US Politics

The US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas said on Friday he was advised the “personal hospitality” extended to him for more than 25 years by the Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow, detailed in an explosive report by ProPublica, did not have to be reported under ethics rules.“I have endeavoured to follow that counsel throughout my tenure,” Thomas said in a rare statement, “and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines.”The statement did little to dampen controversy surrounding the 74-year-old conservative or lessen fire from the political left.Thomas is the longest-serving current justice, nominated by George HW Bush in 1991. On Thursday, ProPublica reported that he has long accepted trips from Crow including travel on private jets and yachts and stays at exclusive resorts.Justin Elliott, one of the report authors, said: “This is the text of the law ethics lawyers told us he violated. Gifts – such as private jet travel – need to be reported, unless they are ‘food, lodging, or entertainment received as personal hospitality’. This is in the statute itself and predates the recent filing guidance update.”That update went into effect on 14 March. In a subsequent letter to Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, Roslynn Mauskopf, director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, said gifts not covered by the reporting exemption included gifts “such as transportation that substitutes for commercial transportation”.Thomas said: “Early in my tenure at the court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the court, was not reportable.”He added: “It is, of course, my intent to follow this guidance in the future.”Supreme court justices, however, largely sit above federal ethics regulations, essentially governing themselves.Thomas also said Harlan and Kathy Crow were among his “dearest friends” and had joined him and his own wife, the rightwing activist Ginni Thomas, “on a number of family trips”.In 2004, 13 years into Thomas’s time on the court, the Los Angeles Times reported gifts from Crow including a Bible once owned by Frederick Douglass. After that, in the same paper’s words this week, Thomas “stopped disclosing” gifts. The Washington Post noted that Thomas has disclosed just two gifts since 2004.ProPublica noted that Crow’s generosity to Thomas was reported in 2011, by the New York Times and Politico. The latter, it said, “revealed that Crow had given half a million dollars to a Tea Party group founded by Ginni Thomas, which also paid her a $120,000 salary”.ProPublica reported the existence of a painting hung at Crow’s resort in New York state and showing Thomas smoking a cigar in company including Leonard Leo, head of the Federalist Society, which played a major role in tilting the supreme court right with three confirmations under Donald Trump.Crow said he and his wife had been friends with the Thomases since 1996, giving gifts “no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends”.He also claimed: “We have never asked about a pending or lower court case, and Justice Thomas has never discussed one, and we have never sought to influence Justice Thomas on any legal or political issue. More generally, I am unaware of any of our friends ever lobbying or seeking to influence Justice Thomas on any case, and I would never invite anyone who I believe had any intention of doing that.”Accountable.US, an advocacy group, contended Thomas was wrong to say Crow did not have business before the court.It said: “For three decades, Crow has served on the board of trustees of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which has published and taken credit for multiple amicus briefs filed with the supreme court by the group’s president and scholars.”Crow joined the AEI in 1996, the same year he said he became friends with Thomas.Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, said: “First Justice Thomas hid decades of lavish gifts and travel funded by Harlan Crow, but now he’s outright lying when he says this major conservative donor had no interest in the work of the supreme court.“The truth is clear: this is an unprecedented story of corruption at the highest levels, and those involved must be held accountable.”Thomas is the senior conservative of six on the nine-member court, his influence growing through a series of controversial conservative rulings, not least the removal of the right to abortion in Dobbs v Jackson last year. In a concurring opinion in Dobbs, Thomas suggested similar rights – same-sex marriage, gay sex and contraception access – should be reviewed. He did not mention interracial marriage. Thomas is Black. His wife is white.The ProPublica report prompted Senate Democrats to call for an investigation – and some on the left to renew calls for impeachment.Dick Durbin, a Democratic senator from Illinois, said: “Supreme court justices must be held to an enforceable code of conduct, just like every other federal judge … the Senate judiciary committee will act.”Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive congresswoman from New York, said “Thomas must be impeached”, as the court was becoming known for “rank corruption, erosion of democracy and the stripping of human rights”.Impeachment is highly unlikely, even given other calls regarding Ginni Thomas’s efforts in support of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and Clarence Thomas’s failure to recuse himself from a related case. Like Crow, Ginni Thomas has claimed not to talk to her husband about cases or politics.Writing for Slate on the ProPublica report, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern said: “Clarence Thomas broke the law, and it isn’t particularly close.“Thomas broke … a law which contains serious civil penalties, though the bogus technicality on which he relies, in addition to his political clout, will be more than enough to ensure that he never faces any actual legal consequences.” More

