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    Democrats Seek Criminal Investigation of Justice Thomas Over Travel and Gifts

    The senators said the Supreme Court justice’s failure to disclose lavish gifts and luxury travel showed a “willful pattern of disregard for ethics laws.”Two top Democratic senators have asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation of Justice Clarence Thomas for possible violations of federal ethics and tax laws.Senators Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Ron Wyden of Oregon sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland last week asking that he appoint a special counsel to investigate Justice Thomas’s failure to disclose lavish gifts, luxury travel, a loan for a recreational vehicle and other perks given to him by wealthy friends.The request further intensified efforts by Senate Democrats to scrutinize Justice Thomas’s conduct at a time when they are trying to force Supreme Court justices to comply with stricter ethics and financial disclosure rules.“We do not make this request lightly,” the senators wrote in a joint statement. “Supreme Court justices are properly expected to obey laws designed to prevent conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety and to comply with the federal tax code.”“No government official should be above the law,” they added.Specifically, the senators asked that a special counsel investigate whether Justice Thomas violated federal ethics and tax laws by failing to disclose as income the $267,000 he received in forgiven debt for a luxury R.V.The senators wrote that Justice Thomas had “repeated opportunities” to explain his failure to disclose the gifts to the Senate Finance Committee, of which Mr. Wyden is the chairman, as well as the Judiciary Committee’s panel on federal courts, which Mr. Whitehouse leads.They also accused Justice Thomas of showing a “willful pattern of disregard for ethics laws,” behavior that they said surpassed that of other government officials who have been investigated by the Justice Department for “similar violations.”A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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    Supreme Court Immunity Ruling Escalates Long Rise of Presidential Power

    Beyond Donald J. Trump, the decision adds to the seemingly one-way ratchet of executive authority.The Supreme Court’s decision to bestow presidents with immunity from prosecution over official actions is an extraordinary expansion of executive power that will reverberate long after Donald J. Trump is gone.Beyond its immediate implications for the election subversion case against Mr. Trump and the prospect that he may feel less constrained by law if he returns to power, the ruling also adds to the nearly relentless rise of presidential power since the mid-20th century.It had seemed like a constitutional truism in recent years when more than one lower-court opinion addressing novel legal issues raised by Mr. Trump’s norm-breaking behavior observed that presidents are not kings. But suddenly, they do enjoy a kind of monarchical prerogative.“The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in an outraged dissent joined by the court’s other two liberals. “In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.”Dismissing those worries, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, argued that presidents stand apart from regular people, so protecting them from prosecution if they are accused of abusing their powers to commit official crimes is necessary.“Unlike anyone else,” he wrote, “the president is a branch of government, and the Constitution vests in him sweeping powers and duties.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Clarence Thomas Took Other Trips on Harlan Crow’s Jet, Documents Show

    A congressional committee released documents showing that Justice Clarence Thomas had not disclosed three private jet trips paid for by the Texas billionaire Harlan Crow.Justice Clarence Thomas never disclosed three trips aboard the private jet of the Texas billionaire Harlan Crow, according to documents obtained by the Senate Judiciary Committee released on Thursday.The documents, obtained by Democrats on the panel, list three visits that have not previously been reported: one to a city in Montana, near Glacier National Park, in 2017; another to his hometown, Savannah, Ga., in March 2019; and another to Northern California in 2021.The purpose of each trip was not immediately clear, nor was the reason for their omission on the justice’s disclosure forms. However, all of the flights involve short stays: two were round trips that did not include an overnight stay.The revelation underlined the extent to which Justice Thomas has relied on the generosity of his friends over the years and the consistency with which he declined to report those ties.Justice Thomas has said that he had been advised he did not need to disclose gifts of personal hospitality from friends who did not have cases before the Supreme Court.The announcement is all but certain to fuel the fight over greater transparency at the Supreme Court. Lawmakers’ efforts to require that justices be held to ethics standards similar to those for the executive and legislative branches have faltered. And even as the court, under immense public scrutiny, announced its first ethics code in the fall, experts immediately pointed out its lack of an enforcement mechanism or penalties should a justice have violated it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Senate Republicans Block Supreme Court Ethics Measure Pushed by Democrats

