Supreme Court is now illegitimate. It will never recover. The justices are coming to the point they don’t care about public perception. It will get much worse
Clarence Thomas
- Thread starter Joes Place
- Start date
I won't say never recover - heck, it wasn't that long ago that the SC was once considered the one institution that was insulated from partisan squabbles.
It is possible for them to restore their reputation and the trust of the American people...but first they have to recognize they have a problem. Until that happens, you are correct that things will get worse before it gets better.
Only the most partisan of judges will be considered moving forward. The nomination and confirmation process is broken. We have judges lying under oath during confirmation. We have judges accepting million dollar vacations. It’s pretty bad
That’s exactly it. But we are beyond pretty bad. With a solid 30-35% of the population brainwashed otherwise.
Justice Thomas lost me long ago when he said the appearance of money does not indicate corruption. That was after I think Citizens United. Now I know why he said that.
We have a known. Corrupt. Justice on our bench. Honestly I think that dude bought his moms house only to be able to say he turned one of the most prominent black individuals in our nation into a slave holding Nazi house. Cause that’s what demented sick ****s do. Yep. Takes one to know one.
I hope I’m wrong.
I
It’s rapidly becoming farcical that the House Judiciary hasn’t said anything yet.
It’s rapidly becoming farcical that the House Judiciary hasn’t said anything yet.
Every post you make is nothing but ignorance including this one. Non-factual and lacking understanding. Thinking Bernie isn't "rich" is ignorant. You know what else is fact? Feinstein and Pelosi have enriched themselves and their husbands because of their positions. What an idiot!
I didn't say that, but thanks for putting words in my mouth that weren't said.
Probably should read up a little more.
Opinion | The Truth About Clarence Thomas’s Disclosures
He reported carefully on his inherited real estate. ProPublica’s reporting was slipshod and incurious.
www.wsj.com
Clarence Thomas lost his beloved maternal grandparents barely a month apart in the spring of 1983. Myers Anderson, whom his grandson knew as “Daddy,” died of a stroke on March 30. Christine Anderson, known as “Aunt Tina,” suffered a stroke as well and died on May 1. “Perhaps, I thought, she’d lost the will to live,” Justice Thomas writes in his 2007 memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.”
The Andersons, who were 75 and 70 respectively, are buried at Palmyra Baptist Church in Liberty County, Ga. When they died, Mr. Thomas was 34 and chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “Losing Aunt Tina a month after Daddy was more painful than I could ever have imagined,” he writes. “How could I have let myself grow away from her, or from the man who . . . was the only real father I’d ever had?”
Mr. Thomas inherited a one-third interest in a few modest houses Myers Anderson owned. Forty years later, ProPublica has taken a different kind of interest in those properties. ProPublica describes itself as “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force.” It promises “deep-dive reporting” dedicated to “exposing corruption, informing the public about complex issues, and using the power of investigative journalism to spur reform.”
Give ProPublica credit for admitting its journalism has an agenda. So does mine, as the word “opinion” atop this page should make clear. But ProPublica’s acknowledgment that it’s in the opinion business doesn’t excuse it from the obligation to report facts accurately, carefully and thoroughly.
ProPublica has at least three reporters working the Clarence Thomas beat—Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski. Their story, published last Thursday, is titled “Billionaire Harlan Crow Bought Property From Clarence Thomas. The Justice Didn’t Disclose the Deal.” The troika write that the lack of disclosure “appears to be a violation of the law, four ethics law experts told ProPublica.” That statement is equivocal because it’s a legal theory based on incomplete facts. Justice Thomas didn’t respond to ProPublica’s questions or to mine.
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.
Further, the ProPublica troika made a sloppy reporting error, the effect of which is to cast Justice Thomas’s disclosures in a falsely unfavorable light—to make them look shambolic or perhaps even dishonest when in fact they followed the filing instructions without fail.
The reporters’ error involves a confusion about what Justice Thomas did disclose. “By the early 2000s,” ProPublica reports, “he had stopped listing specific addresses of property he owned in his disclosures. But he continued to report holding a one-third interest in what he described as ‘rental property at ## 1, 2, & 3’ in Savannah.” It’s worth noting—ProPublica doesn’t—that the filing instructions (on page 32) prescribe disclosing rental properties in precisely this manner.