Jonathan Freedland’s perceptive analysis of the progress/decline of Northern Ireland and Israel respectively since 1998 misses one important dynamic (Netanyahu is leading a coup against his own country. But the threat is not only to Israel, 31 March): the role the American domestic electoral cycle plays in influencing US foreign policy.I worked in Washington DC for the congressman Gary Ackerman (Democrat, Queens, New York) from 1989 to 1990. The substantial Jewish-American and Irish-American populations in his congressional district led Gary to take dramatically contrasting positions to Israel and Northern Ireland. Whereas he backed Israel’s policies without question, he also seemed to be a staunch supporter of Irish republicanism.This electoral imperative is, arguably, an important factor why US representatives who are not Irish-American have been members of the Irish caucus in Congress over the years. The importance of re-election is one reason why the Good Friday agreement is sacrosanct in Washington, and the lack of such a motive with regards to Palestinian issues hinders resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.Michael HerronLondon I always value Jonathan Freedland’s commentaries, never more so than at present, when Israel is fighting for its democratic soul. I feel anguished to see the democratic hopes and ideals of Israel’s founders torn to shreds by this far-right government.Jonathan Freedland provides a compass and wake-up call for all who care about Israel’s future, and I am grateful for that. I support the democratic movement which, hopefully, will continue to gather momentum, in Israel and among the diaspora. Elizabeth Barnell Shrewsbury, Shropshire More

It’s been a long time since Wisconsin could feel anything close to hope.More than a dozen years ago – when the first Harry Potter movie still played in theaters, and Katy Perry’s Firework and Bruno Mars’s Grenade topped the pop charts – Republican operatives and lawmakers locked themselves in a Madison, Wisconsin, law office and then locked themselves into power.They haven’t lost since. That painstakingly designed gerrymander gutted majority rule in a closely contested purple state. Sure, they still hold elections for state senate and assembly every two years. The Republican party simply can’t be defeated – indeed, they approach veto-proof supermajorities – even when voters award Democrats hundreds of thousands more votes.The entrenched Republican legislature, immune to voters and proven protected from public opinion, has run roughshod over labor unions, public employees and the state university system. When Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, has called the legislature into special session to enact overwhelmingly popular provisions on gun violence and reproductive rights, among other issues, Republican leadership gavels in and out in mere seconds. The rigged maps explain why an 1849 law that criminalized abortion in almost every circumstance reverted into effect after the Dobbs decision – even though more than 70% of Wisconsinites want it changed.The lack of anything resembling a basic, functioning democracy in an American state placed outsized importance on Tuesday’s state supreme court election, won decisively by liberal Janet Protasiewicz. Her victory flipped what had been a 4-3 conservative majority on a court that not only aided and abetted the newest Republican gerrymander, but only narrowly declined a Trumpian gambit to toss out 220,000 votes from Democratic-leaning counties after the state’s tight 2020 election.The stakes of this race were huge. There’s a good reason why this election shattered records for the most expensive state supreme court race ever. There will be an immediate effort to bring new litigation to un-gerrymander the state’s toxic legislative map. The 1849 anti-abortion law will be challenged before a court that is now friendly to reproductive rights. It will be more difficult for Republicans to use Wisconsin courts in 2024 to subvert presidential election results in a state where the outcome could determine the nation’s leader.Nevertheless, democracy has not been restored in Wisconsin and the threat has not receded. No one should be under any delusion that Wisconsin Republicans, so accustomed to ruling with impunity, will operate any differently. They don’t have to change. On Tuesday, just as voters statewide tipped the court to progressives, a special election for a crucial state senate seat went Republican, ensuring a Republican supermajority. Republicans have already threatened that they might impeach liberal justices, including Protasiewicz.There’s no reason not to take them at their word. When voters elected Evers, a