Senate Democrats Pressure the Supreme Court to Get Rid of Clarence Thomas By Holding Up Money For Their Security and Protection, Threatening to Make Them Open to Assassination Attempts by Their Antifa Allies

Did you hear that? That was the sound of Norms Being Restored.

Oh, NeverTrump, at long last the Prophecy of David Frum has been fulfilled! The Age of Restored Norms is finally at hand!

This story is about the non-story of Clarence Thomas occasionally going on vacation with -- and having his expenses paid by -- a friend of his named Harlan Crow.

Now, as you can tell from the name "Harlan Crow," Crow is both a conservative mega-donor as well as the human guise of Satan in a Steven King novel.

Harlan Crow, who has a side-gig of selling cursed antiquities to venal people in a Maine town you never heard of, also funds The Dispatch, which, as far as Satan's vicious little tricks go, ranks up there among the best of them. Chef's Kiss, Satan. Well done.

"Well now my name is Harlan Crow, Little Miss.
And I can get you your big break at the Boston Philharmonic.
But I'm going to need two things:
First, your immortal soullllllll.
And second, your mouf for about ten minutes, fifteen tops.
Daddy horny. Daddy very horny."

Glenn Reynolds points out that Justices have been taking all-expense paid trips from politically-interested parties for years and years, but it only seems to matter when there's a chance to attack that wayward n-word (their words) on the court.

Conservative Supreme Court justice hit pieces: We are being lectured on ethics by scoundrels

By Glenn H. Reynolds
May 1, 2023 5:25pm Updated

"Wait till the next empty shoe drops."

That's how law professor Josh Blackman concludes a discussion of The New York Times' open-mouthed discovery that law schools have summer study-abroad programs and sometimes they recruit celebrity professors, even Supreme Court justices, to teach them.

The Times believes it has found a scandal because George Mason's Scalia Law School has one of these programs and seeks Supreme Court justices to teach in the summer.

My law school has one of these too. So does Blackman's.

He comments: "Shocker! A DC law school works hard to connect its students with the leaders of the profession. My own law school has organized similar programs in the past with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Ginsburg. (My students described it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience.)"

But, you see, the law school and the justices involved here are conservative, so the Times thinks -- or, more accurately, wants its readers to think -- there must be something nefarious going on, perhaps "collusion."

Why, George Mason's legal clinic sometimes files friend-of-the-court briefs in the Supreme Court, which the paper would like you to believe is some sort of conflict of interest.

Never mind that schools like Harvard and Yale were -- until recently, anyway -- much closer to many justices on the court than this.

(Note that every member of the court except Amy Coney Barrett is an alumnus of Harvard or Yale.)

There's nothing there, but the Times doesn't care.

The Supreme Court has ruled against the left on guns and abortion and is expected to strike down affirmative action any day now.

Thus it must be delegitimized in any way possible.

Just as the breathless coverage of the (entirely fake) stories of Donald Trump cavorting with Russian hookers in Moscow convinced some people that with so much smoke there must be fire.

Well, if the notion "Where there's smoke, there's fire" is popular, you can expect a brisk trade in smudge-pots, and smudge is what the Times is dispensing.

And other media outlets.

This follows an equally bogus ProPublica story claiming Clarence Thomas' vacations with a rich friend, Harlan Crow, are unethical.

Crow had no business before the court, and Supreme Court justices have always been allowed to have friends. (Chief Justice Fred Vinson played poker with President Harry Truman.)

The point was for the press to make a big deal about it.

It even tried to make Crow out as some sort of Nazi for having a statue of Hitler, omitting that he collects statues of all sorts of deposed dictators, including Joseph Stalin and Nicolae Ceaușescu.

You'd think the Times -- whose own Walter Duranty covered up Stalin's Holodomor, a campaign of starvation that killed millions of Ukrainians -- would be OK with that. (The paper even kept Duranty's Pulitzer after his lies were revealed.)

...

As is so often the case, we are being lectured on ethics by scoundrels.

By its fruit the tree is known.

And the fruit of today's news media is poisonous.

Carrie Campbell Severino reports that Republicans embarrassed Democrats by citing ethical lapses by the leftwing justices.

After pointing out that Charles Schumer had come within one millimeter of threatening the justices with assassination if they struck down Roe v. Wade -- promising that they will "reap the whirlwind" -- Severino writes:

That thuggery was followed by a dark-money-funded push to pack the Court if it did not rule as its left-wing critics desired--and, after Biden's inauguration, by Demand Justice's sordid but successful campaign to pressure Justice Stephen Breyer into retiring from the Court.

