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      Pressure grows on Clarence Thomas after more gifts from rightwing donor

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      The conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas faced further controversy on Thursday after the release of his financial disclosure form for 2022 provided evidence of more flights and stays with Harlan Crow, a Republican mega-donor.Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island and judiciary committee member, called the form a “late-come effort at ‘clean-up on aisle three’” which would not “deter us from fully investigating the massive, secret, rightwing billionaire influence in which this court is enmired”.A series of bombshell reports have detailed long relationships between Thomas, rich donors and influential rightwing figures. In the case of Crow, a real-estate baron and collector of Nazi memorabilia, ProPublica has reported gifts of luxury travel and resort stays, a property purchase involving Thomas’s mother and school fees paid for his great-nephew.Thomas is the senior conservative on a court dominated 6-3 by the right, a majority that has handed down epochal rulings including Dobbs v Jackson, which removed the right to abortion.From the left, calls for Thomas to resign or be impeached have proliferated. In the Senate, Democrats have advanced supreme court ethics reform. Given that Republicans have sufficient votes to prevent all such actions – and that the chief justice, John Roberts, has rebuffed calls to testify – chances of change seem slim.Thomas, 75, has denied wrongdoing, saying he was advised he did not need to disclose trips and gifts from rich donors as they were “hospitality from close personal friends”.His 2022 disclosure form was released on the last day of August after he – and another conservative beset by reporting about donor relationships, Samuel Alito – requested 90-day extensions to the usual deadline. In an unusual move, Thomas’s form included a lengthy defence of previous filings.In one striking contention, the justice claimed protests over the Dobbs decision, after it leaked in May 2022, justified his use of Crow’s private plane for a trip to Texas to speak at a rightwing conference.“Because of the increased security risk following the Dobbs opinion leak,” the form said, “the May flights were by private plane for official travel as filer’s security detail recommended noncommercial travel whenever possible.”Thomas’s lawyer, Elliot S Berke, said the justice had “always strived for full transparency and adherence to the law, including with respect to what personal travel needed to be reported”.Berke also criticised “ethics complaints filed against Justice Thomas by leftwing organisations … diametrically opposed to his judicial philosophy” and “leftwing ‘watchdog’ groups … attacking Justice Thomas for alleged ethical violations stemming from his relationships with personal friends who happen to be wealthy”.In his own statement, Kyle Herrig, senior adviser to the watchdog Accountable.US, said: “It’s no surprise that Justice Thomas has kept up his decades-long cozy relationship with billionaire benefactor Harlan Crow with even more lavish jet rides and vacation reimbursements.“For years, Thomas has used his position on our nation’s highest court as a way to upgrade his own lifestyle – and that hasn’t stopped.“… Harlan Crow, Justice Thomas, Leonard Leo, and other key players … may believe they exist above the law, but they don’t. We need accountability and reform now.”Another court observer, Gabe Roth of Fix the Court, addressed the unusual statement appended to Thomas’s declarations form.“Justice Thomas’s lengthy explanation as to why he omitted various gifts and free trips on previous disclosures does not countermand his decades of willful obfuscation when it comes to his reporting requirements,” Roth said.“What’s more, he’s chosen not to update earlier reports with details about the tuition gift, the RV loan” – from Anthony Welters, a healthcare magnate, and first reported by the New York Times – “or his countless private plane fights, all of which were reportable.“It’s time for the Judicial Conference, as required by the disclosure law, to refer these issues to the [US] justice department for further investigation.” More

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      ‘Warped history’: how the US supreme court justified gutting gay rights

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      The extreme religious right’s mission to roll back civil rights from abortion to public accommodations is being fueled by false facts and false history. Recent articles in the New Republic have documented the shaky factual foundation behind 303 Creative LLC v Elenis, the case in which the supreme court held that a website design business owned by an evangelical Christian, Lorie Smith, could refuse service to same-sex couples. Even more troubling, the history undergirding the majority’s reasoning is misleading and dangerous to the separation of church and state.Tragically, the religious right knows it has a friendly audience in the six conservative Catholic justices on the supreme court, who have been partners in shaking the foundations of fundamental rights. The justices’ new standard is whether a constitutional right