    Democrats made what they knew was a doomed attempt as they faced pressure from the left to do more to try to hold the court accountable.Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked an effort by Democrats to quickly pass Supreme Court ethics and transparency legislation they had pushed forward in the wake of disclosures about justices taking unreported gifts and travel and other ethical issues surrounding the high court.The unsuccessful outcome was predetermined, but represented an effort by Senate Democrats to show they were pressing the case against the court. It was also aimed at demonstrating the limits of their power given the narrow divide in the Senate and deep Republican opposition to Congress taking action to impose stricter ethics rules on the justices.“The ethics crisis at the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, is unacceptable,” Senator Richard J. Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Committee, said in calling for the measure to be approved. “It is unsustainable and it’s unworthy of the highest court in the land.”Republicans assailed the bill as a naked effort by Democrats to undercut the court because of ideological disagreements with its decisions, particularly with major rulings about to be handed down. They accused Democrats of trying to intimidate the justices.“Let’s be clear: This is not about improving the court, this is about undermining the court,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, who lodged the objection to taking up the bill. “This will be an unconstitutional overreach. This would undermine the court’s ability to operate effectively.”The move by Democrats came as progressives have been ramping up their demands for more aggressive action in the Senate.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Justice Thomas Denounces ‘the Nastiness and the Lies’ Faced by His Family

    The statement was among the few public remarks he has made since revelations that he had failed to report lavish gifts and travel from wealthy conservatives.Justice Clarence Thomas denounced on Friday “the nastiness and the lies” that have shadowed him in recent years as public scrutiny has mounted over his wife’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election and luxury gifts he has accepted from billionaire friends.It amounted to some of the most extensive public remarks he has made since revelations that he failed to disclose years of lavish trips from wealthy conservatives, like the Texas real estate magnate Harlan Crow, including on private jets and a superyacht.“My wife and I, the last two or three years, just the nastiness and the lies,” said Justice Thomas, who did not specify what he was referring to in addressing a full ballroom of lawyers and judges gathered for a judicial conference in Alabama. “There’s certainly been a lot of negativity in our lives, my wife and I, over the last few years, but we choose not to focus on it.”The justice faced calls for recusal after text messages and emails showed that his wife, Virginia Thomas, known as Ginni, sought to overturn the election, appealing to administration officials and lawmakers. Justice Thomas has continued to participate in a number of cases related to the 2020 election, including three about Jan. 6 on the docket this term.The remarks were part of a wide-ranging conversation at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit Judicial Conference held at a luxury resort on the waters of Mobile Bay, a shallow inlet of the Gulf of Mexico.Interviewed by a former clerk, Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, now a federal judge in Florida best known for overturning the Biden administration’s mask mandate, Justice Thomas reminisced about past years on the court, when he said it would have been impossible to imagine anyone leaking opinions. That appeared to be a reference to the 2022 leak of the draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eliminating the constitutional right to abortion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Persistent Threat to Abortion Rights

    The Supreme Court this week heard the first major challenge to abortion rights since it struck down Roe v. Wade two years ago — an attempt to severely limit access to mifepristone, the most commonly used abortion pill in the country, by a group of doctors who are morally opposed to the practice.The justices seem prepared to throw out the lawsuit. During oral arguments, they questioned whether the doctors had suffered the harm necessary to bring the suit in the first place.But that should come as small comfort to anyone concerned for the future of reproductive freedom in America. Judges at the state and federal level are ready to further restrict reproductive options and health care access. The presumptive Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump, has indicated support for a 15-week national abortion ban. And while the Supreme Court, in overturning Roe, ostensibly left it to each state to decide abortion policy, several states have gone against the will of their voters on abortion or tried to block ballot measures that would protect abortion rights. Anti-abortion forces may have had a tough week in the Supreme Court, but they remain focused on playing and winning a longer game.Even potential victories for reproductive freedom may prove short-lived: The mifepristone case, for instance, is far from dead. Another plaintiff could bring the same case and have it considered on the merits, a possibility Justice Samuel Alito raised during oral arguments.