Just as compelling was the double standard on display as Republican members listed examples of recent liberal justices omitted in the media's selective focus on Thomas, even though they raised starker ethical questions than the most senior sitting associate justice: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Discussion of Ginsburg, a liberal icon, evoked particularly memorable reactions when Graham asked about examples of ethical questions she raised: In 1998, the National Organization for Women auctioned off a signed copy of Ginsburg's opinion for the Court in United States v. Virginia, which struck down male-only admissions to the Virginia Military Institute. "Do you all agree that if [Justice] Alito signed the Dobbs decision and gave it to the Susan B. Anthony pro-life organization to raise money, all hell would break loose in this country?" One of the Democrats' expert witnesses on the hearing panel, Amanda Frost, conceded that would be a problem, but the panelists were silent on why the 1998 auction was not reported.

Graham also noted Ginsburg's receipt of an award from the National Democratic Women's Club and asked what the reaction would be if Chief Justice John Roberts received an award from a Republican women's club. Or how about her receipt of the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, which entailed a $1 million award for her to allocate among her preferred recipients?

"Does anybody have a problem with that? Does everybody have a problem with that?" Graham continued. From the panelists, crickets. "Well," the ranking member continued, "I'm gonna assume silence means yes." (By the way, Ginsburg not only got a pass for the latter award in the press, but upon her death in 2020, CNN ran a reverent article, "How to honor RBG by supporting her favorite causes" and listed some of her Berggruen Prize money recipients.) And frankly these examples only scratch the surface; the senators could have gotten into additional conflict of interest questions that arose during her tenure.

Democrat Senators demanded that Roberts and another Justice appear before them to be berated. The Democrat Senators want to pressure the Court to change its rules to force Thomas to recuse himself on... well, any important case, really. They just want to neutralize him as a vote.

And then they'll move on to the next one, Gorsuch or Kavanaugh.

At the moment, Justices themselves decide when they feel they are compromised enough in a case to warrant recusal. You know, like Elena Kagan, who was fresh off drafting Obamacare and pressuring Congressmen to pass it, decided she was not invested enough in Obamacare to recuse herself from deciding on its constitutionality.

Roberts, to his credit and to my surprise, said "No" to the demand to be publicly upbraided, with just a soupcon of "Go f*** yourselves" beneath it.

Why did Roberts decline to appear before Congress? Well, for one thing, Congress has no power to compel him to appear. He's at the top of an independent, co-equal branch of government.

For another, Congress is limited in what it can investigate. The power of Congress to investigate isn't in the Constitution; it's one of those powers deemed to exist by the "necessary and proper" clause. But it's a dependent power -- Congress only has this power to the extent it is necessary to carry out one of its explicit powers.

Congress has the power of oversight over some executive departments. Congress has the power to approve or disapprove of some nominees. And Congress has the power to legislate.

Which of those three powers would Congress be advancing by subjecting Supreme Court Justices to badgering, insulting questioning? They do not have the power of oversight over the Supreme Court, and no one is being nominated and approved to the court. Finally, they do not have the power to pass legislation affecting the Supreme Court -- it's a co-equal branch of government and therefore makes its own rules.

So Roberts was quite right to re-assert the Court as a co-equal branch that simply does not answer to partisan Democrat Senators who have been trying to get rid of Clarence Thomas for, what is today, Wednesday? Let's see, this Wednesday is the 3rd, last Wednesday was the 26th... Ah yes, partisan Democrat Senators have been trying to get rid of Clarence Thomas for thirty five f'n' years now.

In this context -- in an attempt to force Supreme Court Justices to appear in an illegal committee hearing with no proper legislative purpose, so they can demand that Roberts just start recusing Thomas from all cases where liberals suspect he might vote conservatively (that is, in almost all cases) -- Democrats are essentially threatening Justices lives by holding up money for their physical security.

Just setting them out in the open fields so that their antifa wolves can kill them.

Debra Heine:

Two Republican Senators tore into their Democrat colleagues Tuesday, accusing them of threatening to cut $10 million in funding for Supreme Court security unless SCOTUS does what they want.

Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) made the explosive accusations during yesterday's Democrat-led "Supreme Court Ethics Reform" hearing.

"The Left is willing to threaten the lives of the justices," said Cruz. "This is disgraceful."

The fiery hearing was held amid a weeks-long media campaign accusing conservative justices of ethics violations and conflicts of interest.

On March 31, fifteen Democrat Senators sent a letter to the to the top Republican and Democrat on a Senate subcommittee in charge of the Supreme Court budget. The Democrats proposed language to be attached to next year's Supreme Court funding bill requiring the court to adopt a new ethical code with a monitor answerable to Congress to enforce it.

"Congress has broad authority to compel the Supreme Court to institute these reforms, which would join other requirements already legislatively mandated," the senators wrote. "And Congress's appropriations power is one tool for achieving these changes."

The Democrats have a brazenly-obvious inside-outside game going with their antifa militias -- the Democrats will strip protection from Justices from the Inside, so that antifa can then literally murder them on the Outside.

Norms have been restored.

posted by Ace at 03:45 PM

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