Leftists prize power above all else, and when they don't get their way -- including or especially when conservatives win fair and square -- they are more than willing to wage bare-knuckles war against people or institutions that stand in their way. They wax eloquent about "democracy" and "norms" and "institutions." But they don't really mean any of it, as their actions make clear. This is true at the hyper-local level, as we covered this week, and it's true at the highest echelons of the federal government. In recent weeks, a series of 'investigative report' hit pieces have emerged from Left-aligned media sources, supposedly exposing the ethical entanglements of two conservative Supreme Court justices. The progressive website ProPublica produced two stories about the friendships and financial transactions of Clarence Thomas, a conservative jurist the Left has been smearing since the moment he was nominated to the Court decades ago. As we've previously noted, writing at The Federalist, David Harsanyi dissected the initial 'scoop' against Thomas:
[In the ProPublica article] we learn that the Supreme Court justice has a super-rich friend. And that super-rich friend, GOP donor Harlan Crow, invites Thomas on “luxury” vacations from time to time at his “private resort,” “sprawling ranch,” “all-male retreat,” and on his “superyacht.” As all the adjectives strongly suggest, all of it is very upscale. Most of the luxury vacations that happen “virtually every year,” it seems, have Clarence and Ginni Thomas spending “about a week” during the summer as guests at one of Crow’s resorts in the Adirondacks...The internet has “exploded” with comments from the usual suspects mischaracterizing the trips as bribes, though everything reported by ProPublica is completely legal and unrelated to Thomas’ work on the court...Thomas has zero legal obligation to disclose where he goes on vacation to journalists or anyone else — whether they are “luxury” trips or not. The idea that Thomas is secretly engaging in these activities because he fails to provide the editors at ProPublica or The New York Times with his itinerary is beyond preposterous.
The only even debatable part of the disclosures would be his failure to report private flights as transportation expenses. (A genuine piece of journalism would have investigated the practices of all justices on this front.) But the idea, as one “expert” claims in the piece, that spending time on a friend’s yacht should be reported as transportation, rather than a vacation, is also nonsensical. While the purpose of ProPublica’s piece is to frame all this as unethical, it offers not a single substantive instance of anything remotely approaching a conflict of interest. No cases involving Harlan Crow have ever reached Thomas. And there are no examples of Thomas having changed his positions to accommodate anyone.
There's no 'there' there on conflict-of-interest corruption, despite the insinuations. For his part, Justice Thomas explained in a statement that he's followed all the guidelines, based on conversations with colleagues and officials, and that he will continue to follow the rules -- even as the rules are changing:
In his statement Friday, Thomas said the Crows "are among our dearest friends, and we have been friends for over twenty-five years," and that he and his wife "have joined them on a number of family trips." He wrote that he had consulted with "colleagues and others in the judiciary" earlier in his career, who "advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable. I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure, and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines," Thomas said. "These guidelines are now being changed, as the committee of the Judicial Conference responsible for financial disclosure for the entire federal judiciary just this past month announced new guidance. And, it is, of course, my intent to follow this guidance in the future."
A follow-up ProPublica piece suggested that there was something shady about a real estate sale involving a property owned by Thomas' family (many of the people who've pronounced themselves very "concerned" about the transaction did not care one bit about a highly suspicious land deal involving Barack Obama and a wealthy slum lord and convicted felon in Chicago, an issue that was largely ignored during the 2008 presidential campaign). James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal addressed the Thomas sale, calling ProPublica's reporting "slipshod and incurious." He notes that Thomas "inherited a one-third interest in a few modest houses" his maternal grandparents owned after they died, decades ago. It appears that there was a further transaction involving this property nearly a decade ago, and that Thomas appears to have mistakenly not disclosed it:
Some facts are known and undisputed. Mr. Crow, a Dallas developer and friend of the justice, confirmed in a written statement to ProPublica that Savannah Historic Development LLC, a company he established, bought “the childhood home of Justice Thomas,” which Mr. Crow plans to convert into a museum “telling the story of our nation’s second black Supreme Court Justice.” Public documents show that the company paid Anderson’s heirs a total of $133,363 for the Savannah house and two adjacent empty lots. According to ProPublica, Justice Thomas’s mother, 94-year-old Leola Williams, lived in the house at least until 2020 and possibly still does. Assuming Justice Thomas received one-third of the sale price (or any amount more than $1,000), the text of the federal financial-disclosure statute would require him to have reported the transaction in Part VII (“Investments and Trusts”) of his annual AO-10 form for 2014. He didn’t do so and may need to file an amended form. But my review of Justice Thomas’s disclosures and other documents convinces me that any failure to disclose was an honest mistake. On all other matters involving his scanty real-estate inheritance, he followed the Filing Instructions for Judicial Officers and Employees, prepared by the Committee on Financial Disclosures of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Those instructions don’t make clear the statutory obligation to disclose the 2014 transaction.