is grounded in “history and tradition”, the latest byword for the bogus doctrine of “originalism”. So they need some history, and apparently any history will do.The legal end to reach a thunderous ruling justifies their debatable means. So the concept of “religious autonomy”, built on a foundation of misleading scholarship, “impact” litigation and, above all, false history, has become the method for restricting rights. Its logic of power rests on its illogic; its warping of the constitution depends on the distortion of history.Tossing aside established historySince the first religious free exercise case in 1878, the supreme court has held that the first amendment protects belief absolutely, but speech and conduct reflecting those beliefs can be regulated if the government’s interest is strong enough.According to the founders, the reason speech and conduct should be subject to the law is the potential for harm. For example, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously remarked, it is illegal to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there are no flames. It is also illegal to cover up child sex abuse or to let a child die from medical neglect despite religious motives. This foundational no-harm doctrine used to apply to all Americans. But now, with its recent decision, the conservative supreme court majority has carved out a gaping exception to the no-harm doctrine for the extremist Christian right, tossing aside established history.For the court to reach its holding that an evangelical website designer has a constitutional right to engage in invidious discrimination against same-sex couples, the majority fraudulently inflated the value of Smith’s speech from expressive conduct (regulatable) to highly valued “pure speech” (untouchable).Two conservative amicus groups, the Becket Fund and the Catholic League, provided the court with the necessary tools to assemble this phony argument by concocting fraudulent histories on the freedom of religious speech.Both the Becket Fund and the Catholic League rely heavily on a 1990 article by the conservative law professor Michael W McConnell that cherry-picks history to make the argument that the constitution mandates religious exemptions from the law. No legitimate scholar outside the realm of the religious right takes McConnell’s arguments seriously – they were thoroughly debunked by Philip Hamburger, Ellis West and myself 20 years ago. As I wrote in 2004, “the power to act outside the law–was not part of the framers’ intent, the framing generation’s understanding, or the vast majority–and the best–of the supreme court’s free exercise jurisprudence.”Unlike what the Becket Fund and the Catholic League wish the justices to believe, the historical truth is that the founders believed that obedience to the rule of law was necessary for true liberty. And it is the true history repeatedly stated in the sermons of the leading clergy of the late 18th-century United States. The most influential of them all, president of Presbyterian College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), the Rev John Witherspoon, who trained more framers than any other educator –including the architect of the constitution, James Madison – stated that the “true notion of liberty is the prevalence of law and order, and the security of individuals”. According to Israel Evans, chaplain of the American army in the Revolution and a friend of George Washington, when a believer “counteract[s] the peace and good order of society” and harms others, “he would be punished not for the exercise of a virtuous principle of conscience, but for violating that universal law of rectitude and benevolence which was intended to prevent one man from injuring another.”The founders believed churches should have the “power to make or ordain articles of faith, creeds, forms of worship or church government”, in the words of the congregational pastor, Rev Elisha Williams, rector of Yale University. Yet the ecclesiastical domain had to give way when others are hurt. As the founder Baptist Rev John Leland stated, the civil law is intended to constrain the actions that harm others and the public good: “[D]isturbers … ought to be punished.” Leland was close to Madison and Thomas Jefferson and influenced their views on separation of church and state. “Never promote men who seek after a state-established religion; it is spiritual tyranny – the worst of despotism,” Leland wrote.In short, the founders definitively rejected the notion that religious believers have special rights to avoid the duly enacted laws that apply to everyone else. The inconvenience of this deeply rooted historical fact must be glossed over by the Becket Fund and the Catholic League, because acknowledging it would undermine their entire argument.Exaltation of religious speech through revisionismThe argument for placing religious speech on a pedestal above all other speech is especially suspect. The Becket Fund argues that the freedom of religious speech has historically occupied a “preferred position” in the “constitutional order”, over other forms of speech. By “preferred” they mean untouchable by law. They even concoct a new label for valuable speech: “core religious speech”. The Fund’s so-called “history” argues that the freedom of speech started with the freedom of religious speech