Democrat, governor along with an entire slate of Democratic statewide officeholders in 2018, the legislature immediately passed wide-ranging legislation reining in the Democrat officeholders’ power, or claiming what had been executive powers for themselves. They refused to consider Evers’s appointments to crucial committees and allowed Republican officials to stay in those offices even after their terms expired.And even if the liberal justices are allowed to serve, and then a new state supreme court overturns the gerrymandered legislative maps, there’s the problem of the US supreme court and the dangerous independent state legislature theory. When North Carolina citizens looked to free themselves of a toxic Republican gerrymander by similarly flipping the state supreme court and successfully suing to overturn the maps, Republicans took it to high court, arguing that the power to draw lines has been handed to the legislature and only the legislature, free from the review of state courts.After oral arguments in Moore v Harper last fall, North Carolina Republicans won back the state supreme court and decided to revisit the previous court’s decision, potentially rendering that case moot. But at least five conservatives on the court have expressed some interest in this theory. It is not going away for good – and it’s easy to foresee Wisconsin Republicans making the same challenge. And by the time the court rules, another seat on the Wisconsin court will be up in 2025, forcing Democrats to win yet again.It is dreary to be cynical the day after a hard-won victory that activists worked many years to secure. Yet it is hard not to look at Wisconsin and see Charlie Brown and the football once more. Democrats spend a decade playing by the rules and executing a 12-point plan to undo the after-effects of the 2010 redistricting, step by careful step. And if Democrats win, Republicans use their gerrymanders to take away their power or make some pretend doctrine and take it to their equally unearned and illegitimate supermajority on the US supreme court.One outcome of the news from Wisconsin is that it might finally be clear to everyone that, in today’s America, judges have become little more than robed partisans. But it needs to become equally clear that without a national fix for gerrymandering and structural reform to the US supreme court, that hope in Wisconsin – and perhaps your state next – will be little more than fool’s gold.
David Daley is the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy. He is a senior fellow at FairVote More

Next week, Joe Biden and Bill Clinton will arrive in Northern Ireland to join commemorations of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement. Clinton is now celebrated as one of the key players behind the agreement, but he didn’t do it alone. It took years of background efforts – of secret meetings, discreet lobbying and high-risk shadow diplomacy, by people whose names we’ve never known – to convince the United States to get involved.
This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to one of those people, Niall O’Dowd, who tells the extraordinary story of how he built a secret channel between Clinton and the Irish republican movement

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The Biden administration has released a proposal that would forbid schools and colleges across the US from enacting outright bans on transgender athletes. But teams could create some limits in certain cases – for example, to ensure fairness.If finalized, the proposal would become enshrined as a provision of Title IX. It must undergo a lengthy approval process, however, and it’s almost certain to face challenges from opponents.“Every student should be able to have the full experience of attending school in America, including participating in athletics, free from discrimination,” said Miguel Cardona, Biden’s education secretary, in a statement.The Biden administration used “fairness of competition” as criteria, which has been part of the debate in the US and globally.The move is an effort to counteract a wave of Republican-backed measures targeting LGBTQ+ rights, particularly the participation of trans athletes in school sports. The proposal must undergo a lengthy approval process, however, and it’s almost certain to face challenges. While opponents sharply criticized the proposal, some advocates for transgender athletes were concerned that it did not go far enough.The proposal came on the same day that the US supreme court refused to let West Virginia enforce a state law banning trans athletes from female sports teams at public schools, one of many similar measures across the country.The justices denied West Virginia’s request to lift an injunction against the law that a lower court had imposed while litigation continues over its legality in a challenge brought by a 12-year-old transgender girl, Becky Pepper-Jackson.Two conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, publicly dissented from the decision.The law, passed in 2021, designates sports teams at public schools including universities according to “biological sex” and bars male students from female athletic teams “based solely on the individual’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth”.In the lawsuit, Pepper-Jackson and her mother Heather argued that the law discriminates based