Not surprised at all that you would think a $3M net worth at age 81 makes someone rich, but as usual, you are wrong. That's a nice nest egg but far from rich.
Also not surprised you completely missed the point claiming Pelosi and Feinstein made their money due to politics. That, too, is wrong.
You are one dumb mother****er.
The story continues: “Two of the houses were torn down around 2010, according to property records and a footnote in Thomas’ annual disclosure archived by Free Law Project.” That footnote in Justice Thomas’s 2010 disclosure states in full: “Part VII, Line 2 - Two of the Georgia rental properties have been torn down. The only remaining property is an old house in Liberty County.”
Liberty County is where our journey began, but the ProPublica troika somehow missed it on the map. Their story leads the reader to think that the “remaining property” was the Savannah house where Justice Thomas’s mother lived. A Friday letter from the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington—co-signed by Virginia Canter, the first of ProPublica’s “four ethics experts”—expressly says so and accuses Justice Thomas of deceptively disclosing (rather than failing to disclose) the property’s disposition.
The footnote makes clear that this is wrong. There’s a fourth property. Justice Thomas’s 2009 disclosure listed three rental properties in “Sav., GA.” Beginning in 2010, he listed only one, in “Liberty Cty, GA.” Savannah is in Chatham County, not Liberty. But Liberty County is in the Savannah area, roughly a 45-minute drive from the city. For someone living hundreds of miles away, it would have been reasonable to describe the three rental properties collectively as being “in Savannah.”
That implies that Justice Thomas never disclosed his interest in the Savannah house where his mother lived. But he didn’t need to. “Information pertaining to a personal residence is exempted from reporting, unless the property generates rental income,” the filing instructions say on page 33. Nor was there any requirement to disclose the ownership of the other two Savannah properties after the houses were demolished. Who wants to rent an empty lot in Savannah?
When an asset isn’t sold but stops being reportable—in this case because it is no longer capable of generating rental income—page 50 of the filing instructions directs the filer to “insert ‘(Y)’ after the asset description in Column A and leave Columns B-D blank, or include an explanatory note in Part VIII.” Justice Thomas did exactly that for the Savannah rental properties in 2010, and for the Liberty County property in 2015. The latter footnote reads simply: “Line 1: The asset listed on line 1 does not receive any rental income for this property.” This is the disclosure Ms. Canter and her co-signers mistake for a deception.
When my mother died in 2019, I inherited a one-third interest in her house, which I sold to my brother. I understand the statute to mean that if I had been a federal judge, I would be obligated to disclose that transaction. But if I hadn’t been made aware of the statute, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to think of my inheritance as an “investment,” and I searched the filing instructions in vain for language that makes plain a judge’s duty to disclose this sort of transaction.
In Justice Thomas’s circumstances, moreover, the instructions seem to say not to report the sale of the former rental properties. The above-quoted “insert ‘(Y)’ ” language on page 50 is followed immediately by this sentence: “In subsequent years, this asset should be deleted from Part VII.”
One may be tempted to think that of all people a judge should know what the law says. But that’s a nonsensical standard. A judge’s job isn’t to memorize statute books; it’s to discern laws’ meaning and their application to the facts in cases that litigants bring before him. Inasmuch as the law applies to the judge’s personal affairs and interests, he’s in the same boat with the rest of us—often dependent on lawyers or other specialists, such as the Committee on Financial Disclosures of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, to make sense of his duties and rights.
The job of a journalist is similar in some ways to that of a judge. Both involve asking questions, testing arguments, and judiciously ascertaining facts and their significance. ProPublica failed to consider some obvious questions: Where is Liberty County? What is Justice Thomas’s connection to the place? If the remaining rental property was the house Mr. Crow’s company bought, what was it doing on Justice Thomas’s AO-10 for 2015, the year after the sale closed?
Journalists don’t memorize books either. I read “My Grandfather’s Son” when it came out in 2007, but as I researched this article I had to return to it and refresh my memory. “Daddy’s people worked on a three-thousand-acre rice plantation in Liberty County,” Justice Thomas writes, “and after their manumission they stayed nearby. The maternal side of my mother’s family also came from Liberty County, and probably worked on the same plantation.”