for churches, which then devolved to freedom of speech for legislators, and then finally individuals. The history they tick off is in fact a history of the suppression of religious dissenters’ speech, which was often brutal. From that bloody history, they conclude that at the founding, “the framers elected to follow a broad view of freedom of speech”.Yet their history is just spin. First, it’s not supported in the history of the first amendment itself. As they have to admit, “neither the debates in Congress nor the ratification debates within the several states shed light on the exact scope of the right protected, much less to what extent religious speech was covered.” Second, the first amendment’s free speech and press clauses were ratified in an era of vibrant political speech aired by a vital press. It is clear the founders believed that the press and political speech were highly valued, not ranked below that of religious speech in some recently invented imaginary hierarchy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionToday, the first amendment holds that political and religious speech are highly valued (though not one over the other), but at the time of the framing, the framers knew that when they limited the first amendment to the federal government, the state anti-blasphemy laws would stand. They placed political speech above dissenters’ religious speech. Thus, the first amendment was consistent with putting in jail those who criticized Christianity. Indeed, there were prosecutions for blasphemous and sacrilegious speech until Burstyn v Wilson in 1952, which held such a law unconstitutional. Of course, that is religious speech suppression. So much, in the light of the founders, for religious speech’s “preferred position” by history. What they really mean, based on their twisted interpretation, is that Christian speech has a preferred position.The Catholic League in fact leans into the fantastical concept of exalting a subset of religious speech over all other religious speech when it bizarrely attributes to the framers their acceptance of what they claim as Madison’s supposed view “that the governor of the universe supersedes any earthly authority, religious convictions were understood to command greater deference than mere personal opinions”.Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion elevates certain religious speech exactly as the Becket Fund and Catholic League suggest, and achieves this feat by intentionally misapplying free speech doctrine at its most basic. As a matter of law prior to this court, 303 Creative’s website design would have been expressive conduct. 303 Creative’s commercial speech is not the traditional, highly protected speech the court has recognized again and again: it’s not speech in a public park or on a public sidewalk or a parade. The speech is by a commercial business, whose product has expressive elements to it, which means it is expressive conduct, on which the public accommodation laws impose merely incidental burdens. However, the majority pulls a proverbial rabbit out of its hat by saying that the parties “stipulated” the commercial speech is “pure speech” – and so it must be. But that’s not how free speech cases are decided. The courts decide whether expression is traditionally highly protected, lesser valued speech, expressive conduct, or unprotected altogether. Hiding behind the parties’ stipulation is in derogation of the court’s duties and constitutional nonsense.Having transformed commercial expressive conduct into highly protected speech, Gorsuch nudged the law closer to McConnell’s debunked thesis of mandatory exemptions, which downplays any government interest. Gorsuch takes 12 pages to even acknowledge Colorado’s interest in public accommodations law, granting it one full paragraph and a quick tip of the hat: “The vital role public accommodations laws play in realizing the civil rights of all Americans.” Then he segues to suggesting that newer rights in the public accommodations laws haven’t been fully examined in the law. It’s easy to read between the lines: the majority is suggesting that LGBTQ+ discrimination isn’t nearly as bad as race discrimination; it’s a second-order interest. This is exactly what the Institute for Faith and Family argued with some dubious 14th amendment assertions. The disgraced John Eastman, writing for the Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, would have moved all the way to McConnell’s conclusion, arguing no state interest could possibly overcome the exalted speech of the wedding website. The court got very close.Dangerous movesThese are dangerous moves by the court that unleash biased and destructive religious speech and conduct. The founders would not recognize the lawless world this court is building.Let’s be frank. The extreme right Christian groups supporting 303 Creative are still burned up about the Obergefell decision, which enshrined gay marriage as constitutional. They have manufactured a fictional guarantee to so-called “pure speech” and trivialized the anti-discrimination laws to make up for the fact they lost the war on LGBTQ+ marriage.The majority’s decision in 303 Creative is, in fact, an expression of the Christian right’s constitutional sour grapes. The supreme court majority has deconstructed the first amendment to fit their Bibles.