“Is there anybody who could challenge in court the lawfulness of what the F.D.A. did here?” he asked the solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar. Such a challenge would be exceptionally weak, given that the F.D.A. provided substantial support for its approval and regulatory guidance on the use of mifepristone, but the right-wing justices on the Roberts court may be willing to hear it again anyway. The justices have already illustrated their hostility to the authority of administrative agencies, and that hostility may persist even in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence.Then there is the Comstock Act, a 151-year-old federal law that anti-abortion activists are trying to revive to block the mailing of mifepristone and other abortion medication. During the oral arguments this week, Justices Alito and Clarence Thomas repeatedly expressed their openness to the use of the law, which was pushed by an anti-vice crusader decades before women won the right to vote. If anti-abortion activists can get themselves before a sympathetic court and secure a national injunction on this medication being mailed, they may well be able to block access to abortion throughout the country, including in states where it is legal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Justice Thomas Hires Law Clerk Accused of Sending Racist Text Messages

    Crystal Clanton, who is close with the Thomas family, has said she does not remember sending the messages, which emerged in 2017.Justice Clarence Thomas recently hired a law clerk who was previously accused of sending racist text messages, resurfacing the controversy around her.Crystal Clanton will begin clerking for the justice in the upcoming term, according to the Antonin Scalia Law School, from which she graduated in 2022.In late 2017, a New Yorker story reported that Ms. Clanton, who had served for five years as the national field director at Turning Point USA, a conservative student group, had sent the text messages, including the statement “i hate black people,” to another employee. The New York Times has not seen the messages.Ms. Clanton, who had resigned from the group by the time the article came out, told The New Yorker at the time that she had no recollection of the messages and that “they do not reflect what I believe or who I am and the same was true when I was a teenager.” (Ms. Clanton would have been 20 years old when the messages were sent.) She did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday.In the years since, Ms. Clanton has maintained a close relationship with Justice Thomas and his wife, Virginia Thomas. Ms. Thomas once served on the advisory board of Turning Point USA, and subsequently hired Ms. Clanton. The justice has called the allegations against Ms. Clanton unfounded and said that he does not believe her to be racist.Justice Thomas did not respond to a request for comment.The Thomases have welcomed Ms. Clanton into their inner circle. Photos from the Thomases’ 2022 holiday newsletter show that she joined the couple for Thanksgiving dinner. The Thomases also celebrated her graduation from Scalia Law.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Best Sentences of 2023

    Over recent days, I took on a daunting task — but a delightful one. I reviewed all the passages of prose featured in the For the Love of Sentences section of my Times Opinion newsletter in 2023 and tried to determine the best of the best. And there’s no doing that, at least not objectively, not when the harvest is so bountiful.What follows is a sample of the sentences that, upon fresh examination, made me smile the widest or nod the hardest or wish the most ardently and enviously that I’d written them. I hope they give you as much pleasure as they gave me when I reread them.I also hope that those of you who routinely contribute to For the Love of Sentences, bringing gems like the ones below to my attention, know how grateful to you I am. This is a crowdsourced enterprise. You are the wise and deeply appreciated crowd.Finally, I hope 2024 brings all of us many great things, including many great sentences.Let’s start with The Times. Dwight Garner noted how a certain conservative cable network presses on with its distortions, despite being called out on them and successfully sued: “Fox News, at this point, resembles a car whose windshield is thickly encrusted with traffic citations. Yet this car (surely a Hummer) manages to barrel out anew each day, plowing over six more mailboxes, five more crossing guards, four elderly scientists, three communal enterprises, two trans kids and a solar panel.”Erin Thompson reflected on the fate of statues memorializing the Confederacy: “We never reached any consensus about what should become of these artifacts. Some were reinstalled with additional historical context or placed in private hands, but many simply disappeared into storage. I like to think of them as America’s strategic racism reserve.”Pamela Paul examined an embattled (and later dethroned) House speaker who tried to divert attention to President Biden’s imagined wrongdoing: “As Kevin McCarthy announced the impeachment inquiry, you could almost see his wispy soul sucked out Dementor-style, joining whatever ghostly remains of Paul Ryan’s abandoned integrity still wander the halls of Congress.”Damon Winter/The New York TimesTom Friedman cut to the chase: “What Putin is doing in Ukraine is not just reckless, not just a war of choice, not just an invasion in a class of its own for overreach, mendacity, immorality and incompetence, all wrapped in a farrago of lies. What he is doing is evil.”Maureen Dowd eulogized her friend Jimmy Buffett: “When he was a young scalawag, he found the Life Aquatic and conjured his art from it, making Key West