Daddy grew up on a family plot known as “the farm,” which “had been passed down undivided from generation to generation, as was often customary with land owned by southern blacks. Any family member was entitled to live there.” The fields were fallow by Christmas 1957, when Clarence was 9 and Daddy decided to build a house there. He enlisted the help of Clarence and his brother, Myers Thomas, and “by springtime we’d finished building a simple four-room house,” writes Justice Thomas, who spent his summers there until he left for college in 1967.
When Aunt Tina died in May 1983, “no sooner did Myers and I go home to the farm after the funeral than some of our relatives started fighting over the contents of the house, declaring that Aunt Tina would have wanted them to have this item or that,” Justice Thomas recounts. “Part of me was disgusted by their greed, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. Death had already stolen the only things in the house that mattered to me.”
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.”
Liberty County is where our journey began, but the ProPublica troika somehow missed it on the map. Their story leads the reader to think that the “remaining property” was the Savannah house where Justice Thomas’s mother lived. A Friday letter from the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington—co-signed by Virginia Canter, the first of ProPublica’s “four ethics experts”—expressly says so and accuses Justice Thomas of deceptively disclosing (rather than failing to disclose) the property’s disposition.
The footnote makes clear that this is wrong. There’s a fourth property. Justice Thomas’s 2009 disclosure listed three rental properties in “Sav., GA.” Beginning in 2010, he listed only one, in “Liberty Cty, GA.” Savannah is in Chatham County, not Liberty. But Liberty County is in the Savannah area, roughly a 45-minute drive from the city. For someone living hundreds of miles away, it would have been reasonable to describe the three rental properties collectively as being “in Savannah.”
That implies that Justice Thomas never disclosed his interest in the Savannah house where his mother lived. But he didn’t need to. “Information pertaining to a personal residence is exempted from reporting, unless the property generates rental income,” the filing instructions say on page 33. Nor was there any requirement to disclose the ownership of the other two Savannah properties after the houses were demolished. Who wants to rent an empty lot in Savannah?
When an asset isn’t sold but stops being reportable—in this case because it is no longer capable of generating rental income—page 50 of the filing instructions directs the filer to “insert ‘(Y)’ after the asset description in Column A and leave Columns B-D blank, or include an explanatory note in Part VIII.” Justice Thomas did exactly that for the Savannah rental properties in 2010, and for the Liberty County property in 2015. The latter footnote reads simply: “Line 1: The asset listed on line 1 does not receive any rental income for this property.” This is the disclosure Ms. Canter and her co-signers mistake for a deception.
When my mother died in 2019, I inherited a one-third interest in her house, which I sold to my brother. I understand the statute to mean that if I had been a federal judge, I would be obligated to disclose that transaction. But if I hadn’t been made aware of the statute, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to think of my inheritance as an “investment,” and I searched the filing instructions in vain for language that makes plain a judge’s duty to disclose this sort of transaction.
In Justice Thomas’s circumstances, moreover, the instructions seem to say not to report the sale of the former rental properties. The above-quoted “insert ‘(Y)’ ” language on page 50 is followed immediately by this sentence: “In subsequent years, this asset should be deleted from Part VII.”
One may be tempted to think that of all people a judge should know what the law says. But that’s a nonsensical standard. A judge’s job isn’t to memorize statute books; it’s to discern laws’ meaning and their application to the facts in cases that litigants bring before him. Inasmuch as the law applies to the judge’s personal affairs and interests, he’s in the same boat with the rest of us—often dependent on lawyers or other specialists, such as the Committee on Financial Disclosures of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, to make sense of his duties and rights.
The job of a journalist is similar in some ways to that of a judge. Both involve asking questions, testing arguments, and judiciously ascertaining facts and their significance. ProPublica failed to consider some obvious questions: Where is Liberty County? What is Justice Thomas’s connection to the place? If the remaining rental property was the house Mr. Crow’s company bought, what was it doing on Justice Thomas’s AO-10 for 2015, the year after the sale closed?