      Marci A Hamilton is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania More

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      AOC leads call for federal ethics investigation into Clarence Thomas

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      Five House Democrats led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York wrote to the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, to demand a federal investigation of the conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, over his acceptance of undeclared gifts from billionaire rightwing donors.“We write to urge the Department of Justice to launch an investigation into … Clarence Thomas for consistently failing to report significant gifts he received from Harlan Crow and other billionaires for nearly two decades in defiance of his duty under federal law,” the Democrats said.As well as Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive popularly known as AOC, the letter was signed by Jerrold Nadler of New York, the ranking Democrat on the House judiciary committee; Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a professor of constitutional law; Ted Lieu of California; and Hank Johnson of Georgia.This week saw publication of a bombshell ProPublica report which said Thomas had taken 38 undeclared vacations funded by billionaires and accepted gifts including expensive sports tickets.The report followed extensive reporting by ProPublica and other outlets including the New York Times regarding Thomas’s close and financially beneficial relationships with Crow, a real-estate magnate, and other influential businessmen.Thomas, 75, denies wrongdoing, claiming never to have discussed with his benefactors politics or business before the court. He has said he did not declare those benefactors’ gifts, over many years, because he was wrongly advised.Ethics experts say that Thomas broke federal law by failing to declare such largesse.Supreme court justices are nominally subject to the same ethics rules as all federal justices but in practice govern themselves.The chief justice, John Roberts, has rebuffed requests for testimony in Congress. Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee have advanced supreme court ethics reform but it will almost certainly fail, in the face of Republican opposition.Calls for Thomas to resign or be impeached and removed have proliferated but are also almost certain to fail. Confirmed in 1991, Thomas is the most senior of six conservatives on a nine-member court tipped dramatically right by three justices installed during the presidency of Donald Trump.In their letter to Garland on Friday, Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow Democrats noted that Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, is “a far-right activist who often champions conservative causes that come before the court”.They were addressing, they said, “a matter of critical importance to the integrity of our justice system”.Outlining reporting about Thomas, the representatives said his “consistent failure to disclose gifts and benefits from industry magnates and wealthy, politically active executives highlights a blatant disregard for judicial ethics as well as apparent legal violations.“No individual, regardless of their position or stature, should be exempt from legal scrutiny for lawbreaking … as a supreme court justice and high constitutional officer, Justice Thomas should be held to the highest standard, not the lowest and he certainly shouldn’t be allowed to violate federal law.”Refusing to hold Thomas accountable, the Democrats said, “would set a dangerous precedent, undermining public trust in our institutions and raising legitimate questions about the equal application of laws in our nation.“The Department of Justice must undertake a thorough investigation into the reported conduct to ensure that it cannot happen again.” More

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      ‘Affirmative action for the privileged’: why Democrats are fighting legacy admissions

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      In the aftermath of the supreme court’s decision to strike down race-conscious admissions at universities in June, progressive Democrats have turned their outrage into motivation. They are now using their fury to power an impassioned campaign against a different admissions practice that they consider unjust and outdated: legacy admissions.The century-old practice gives an advantage to the family members of universities’ alumni, a group that tends to be whiter and wealthier than the general pool of college applicants. Critics argue that legacy applicants already enjoy an unfair leg up in the admissions process and that university’s preference toward those students exacerbates existing inequalities in higher education.As the country adapts to a post-affirmative action world, progressives are ramping up the political and legal pressure on universities to scrap their use of legacy admissions. A Democratic bill, introduced by Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Congressman Jamaal Bowman of New York, and a civil rights inquiry at the Department of Education could represent a serious threat to legacy admissions.