on sex and transgender status in violation of the US constitution’s 14th amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law, as well as the Title IX civil rights law that bars sex-based discrimination in education.West Virginia said in a court filing that it can lawfully assign athletic teams by sex rather than gender identity “where biological differences between males and females are the very reason those separate teams exist”.Pepper-Jackson, who attends a middle school in the West Virginia city of Bridgeport, sued after being prohibited from trying out for the girls’ cross-country and track teams.Critics argue trans athletes have an advantage over cisgender women in competition. Last year, Lia Thomas became the first transgender woman to win an NCAA swimming title. College sports’ governing body, however, adopted a sport-by-sport approach to transgender athletes in January 2022, which was to bring the organization in line with the US and International Olympic committees, though recently the NCAA’s board decided it won’t be fully implemented until 2023-24.At the same time, international sports-governing bodies are instituting policies that ban all trans athletes from competing in track and field and effectively ban trans women from swimming events. More

Thousands of protesters flocked to the Tennessee state capitol on Thursday to support three Democratic lawmakers facing expulsion for their role in a gun control demonstration after the killings of three children and three adults at a Nashville elementary school last week.Crowds cheered and chanted outside the house chamber, so loud that they drowned out proceedings.Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson are the subjects of the expulsion vote. Last week, they approached the front of the chamber floor and chanted back and forth with gun control supporters who packed the gallery.On Thursday the three Democrats held hands as they walked on to the house floor. During the pledge of allegiance, Pearson raised his fist to the crowd.Their possible expulsion has once again thrust Tennessee into the national spotlight, underscoring not only the ability of the Republican supermajority to silence opponents but also its increasing willingness to do so. The move sends a chilling message just as lawmakers grapple with how to respond to the devastating shooting at the Covenant school.On Thursday, many protesters had traveled from Memphis and Knoxville, areas Pearson and Johnson represent, and stood in a line that wrapped around the building. Johnson urged those in the gallery to remain calm and not shout at lawmakers, to avoid getting removed.Protesters outside the chamber held up signs that said “School zones shouldn’t be war zones”; “Muskets didn’t fire 950 rounds per minute”, with a photo of George Washington; and “You can silence a gun … but not the voice of the people”.As the House began proceedings, a Democrat, Vincent Dixie, urged that colleagues “not get distracted”. He mentioned the funeral of Mike Hill, the custodian killed at the Covenant school, which took place earlier in the week.“I want us to keep in mind the sacrifice that he made to keep those kids safe,” Dixie said. “Each of us has power to make change.”Before the expulsion vote, House members were set to debate more than 20 bills, including a school safety proposal requiring public and private schools to submit building safety plans to the state.The bill did not address gun control, sparking criticisms from some Democrats that lawmakers were only addressing a symptom and not the cause of school shootings.Expulsions in the Tennessee general assembly are rare.In 2019, lawmakers faced pressure to expel the former Republican representative David Byrd, after he faced accusations of sexual misconduct dating to when he was a high school basketball coach three decades before.Republicans declined to take action, pointing out that he was re-elected as the allegations surfaced. Byrd retired last year.In 2022, the state senate expelled a Democrat, Katrina Robinson, after she was convicted of using about $3,400 in federal grant money on wedding expenses instead of her nursing school.Before that case, state lawmakers last ousted a house member in 2016, voting 70-2 to remove the Republican Jeremy Durham after an investigation detailed allegations of improper sexual contact with at least 22 women in four years in office.If Johnson, Jones or Pearson are expelled, the county commissions in their districts would get to pick replacements to serve until special elections could be held. The three Democrats would remain eligible to run in those contests. More