Journalists don’t memorize books either. I read “My Grandfather’s Son” when it came out in 2007, but as I researched this article I had to return to it and refresh my memory. “Daddy’s people worked on a three-thousand-acre rice plantation in Liberty County,” Justice Thomas writes, “and after their manumission they stayed nearby. The maternal side of my mother’s family also came from Liberty County, and probably worked on the same plantation.”
Daddy grew up on a family plot known as “the farm,” which “had been passed down undivided from generation to generation, as was often customary with land owned by southern blacks. Any family member was entitled to live there.” The fields were fallow by Christmas 1957, when Clarence was 9 and Daddy decided to build a house there. He enlisted the help of Clarence and his brother, Myers Thomas, and “by springtime we’d finished building a simple four-room house,” writes Justice Thomas, who spent his summers there until he left for college in 1967.
When Aunt Tina died in May 1983, “no sooner did Myers and I go home to the farm after the funeral than some of our relatives started fighting over the contents of the house, declaring that Aunt Tina would have wanted them to have this item or that,” Justice Thomas recounts. “Part of me was disgusted by their greed, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. Death had already stolen the only things in the house that mattered to me.”
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.”
Dah, from the guy who says 3M at age 81 isn't rich and misses the point entirely about Pelosi and Feinstein. You are entertainment for sure! Why would anyone need wit when it's so glaringly obvious you're an idiot.Good one.Your ignorance is only exceeded by your lack of wit. SMFH
If you had even a modicum of intelligence you would have learned that the vast majority of his wealth came after he was VP and he made money on book sales and speaking arrangements. All as a private citizen.
Next question, dumbass.
LOL - how to say you are a poor without saying you are a poor. $3M net worth is not rich. JFC.
You are an abject moron. A complete and utter imbecile. How you even function on a daily basis (assuming you do) is a miracle.
You're also a waste of time. I'll sit back and watch others kick your ass from here.
JFC I already commented by saying he should have disclosed, but in no way shape or form do these things arise to any of the crap you're talking about, especially with the requirements that were in place AS LAW and what he HAS disclosed. YOU are the narrative builder because you never seem to miss flapping your lips at stories like this but remain silent when it's liberals in the news.
You're going to sit here on your high horse saying a net worth of 3M at ANY age isn't rich? I mean you are beyond stupid! Yes, please stop talking to me because you've already proven how utterly ignorant you are. Clearly someone wiped their ass on your pillow case....
If you agree that he is compromised ethically, then idk how you don’t agree he shouldn’t be on the Court.
Having a moral compass strikes me as an absolute must for that position.
Typically people report when they have a COI. There isn't one here. To be transparent is why he should have, it wasn't an obligation. It also doesn't look like it was any secret here considering all the data available. Just looks like this will open more investigations into others in DC, hopefully starting with Pedo Peter.
You mad? You admit to lapses in ethics, as I pointed out...but immediately fall back on the "LAW" in your desperate deflection fusillade. You seem to be missing the entire point which is kind of surprising given how pointy your head is. As for "liberals in the news", my consistent response is if they're guilty they should face the consequences of their actions. It's not really that difficult.
If Thomas violated ethical standards he should be held to the same standard as every other practitioner of the law. Clinton surrendered his law license even though he was never convicted of anything. His lapse was...what?...say it with me...E-T-H-I-C-A-L.
A GOP mega-donor and influencer whose organization files numerous amicus briefs with the Supreme Court paid Thomas ~$45,000 as his share for properties Thomas HIMSELF valued at $15,000. (which raises the question of why his own mother was living in an apparent shack). Said mega-donor then allowed Thomas' mother to continue to live in the shack rent-free while he made thousands of dollars in improvements. Failure to report that sale, btw, IS a violation of disclosure LAW.
So here's your question - see if you can answer it WITHOUT resorting to whataboutisms. I'm not sure that's possible but we'll see...
Do YOU believe that the myriad ethical lapses and the singular known legal violation Thomas is guilty of - and yes, he IS guilty - rise to the level of removal from the bench?
I got a deal for you. Just name your price. Just be sure you vote the way I ask. lol
I thought you would be smart enough to let this die and not embarrass yourself further. I was wrong about that. You're dumber than I imagined.
Legal obligation? Maybe not. Moral, ethical obligation? Absolutely. Especially on top of everything we saw regarding his wife’s involvement with trumps administration.