“Though the supreme court gutted race-conscious college admissions, make no mistake, affirmative action is still alive and well for children of alumni and major donors, and taxpayers shouldn’t be funding it,” Merkley told the Guardian.The origins of legacy admissions policies date back to the 1920s, when Jewish and immigrant students began attending America’s elite universities in larger numbers. Concerned over this growing trend, college leaders implemented a range of admissions preferences, such as legacy status, designed to benefit the white Protestant applicants who had populated university classrooms for centuries.Despite the ignominious roots of legacy admissions, the practice persists at many of the country’s most prestigious universities, including every member of the Ivy League. Colleges defend the practice as beneficial for building strong alumni communities across generations and encouraging financial contributions, even though one analysis found “no statistically significant evidence that legacy preferences impact total alumni giving”.Progressives have mocked legacy admissions as “affirmative action for the privileged”, and the supreme court’s decision against race-conscious admissions has reinvigorated their efforts to end the widely unpopular practice altogether. According to one Pew Research Center survey conducted last year found, 75% of Americans believe alumni relations should not be considered in the admissions process.“Many of the legacy kids simply would not have gotten in had they not had legacy [preference],” said Rashad Robinson, president of the racial justice group Color of Change. “This is the result of a system that was designed to operate exactly the way it’s operating.”Last month, Merkley and Bowman reintroduced their bill, the Fair College Admissions for Students Act, to prohibit universities participating in federal student aid programs from giving an admissions advantage to the relatives of alumni or donors. Noting the financial advantages legacy students often enjoy in the college admissions process, Merkley suggested those applicants do not require additional assistance to gain entry to elite universities.“As the first in my family to go to college, I know the struggles facing students whose parents have never been through the process,” Merkley said.According to an analysis conducted by the Harvard research group Opportunity Insights, legacy students were only slightly more qualified than the average applicant to elite private colleges, but were nearly four times more likely to be admitted than those with the same test scores. The boost appears to disproportionately harm students of color, as one study found that white students account for 40% of Harvard’s total applicant pool but nearly 70% of the university’s legacy applicants. Opportunity Insights’ research also concluded that legacy applicants are more likely to come from wealthy families, giving them more access to resources like private education and preparation courses for standardized tests.“Children of donors and alumni may be excellent students, but they are the last people who should get reserved seats, enabling them to gain admission over more qualified students from more challenging backgrounds,” Merkley said.The battle over legacy admissions has now also attracted the attention of the Department of Education. Last month, the department opened a civil rights investigation into Harvard’s use of legacy admissions following a complaint filed by the group Lawyers for Civil Rights on behalf of three racial justice organizations. The complaint accused Harvard of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by giving an admissions edge to the children of donors and wealthy alumni.“We know that schools like [Harvard] set students up for success – and for great success – and introduce them to new innovative ideas and a great network,” said Michael Kippins, a litigation fellow with Lawyers for Civil Rights. “They should reflect the type of diversity that we see in our communities the same way that we would want fair access for anything else.”Olatunde Johnson, a professor at Columbia Law School, viewed lawsuits against colleges’ legacy admissions policies as somewhat inevitable after the supreme court’s decision on affirmative action.“The supreme court opened the door to that challenge by leaving legacy and donor preferences untouched while it got rid of race-conscious affirmative action, so it made it kind of an easy target,” Johnson said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe predicted other universities would be closely watching the outcome of the civil rights inquiry into Harvard as they reconsider their own legacy admissions policies.“People might wait to see how this challenge is resolved because some of the broad contours of this complaint are going to mirror what people would do in future cases,” Johnson said. “Whatever kind of ruling there is, it’s going to have implications more broadly for other institutions, even without separate complaints or lawsuits.”Some colleges aren’t waiting on the federal government to make the change. The liberal arts college Wesleyan University announced last month that it would scrap its legacy admissions policy, joining other private institutions like Amherst College and Johns Hopkins University. The practice is already prohibited at a number of public colleges, including all schools in the University of California and the California State University systems.The trend of abandoning legacy admissions policies may accelerate in the face of mounting criticism from political leaders, including some Republicans. After the supreme court’s decision in June, South Carolina senator and Republican presidential candidate Tim Scott praised the ruling and simultaneously suggested universities needed to revisit their legacy preferences.“I think the question is, how do you continue to create a culture where education is the goal for every single part of our community?” Scott told Fox News. “One of the things that Harvard could do to make that even better is to eliminate any legacy programs.”Robinson is somewhat skeptical that a bipartisan coalition will materialize to meaningfully challenge legacy admissions, and the Republicans in control of the House have so far shown little appetite to take up Merkley and Bowman’s bill.But even if legacy preferences do come to an end, Robinson believes much more will need to be done to build a truly just college admissions process. After all, he said, the practice of legacy admissions is only one piece of a much broader system that disadvantages students of color.“Racism is like water pouring over a floor with holes in it. It will always find the cracks. So, yes, we should deal with legacy admissions. But I want to make sure that we don’t think that this is some sort of silver bullet,” Robinson said.“We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that those who are working every day to shut the doors of opportunity and access to those who have been excluded are not going to find other ways to to hold the side door open for people who look like them.” More