That's a reasonable conclusion, based on the evidence. Taranto also points to a "sloppy reporting error" by ProPublica, which unfairly paints Thomas in a negative light, based on the actual facts. He also notes that some of the basis of their "scoop" -- supposedly unearthed by the dogged work of these reporters -- was made public in a memoir Thomas published in 2007. "Justice Thomas disclosed all this in a book that’s available on Kindle for $13.99. If you’re a journalist whose job is to investigate him, you probably ought to read it—especially if you aspire to produce work 'with moral force,'” Taranto writes. Also of note: Thomas' longtime liberal colleague, Stephen Breyer, has come to his defense, calling Thomas a "man of integrity." Meanwhile, Politico got in on the action, publishing a story about Justice Neil Gorsuch. Harsanyi looked into it and upbraided it as "propaganda:"
For nearly two years before he was even nominated as a Supreme Court justice, a group that included Gorsuch tried to sell a Colorado property they owned together since 2005. And nine days after Gorsuch was confirmed, but before he ruled on any cases, the property was sold to a lawyer who runs Colorado’s biggest law firm. Gorsuch netted between $250,000 and $500,000 on the sale. The reason Politico’s Heidi Przybyla is aware of Gorsuch’s supersecret arrangement is that it’s listed right there on his publicly available federal disclosure form from 2017 alongside every other income — stock sales, etc. Yet, one of Politico’s central insinuations is that Gorsuch was trying to conceal this transaction because he “did not report the identity of the purchaser.” And it’s true that the nominee didn’t fill out the “Identity of buyer/seller” column for the estate transaction — or, for that matter, on any other income. I went back and looked at all the disclosure forms of Supreme Court Justices in 2017, and none of them made a single notation in that column for any transaction. And, as far as I can tell, that line has never seen as much as a scribble from any justice in any year. Politico is holding Gorsuch to a completely new standard. The piece also goes on to claim that Gorsuch “didn’t indicate that there had been a real estate sale or a purchaser.” This is just false. On the very first page of the disclosure, Gorsuch notes that he was a member of the “Walden Group, LLC,” right next to the words “mountain property.” On the next page, he lists the specifics.
That's a neat trick, clearly designed to create the appearance of impropriety around one justice by inventing a brand new "ethics" standard that hasn't applied to anyone else, coupled with an outright falsehood. "It takes only a few paragraphs to figure out that Gorsuch broke no law and did nothing that a good-faith observer could deem unethical. So the piece, much like the coverage of Thomas’s friendship with Harlan Crow, tries to cover up its lack of substantiation with a veneer of vaguely journalistic-sounding verbiage," Harsanyi concludes, also noting that the 'journalist' in question also carried water for the smear efforts against Brett Kavanaugh during the disgraceful circus the Left inflicted on the country during his confirmation process. As "think pieces" and other forms of quasi-"journalism" proliferate questioning the legitimacy and authority of the Court, this point is utterly inarguable (and it's also true of Left-driven pushes to "reform" or expand" SCOTUS):
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— IncognegroNeville 🇯🇲🇺🇸 (@FormerlyCBM) April 25, 2023
If the current SCOTUS was 6 to 3 in the liberal direction, 0 think pieces would be written, wrote, or writing about the dangers of 9 unelected robe wearing people being unaccountable to voters. Zero, zilch, nyet, none.
It's all about power and outcomes, period. Always has been, always will be. I'm actually open to a more rigorous and explicit code of ethics for federal judges, beyond what's already in place, but such an effort would need to be undertaken in a scrupulously non-ideological way. But if these "news" stories are supposed to be the impetus for those types of changes, that's very weak sauce -- which is why I suspect many conservatives aren't interested in playing along. Any effort along those lines would appear to be more about delegitimization than good governance. This floor speech by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on this overall subject, including some brazenly hardball tactics being floated on the Left, is excellent:
“In 2020, our colleague the Democratic Leader stood on the steps of the Supreme Court and threatened Justices by name with a ‘whirlwind’ of retaliation if they failed to rule the way he wanted. Then, after top Democrats encouraged mob outrage over a leaked draft opinion, President Biden’s Attorney General failed to enforce clear federal law and put a stop to illegal protests that sought to intimidate the Justices at their private family homes. Recently, a number of Senate Democrats have gone so far as to propose defunding security needs for the Justices and their families if Chief Justice Roberts doesn’t reorganize internal matters the way Democrats would prefer. So after fanning the flames of violence against an equal branch of government, Democrats now want to de-fund the Justices’ ability to protect themselves and their families if certain Senators don’t get their way. They’re trying to turn impartial judges into partisan hostages. It’s beyond irresponsible.
And then, of course, there are the desperate and never-ending attempts to smear and defame Justices appointed by Republican presidents, going back years and decades. Over the last few weeks, two Justices have been particularly subjected to the carousel of character assassination. I’m sure it will be another Justice’s turn again before too long. This is simply how the far left treats the rule of law. Let me just repeat that I have total confidence in Justice Gorsuch, Justice Thomas, and all seven of their distinguished colleagues, no matter who appointed them. Just yesterday all nine Justices explained in a statement their joint approach to maintaining their high ethical standards. Unlike the activists and elected Democrats trying to tear them down, the Justices have proven their sobriety and judicial temperament over their long and distinguished careers.”
In addition to the illegal intimidation at the justices' homes, the law against which the Biden Justice Department won't enforce, there was an assassination plot against one of the conservative members of the Court. It barely received any coverage at all, and top Democrats just pretend it never happened. There has been quite a bit more coverage of the phony 'scandals' mentioned above. And we all know exactly why that is.