I don’t see how you can defend his ethics. And if you can’t, then how can you say he still belongs on the SC.
Totally simpatico. Crow was born with hundreds of millions of dollars to his name, and Thomas proudly says he's the sharecroppers son. A Walmart kind of guy.
Crow groomed him. He lured him into his private jet with candy.
Your ignorance is exposed.
Thomas didn't disclose a required financial transaction.
He has continued to hide the annual financial transaction of his mother getting free-rent off his rich-guy buddy. That should have been disclosed ANNUALLY, or Thomas should have paid the rent in her place.
What bearing does this have on committing a required financial disclosure crime?
A: NONE
I wonder if the Thomas defenders will even attempt to answer this honestly.
Not at all. Amused. I loved Dumb and Dumber and you're even dumber. Carry on.
Roberts needs to step up. Thomas’ reputation is already tainted, and the Court is next if they just sit by.
Probably should read up a little more.
Opinion | The Truth About Clarence Thomas’s Disclosures
He reported carefully on his inherited real estate. ProPublica’s reporting was slipshod and incurious.
Clarence Thomas lost his beloved maternal grandparents barely a month apart in the spring of 1983. Myers Anderson, whom his grandson knew as “Daddy,” died of a stroke on March 30. Christine Anderson, known as “Aunt Tina,” suffered a stroke as well and died on May 1. “Perhaps, I thought, she’d lost the will to live,” Justice Thomas writes in his 2007 memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.”
The Andersons, who were 75 and 70 respectively, are buried at Palmyra Baptist Church in Liberty County, Ga. When they died, Mr. Thomas was 34 and chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “Losing Aunt Tina a month after Daddy was more painful than I could ever have imagined,” he writes. “How could I have let myself grow away from her, or from the man who . . . was the only real father I’d ever had?”
Mr. Thomas inherited a one-third interest in a few modest houses Myers Anderson owned. Forty years later, ProPublica has taken a different kind of interest in those properties. ProPublica describes itself as “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force.” It promises “deep-dive reporting” dedicated to “exposing corruption, informing the public about complex issues, and using the power of investigative journalism to spur reform.”
Give ProPublica credit for admitting its journalism has an agenda. So does mine, as the word “opinion” atop this page should make clear. But ProPublica’s acknowledgment that it’s in the opinion business doesn’t excuse it from the obligation to report facts accurately, carefully and thoroughly.
ProPublica has at least three reporters working the Clarence Thomas beat—Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski. Their story, published last Thursday, is titled “Billionaire Harlan Crow Bought Property From Clarence Thomas. The Justice Didn’t Disclose the Deal.” The troika write that the lack of disclosure “appears to be a violation of the law, four ethics law experts told ProPublica.” That statement is equivocal because it’s a legal theory based on incomplete facts. Justice Thomas didn’t respond to ProPublica’s questions or to mine.
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.
Further, the ProPublica troika made a sloppy reporting error, the effect of which is to cast Justice Thomas’s disclosures in a falsely unfavorable light—to make them look shambolic or perhaps even dishonest when in fact they followed the filing instructions without fail.
The reporters’ error involves a confusion about what Justice Thomas did disclose. “By the early 2000s,” ProPublica reports, “he had stopped listing specific addresses of property he owned in his disclosures. But he continued to report holding a one-third interest in what he described as ‘rental property at ## 1, 2, & 3’ in Savannah.” It’s worth noting—ProPublica doesn’t—that the filing instructions (on page 32) prescribe disclosing rental properties in precisely this manner.
That’s a whole lot of text to bury the lede:
“Assuming Justice Thomas received one-third of the sale price (or any amount more than $1,000), the text of the federal financial-disclosure statutewould 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 the two OTHER houses nearby were bought for 1/3 of Thomas' mother's house ($40k). After he, himself, declared a value (earlier appraisal/estimate) of $15k.
It might be worth $130k now, but Crow dumped >$40k in repairs into it, w/o charging one penny in rent to Clarence Thomas' mother.
i have a feeling this thomas stuff is just the tip of the iceberg. remember that right before kavanaugh’s nomination he paid off like a half million in debt. there is corruption in the supreme court and it’s bad.