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      ‘Unprecedented, stunning, disgusting’: Clarence Thomas condemned over billionaire gifts

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      Conservative US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas has been condemned for maintaining “unprecedented” and “shameless” links to rightwing benefactors, after ProPublica published new details of his acceptance of undeclared gifts including 38 vacations and expensive sports tickets.Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat and chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, rendered an especially damning verdict.“Unprecedented. Stunning. Disgusting. The height of hypocrisy to wear the robes of a [supreme court justice] and take undisclosed gifts from billionaires who benefit from your decisions. 38 free vacations. Yachts. Luxury mansions. Skyboxes at events. Resign,” she posted.From the Senate, Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic judiciary committee chair, said: “The latest … revelation of unreported lavish gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas makes it clear: these are not merely ethical lapses. This is a shameless lifestyle underwritten for years by a gaggle of fawning billionaires.”The ProPublica report followed extensive previous reporting, by the non-profit and competitors including the New York Times, of undisclosed gifts to Thomas from a series of mega-rich donors.Supreme court justices are nominally subject to ethics rules for federal judges but in practice govern themselves.Durbin said Thomas and Samuel Alito, another arch-conservative justice who did not declare gifts, had “made it clear they’re oblivious to the embarrassment they’ve visited on the highest court in the land.“Now it’s up to Chief Justice [John] Roberts and the other justices to act on ethics reform to save their own reputations and the court’s integrity. If the court will not act, then Congress must continue to” do so.Roberts has rejected calls to testify, saying Congress cannot regulate his court. Durbin has advanced ethics reform but its chances are virtually nil, with Republicans opposed in the Senate and in control of the House.Thomas denies wrongdoing, claiming never to have discussed with his benefactors politics or business before the court and to have been wrongly advised about disclosure requirements. Nonetheless, condemnation was widespread.Adam Schiff, a House Democrat running for Senate in California, said: “The scope of Justice Thomas’ undisclosed receipt of luxury vacations from billionaires takes your breath away. As does this court’s arrogant disregard of the public. Every other federal court has an enforceable code of ethics – the supreme court needs the same.”Thomas joined the court in 1991, becoming the second Black justice in place of the first, Thurgood Marshall.Sherrilyn Ifill, former director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) legal fund, said Thomas had created “a crisis and we need to start treating it as such. Our profession, the Senate judiciary committee, newspaper editorial boards, and the chief [justice] will need to summon the courage needed to call for what, by now, should be the obvious next step.”Robert Reich, a former US labor secretary now a Berkeley professor and Guardian columnist, pointed to what that “next step” might be, saying Thomas “must resign or be impeached if [the supreme court] is going to retain any credibility”.Only one justice, Samuel Chase, has ever been impeached – in 1804-05. He was acquitted in the Senate. In 1969, the justice Abe Fortas resigned under threat of impeachment, over his acceptance of outside fees.Now, Republican control of the House renders impeachment vastly unlikely. Nor is Thomas likely to resign, particularly as Democrats hold the Senate, able to reduce conservative dominance of the court should a rightwinger vacate the bench.Nonetheless, calls for Thomas to go continued.Ted Lieu, a California congressman, said Thomas “has brought shame upon himself and the United States supreme court … no government official, elected or unelected, could ethically or legally accept gifts of that scale. He should resign immediately”.Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a campaign group, said: “If three times makes a pattern, what does 38 times make? We’ll tell you: the fact that Clarence Thomas has taken 38 luxury trips with billionaires without disclosing them means this kind of ethical lapse is part of his lifestyle. He needs to resign.” More

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      Supreme court justice Thomas took 38 undisclosed vacations from rich friends – report