the capital of Margaritaville. He didn’t waste away there; he spun a billion-dollar empire out of a shaker of salt.” She also assessed Donald Trump’s relationship to his stolen-election claims and concluded that “the putz knew his push for a putsch was dishonest.” And she sat down with Nancy Pelosi right after Pelosi gave up the House speaker’s gavel: “I was expecting King Lear, howling at the storm, but I found Gene Kelly, singing in the rain.”Bret Stephens contrasted the two Republicans who represent Texas in the Senate, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz: “Whatever else you might say about Cornyn, he is to the junior senator from Texas what pumpkin pie is to a jack-o’-lantern.”Jamelle Bouie diagnosed the problem with the Florida governor’s presidential campaign: “Ron DeSantis cannot escape the fact that it makes no real sense to try to run as a more competent Donald Trump, for the simple reason that the entire question of competence is orthogonal to Trump’s appeal.”Alexis Soloski described her encounter with the actor Taylor Kitsch: “There’s a lonesomeness at the core of him that makes women want to save him and men want to buy him a beer. I am a mother of young children and the temptation to offer him a snack was sometimes overwhelming.”Jane Margolies described a growing trend of corporate office buildings trimmed with greenery that requires less maintenance: “As manicured lawns give way to meadows and borders of annuals are replaced by wild and woolly native plants, a looser, some might say messier, aesthetic is taking hold. Call it the horticultural equivalent of bedhead.”Nathan Englander contrasted Tom Cruise in his 50s with a typical movie star of that age 50 years ago: “Try Walter Matthau in ‘The Taking of Pelham 123.’ I’m not saying he wasn’t a dreamboat. I’m saying he reflects a life well lived in the company of gravity and pastrami.”And David Mack explained the endurance of sweatpants beyond their pandemic-lockdown, Zoom-meeting ubiquity: “We are now demanding from our pants attributes we are also seeking in others and in ourselves. We want them to be forgiving and reassuring. We want them to nurture us. We want them to say: ‘I was there, too. I experienced it. I came out on the other side more carefree and less rigid. And I learned about the importance of ventilation in the process.’”The ethical shortcomings of Supreme Court justices generated some deliciously pointed commentary. In Slate, for example, Dahlia Lithwick parsed the generosity of billionaires that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have so richly enjoyed. “A #protip that will no doubt make those justices who have been lured away to elaborate bear hunts and deer hunts and rabbit hunts and salmon hunts by wealthy oligarchs feel a bit sad: If your close personal friends who only just met you after you came onto the courts are memorializing your time together for posterity, there’s a decent chance you are, in fact, the thing being hunted,” she wrote.Greg Kahn for The New York TimesIn The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri mined that material by mimicking the famous opening line of “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that an American billionaire, in possession of sufficient fortune, must be in want of a Supreme Court justice.”Also in The Post, the book critic Ron Charles warned of censorship from points across the political spectrum: “Speech codes and book bans may start in opposing camps, but both warm their hands over freedom’s ashes.” He also noted the publication of “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” by Senator Josh Hawley: “The book’s final cover contains just text, including the title so oversized that the word ‘Manhood’ can’t even fit on one line — like a dude whose shoulders are so broad that he has to turn sideways to flee through the doors of the Capitol.”Rick Reilly put Mike McDaniel, the sunny head coach of the Miami Dolphins, and Bill Belichick, the gloomy head coach of the New England Patriots, side by side: “One is as open as a new Safeway, and the other is as closed up as an old submarine. One will tell you anything you want; the other will hand out information on a need-to-go-screw-yourself basis. One looks like a nerd who got lost on a stadium tour and wound up as head coach. The other looks like an Easter Island statue nursing a grudge.”Matt Bai challenged the argument that candidates for vice president don’t affect the outcomes of presidential races: “I’d argue that Sarah Palin mattered in 2008, although she was less of a running mate than a running gag.”David Von Drehle observed: “Golf was for decades — for centuries — the province of people who cared about money but never spoke of it openly. Scots. Episcopalians. Members of the Walker and Bush families. People who built huge homes then failed to heat them properly. People who drove around with big dogs in their old Mercedes station wagons. People who greeted the offer of a scotch and soda by saying, ‘Well, it’s 5 o’clock somewhere!’”And Robin Givhan examined former President Jimmy Carter’s approach to his remaining days: “Hospice care is not a matter of giving up. It’s a decision to shift our efforts from shoring up a body on the verge of the end to providing solace to a soul that’s on the cusp of forever.”In his newsletter on Substack, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar appraised the Lone Star State’s flirtation with secession: “This movement is called Texit and it’s not just the folly of one Republican on the grassy knoll of idiocy.”In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Emma Pettit experienced cognitive