full tilt Right Wing Nut Job Control.
Blog on !
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07...
Editorial
Published: July 3, 2008 A Supreme Court on the Brink
In some ways, the Supreme Court term that just ended seems muddled: disturbing, highly conservative rulings on subjects like voting rights and gun control, along with important defenses of basic liberties in other areas, including the rights of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The key to understanding the term lies in the fragility of the court's center. Some of the most important decisions came on 5-to-4 votes - a stark reminder that the court is just one justice away from solidifying a far-right majority that would do great damage to the Constitution and the rights of ordinary Americans
With the nomination of Michael Mukasey for attorney general, to replace the Alberto Gonzales, being in the News lately, the issue of Constitutional Rights has once again moved to the front burner of American Politics. Senator Christopher Dodd, much to his credit has been an out-spoken defender of Constitutional Rights:
much of the focus has been on Mukasey's non-answer to if he considers waterboarding torture and thus unconstitutional
...
"No, I was the first senator among the presidential candidates to say no," said Dodd in response to a question if he would support Mukasey's nomination.
Way to go Senator Dodd! We need more Senators fighting to protect the Constitution, like you have! You have my respect Sir.
Since my Candidate of choice is John Edwards however, this made me wonder, "What does Edwards think about Protecting the Constitution?"
To see what I found out, read on please ...
(BTW, I think an Edwards/Dodd Ticket would be an excellent combination to restore a broken America, too)
Last week was a significant one for Bill Richardson's campaign, with a major address in Washington, D.C., on climate change and how to end the bloodshed in Iraq.
It was also a significant week for peace and stability in Korea and Asia - which highlights Richardson's expertise in foreign affairs and his diplomatic skills. With Richardson as President we get two for the price of one - a can-do leader on domestic issues and an experienced diplomat that knows how to bring people and nations together.