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      The US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas appears to have violated US law by failing to disclose “flights, yacht cruises and expensive sports tickets” bestowed by wealthy friends behind at least 38 destination vacations, ethics experts told ProPublica in its latest blockbuster report on the conservative judge and his friends.“It’s so obvious,” Richard Painter, a White House ethics chief under George W Bush, told the nonprofit website. “It all has to be reported.”The report was just the latest in a string of exposés of links between Thomas, 75, and rich benefactors, many donors to conservative causes, prominently including the real-estate magnate Harlan Crow.ProPublica has revealed undeclared links to Crow including luxury holidays and travel; a real estate sale to the benefit of Thomas’s mother; and school fees paid for his grand nephew. It has also reported on links between another arch-conservative justice, Samuel Alito, and another billionaire, Paul Singer.In response to a previous ProPublica report about Crow, Thomas denied wrongdoing, saying he never discussed politics or business before the court with his friend.The justice did not comment on the new report about his 38 vacations at the gift of businessmen including Wayne Huizenga (a former owner of the Miami Dolphins NFL team who died in 2018), David Sokol and Paul “Tony” Novelly, trips that included luxury golf resort visits and expensive college football tickets.Novelly and Huizenga’s son did not comment.Sokol told ProPublica he and Thomas “have never once discussed any pending court matter. Our conversations have always revolved around helping young people, sports and family matters. As to the use of private aviation, I believe that given security concerns all of the supreme court justices should either fly privately or on governmental aircraft.”On social media, Mark Paoletta, a lawyer, conservative activist and Thomas friend, attacked ProPublica before its report was published. Bemoaning “another smear job”, Paoletta called ProPublica a “leftwing billionaire-funded attack dog”, apparently a reference to Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency mogul who faces criminal charges. Earlier this year, ProPublica said it would return a $1.6m donation from Bankman-Fried and terminate the relationship.Paoletta, who appears on a painting made famous by ProPublica, of Thomas with Crow, Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society and other prominent conservatives, said the site “reached out to me for this story as I was on one of these wonderful trips with my good friends”.ProPublica described how at a luxury lodge in Wyoming, Thomas and his wife, the far-right activist Ginni Thomas, “fished, rafted on the Snake River and sat by a campfire overlooking the Teton Range with the other couples”.ProPublica also published a picture of a card sent to friends by Ginni Thomas. It showed Mark and Tricia Paoletta singing while holding phones. The caption said they were performing “a special tribute to Clarence”.Thomas’s love of luxury travel has been described elsewhere. The New York Times recently reported how Anthony Welters, a healthcare magnate, financed Thomas’s purchase of a luxury motor home, or RV.In its new report, ProPublica also reviewed records showing how the Horatio Alger Association, to which Thomas belongs, a link first reported by the Times, raised money by offering donors seats at an event at the supreme court.Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer, said: “To use the supreme court to fundraise for somebody’s charity is, to me, an abuse of office. It’s pay to play, isn’t it?”The association, named for a 19th-century writer who popularised rags-to-riches tales, denied wrongdoing and praised Thomas’s work with scholarship recipients. In a literary historical aside, ProPublica said: “In real life, Alger was a minister on Cape Cod who resigned from his parish after he was credibly accused of molesting boys.”Published early on Thursday, the ProPublica story made a huge splash.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn response, Kyle Herrig, senior adviser to Accountable.US, a progressive nonprofit, said: “Justice Thomas clearly sees his position on our nation’s highest court as a way to upgrade his own lifestyle via his billionaire benefactor social circle.”“It was his own decades-long improper financial relationship with Harlan Crow that sparked the supreme court corruption crisis in the first place – and that was just the tip of the iceberg. Harlan Crow, Justice Thomas, Leonard Leo and other key players in this court corruption crisis may believe they exist above the law, but they don’t. We need accountability and reform now.”Many would agree the supreme court is in crisis but accountability is unlikely. Supreme court justices are nominally subject to the same ethics rules as all federal judges but in practice govern themselves.Claiming his court holds itself to the “highest standards” of ethical conduct, the conservative chief justice, John Roberts, has rejected requests to testify in Congress. Meanwhile, the Senate judiciary committee chair, Dick Durbin of Illinois, has exchanged barbs with Alito. On Thursday, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, another committee Democrat, said of the new ProPublica report: “I said it would get worse; it will keep getting worse. Omertà must stop; it becomes complicity.”The committee has introduced legislation for ethics reform. It is almost certain to fail, given Republican opposition.Democrats and progressives have called for Thomas to resign or be removed. Neither is remotely likely. Republican control of the House ensures impeachment is a non-starter. Even if it were, Thomas is a senior conservative among six on the nine-member court, delivering wins including the removal of the right to abortion. It is inconceivable that impeachment could receive necessary bipartisan support.Still, ProPublica found no shortage of ethics experts to profess dismay at Thomas’s friendships and failure to disclose their benefits.Jeremy Fogel, a former judge, said: “I don’t remember ever seeing this degree of largesse given to anybody. I think it’s unprecedented.”Don Fox, a former government ethics counsel, said: “It’s just the height of hypocrisy to wear the robes [of a justice] and live the lifestyle of a billionaire.” More

