How Democrats can get SCOTUS in line—without the Judiciary Committee – By Joan McCarter (Daily Kos) / May 5, 2023
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is a one-man scandal mill, increasingly exposing Chief Justice John Roberts for the chump he is by the day. Roberts isn’t just covering up for Thomas. He has failed to disclose income and recuse himself from cases, stemming from his prominent spouse’s work. Justice Amy Coney Barrett also has some spousal conflict issues, and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito aren’t immune from conflict of interest concerns. In short, the Supreme Court’s conservatives are undermining the Supreme Court’s legitimacy.
Despite these recent revelations, Roberts refused to talk to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the blatant ethics abuses and he denied that there’s even a problem on the court, which is not bound by the same code of conduct that the rest of the federal judiciary has to honor. That’s not a problem for Roberts or for Republicans, but it is for Senate Democrats looking for ways to flex their check-and-balance muscles over the court.
Roberts had to know there were more shoes to drop in the seemingly endless Thomas-Crow affair. ProPublica delivers, with a new story alleging that the Texas billionaire and big GOP donor paid at least several years of private school tuition for Thomas’ ward, a grandnephew he took in at age 6. That’s on top of the lavish gifts, yachting trips, and private jet flights—and the fact that Crow is Thomas’ mother’s landlord, gifting her free rent after buying the home from Thomas. You know that Thomas knows how stinky all that largesse from Crow is by the fact that he kept it all secret, failing to disclose any of it. Even when he was declaring another $5,000 gift from someone else to pay for his nephew’s education, Thomas was keeping his sugar daddy Crow a secret.