dissonance as she examined the academic bona fides of a “Real Housewives of Potomac” cast member: “It’s unusual for any professor to star on any reality show, let alone for a Johns Hopkins professor to star on a Bravo series. The university’s image is closely aligned with world-class research, public health and Covid-19 tracking. The Real Housewives’ image is closely aligned with promotional alcohol, plastic surgery and sequins.”In The Los Angeles Times, Jessica Roy explained the stubborn refusal of plastic bags to stay put: “Because they’re so light, they defy proper waste management, floating off trash cans and sanitation trucks like they’re being raptured by a garbage god.”In The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., Josh Shaffer pondered the peculiarity of the bagpipe, “shaped like an octopus in plaid pants, sounding to some like a goose with its foot caught in an escalator and played during history’s most lopsided battles — by the losing side.”Space Frontiers/Getty ImagesIn Salon, Melanie McFarland reflected on the futility of Chris Licht’s attempts, during his short-lived stint at the helm of CNN, to get Republican politicians and viewers to return to the network: “You might as well summon Voyager 1 back from deep space by pointing your TV remote at the sky and pressing any downward-pointing arrow.”In Politico, Rich Lowry contextualized Trump’s appearance at his Waco, Texas, rally with the J6 Prison Choir: “It’d be a little like Richard Nixon running for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination, and campaigning with a barbershop quartet made up of the Watergate burglars.”In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols observed that many Republican voters “want Trump, unless he can’t win; in that case, they’d like a Trump who can win, a candidate who reeks of Trump’s cheap political cologne but who will wisely wear somewhat less of it while campaigning in the crowded spaces of a general election.”Also in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson needled erroneous recession soothsayers: “Economic models of the future are perhaps best understood as astrology faintly decorated with calculus equations.”And David Frum noted one of the many peculiarities of the televised face-off between DeSantis and Gavin Newsom: “In the debate’s opening segments, the moderator, Sean Hannity, stressed again and again that his questions would be fact-based — like a proud host informing his guests that tonight he will serve the expensive wine.”In The New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen mulled an emotion: “Joy can be as strong as Everclear or as mild as Coors Light, but it’s never not joy: a blossoming in the heart, a yes to the world, a yes to being alive in it,” he wrote.Also in The New Yorker, David Remnick analyzed the raw, warring interpretations of the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7: “There were, of course, facts — many of them unknown — but the narratives came first, all infused with histories and counterhistories, grievances and 50 varieties of fury, all rushing in at the speed of social media. People were going to believe what they needed to believe.”Zach Helfand explained the fascination with monster trucks in terms of our worship of size, noting that “people have always liked really big stuff, particularly of the unnecessary variety. Stonehenge, pyramids, colossi, Costco.”And Anthony Lane found the pink palette of “Barbie” a bit much: “Watching the first half-hour of this movie is like being waterboarded with Pepto-Bismol.” He also provided a zoological breakdown of another hit movie, “Cocaine Bear”: “The animal kingdom is represented by a butterfly, a deer and a black bear. Only one of these is on cocaine, although with butterflies you can never really tell.”In The Guardian, Sam Jones paid tribute to a remarkably durable pooch named Bobi: “The late canine, who has died at the spectacular age of 31 years and 165 days, has not so much broken the record for the world’s longest-lived dog as shaken it violently from side to side, torn it to pieces, buried it and then cocked a triumphant, if elderly, leg over it.”In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay rendered a damning (and furry!) judgment of the organization that oversees college sports: “Handing the N.C.A.A. an investigation is like throwing a Frisbee to an elderly dog. Maybe you get something back. Maybe the dog lies down and chews a big stick.” He separately took issue with a prize his daughter won at a state fair: “I don’t know how many of you own a six-and-a-half-foot, bright blue stuffed lemur, but it is not exactly the type of item that blends into a home. You do not put it in the living room and say: perfect. It instantly becomes the most useless item in the house, and I own an exercise bike.”Also in The Journal, Peggy Noonan described McCarthy’s toppling as House speaker by Matt Gaetz and his fellow right-wing rebels: “It’s as if Julius Caesar were stabbed to death in the Forum by the Marx Brothers.” In another column, she skewered DeSantis, who gives off the vibe “that he might unplug your life support to recharge his cellphone.”On her website The Marginalian, the Bulgarian essayist Maria Popova wrote: “We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb.”Finally, in The Mort Report, Mort Rosenblum despaired: “Too many voters today are easily conned, deeply biased, impervious to fact and bereft of survival instincts. Contrary to myth, frogs leap out of heating pots. Stampeding cattle stop at a cliff edge. Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide. We’ll find out about Americans in 2024.” More