Clarence Thomas, the most conservative justice on the US supreme court, is facing renewed calls for impeachment after it was reported that for two decades he has accepted undisclosed luxury gifts from a Republican mega-donor.Thomas may have violated financial disclosure rules when he failed to disclose travel on yachts and jets and other gifts funded by the property billionaire Harlan Crow and uncovered by ProPublica.It found that Thomas flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet and holidays on Crow’s 162ft super-yacht. He has enjoyed holidays at Crow’s ranch in Texas and joined him at an exclusive all-male California retreat. The justice usually spends about a week each summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondack mountains in New York.The revelations prompted sharp criticism by Democrats of Thomas, who after 31 years is the longest-serving justice and an influential voice in the rightwing majority that last year ended the right to abortion.Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois and chair of the Senate judiciary committee, said: “This behavior is simply inconsistent with the ethical standards the American people expect of any public servant, let alone a justice on the supreme court.“Today’s report demonstrates, yet again, that supreme court justices must be held to an enforceable code of conduct, just like every other federal judge. The ProPublica report is a call to action, and the Senate judiciary committee will act.”Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive congresswoman from New York, tweeted: “This is beyond party or partisanship. This degree of corruption is shocking – almost cartoonish. Thomas must be impeached. Barring some dramatic change, this is what the [chief justice John] Roberts court will be known for: rank corruption, erosion of democracy, and the stripping of human rights.”Impeachment remains unlikely, even given other calls regarding the pro-Trump activities of Thomas’s wife, the rightwing activist Ginni Thomas, and not just because Republicans hold the House. Only one supreme court justice has ever been impeached: Samuel Chase, in 1804-05. He was acquitted in the Senate.Thomas, 74, has made his humble origins a central part of his identity. He was born in Savannah, Georgia, and learned Geechee, a Creole language spoken by the descendants of slaves, before standard English. He was abandoned by his father but says his grandfather instilled his work ethic.In a documentary which Crow helped finance, Thomas described no-frills tastes: “I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it. I come from regular stock, and I prefer that – I prefer being around that.”ProPublica told a different story, drawn from flight records, internal documents and interviewees ranging from super-yacht staff to members of the secretive Bohemian Club to an Indonesian scuba-diving instructor.It found that Thomas’s friendship with Crow has enabled him to experience luxuries he would never have been able to afford on his salary of $285,000. For example, in 2019, Thomas and his wife flew on Crow’s jet to Indonesia for nine days island-hopping on Crow’s yacht. The trip would have cost more than $500,000.ProPublica also noted that each summer Thomas spends about a week at Camp Topridge, Crow’s Adirondacks resort. The 105-acre property offers boathouses, a clay tennis court, a batting cage and a replica of Hagrid’s hut from Harry Potter. A painting there shows Thomas enjoying a cigar alongside Crow and talking with influential rightwingers including the legal activist Leonard Leo.ProPublica said: “The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the US supreme court.”It said the trips do not appear in Thomas’s financial disclosures and cited two experts saying that appears to violate a law that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to declare most gifts.In a statement, Crow denied seeking to influence supreme court decisions. The Dallas businessman said he and his wife, Kathy, had been friends with the Thomases since 1996 and “the hospitality we have extended … is no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends”.Crow added: “Justice Thomas and Ginni never asked for any of this hospitality. We have never asked about a pending or lower-court case, and Justice Thomas has never discussed one, and we have never sought to influence Justice Thomas on any legal or political issue.“More generally, I am unaware of any of our friends ever lobbying or seeking to influence Justice Thomas on any case, and I would never invite anyone who I believe had any intention of doing that. These are gatherings of friends.”ProPublica said it reviewed a record showing that “during just one July 2017 trip, Thomas’ fellow guests included execs at Verizon and PricewaterhouseCoopers, major GOP donors, and one of the leaders of the conservative American Enterprise Institute thinktank”.Sarah Lipton-Lubet, president of Take Back the Court Action Fund, said: “How many of Crow’s pet interests have had business in front of the court while Thomas was enjoying the lifestyle of the rich and famous on the right-wing mega-donor’s dime?“Thomas’ repeated mockery of basic ethical standards calls into question every decision he has imposed on millions of Americans.”Meagan Hatcher-Mays, of the grassroots movement Indivisible, called for the Senate judiciary committee to investigate “Thomas’s reported ethical lapses, and move quickly to hold hearings and votes on the Supreme Court Ethics, Transparency, and Recusal Act.“The American people want to believe that the court is fair, that the justices behave ethically, and that their decisions are free from undue political influence.”Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, Virginia, said the “alleged failure to report Harlan Crow’s substantial expenditures … could further undermine public trust in the supreme court and Thomas specifically.“This is especially important now, when public trust in the court has plummeted in light of Dobbs overruling of Roe v Wade and the leaked opinion.” More