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      How a Trump adviser manipulates free speech to advance his causes and ‘hurt his adversaries’

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      Towards the end of July Leonard Leo, architect of the rightwing takeover of the American judiciary, emerged from his vacation retreat in Maine to write an opinion piece for the local newspaper, the Bangor Daily News, headlined: “When is free speech protected?”Leo, 58, is the low-profile, deceptively nondescript co-chair of the conservative legal group Federalist Society. That he turned his hand to this topic was in itself no surprise – he has long presented himself as a champion of the first amendment, with its guarantees of freedom of religion, speech, press and peaceable assembly.“Free speech is essential for a free society,” he wrote. “As such, it is something that I have defended and will continue to defend, and I have always accepted that there will be objections and opposition to the work I do.”But a couple of eye-catching, and seemingly incongruous, events have led to speculation that his commitment to free speech might be more complicated than he professes, and more self serving. If all American citizens are equal in front of this vital element of the US constitution, could it be that some people – notably Leo himself – are more equal than others?The first of the two events took place in the bailiwick of the Bangor Daily News, in Maine, where Leo has a $3m waterfront estate on an elite island community in Northeast Harbor. On 20 July, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker reported on a new lawsuit that had been brought by a 23-year-old local resident for wrongful arrest.Eli Durand-McDonnell, a landscaper, was part of a group of progressive activists who staged a series of peaceful protests outside Leo’s home. They were angry about his role in securing a rightwing supermajority on the US supreme court, and the evisceration of fundamental rights that flowed from that.Leo had proposed to Donald Trump the names of all three of the justices appointed by the former president: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. As such, he played a critical role in the court’s overturning of the right to an abortion in June 2022.Leo isn’t named as a defendant in the civil lawsuit, which accuses two local police officers of making an illegal and retaliatory arrest of Durand-McDonnell during one of the protests on 31 July 2022, a month after the devastating abortion ruling. But it does claim that the arrest was made “at the direct behest of Leo, a powerful and wealthy conservative political activist who has used millions of dollars as political speech to influence American politics and courts”.The complaint discloses that the head of Leo’s private security detail contacted the Bar Harbor police while one of the protests was occurring outside his home, singling out Durand-McDonnell for supposedly harassing the Federalist Society chief and his family. Leo told a police officer who turned up at the scene: “I think it’s time for us to press some charges,” adding, “I really feel like this is a guy who’s got to be in jail someday, and sooner rather than later.”In his Bangor Daily News op-ed, Leo said that before the protest Durand-McDonnell had yelled at his wife and daughter that they should burn in hell. “I don’t take reporting someone to the police lightly. But, as a husband and a father, neither can I take harassment of my wife and children lightly,” he wrote.Durand-McDonnell saw the event differently. He denies harassing anyone, insisting that all his actions were political protest that is protected by the first amendment.“I think this case sums it up perfectly,” he told the New Yorker. “The rules don’t apply to Leonard Leo … If he doesn’t agree with what someone else says, it’s no longer free speech.”The second event burst into public view five days after Mayer’s New Yorker article. On 25 July, Leo wrote a letter through his lawyer to two leading Democratic US senators on the judiciary committee, Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse.The senators wanted Leo to answer a series of questions about his ties to the supreme court justices as part of an ethics investigation they were conducting. Leo has long been a figure of interest for Congress, given his outsized influence on US politics and the courts.He is credited as being both brains and brawn behind the long campaign to steer the federal judiciary sharply to the right. He helped place at least 200 judges on the federal bench, and then went on to transform the nation’s most powerful court.“Leo has been the central driving figure of the conservative movement’s decades-long effort to reshape the supreme court’s composition and outcomes,” said Alex Aronson, a judicial accountability advocate and Whitehouse’s former chief counsel in the US senate. “He has his fingerprints on every one of the six Republican-appointed justices who are now on the court.”Leo has also become a focus of intense public scrutiny after he was handed a $1.6bn fund to spend on boosting conservative causes. He now controls a pot of money that represents possibly the largest single donation to a political non-profit in US history.Leo’s name has repeatedly popped up in the wave of ethics scandals that has washed over the supreme court this year. In April, when ProPublica published its blockbuster expose of Justice Clarence Thomas’s chummy relations with the Texas real estate magnate Harlan Crow, there was Leo depicted in a painting that hangs at Crow’s luxury lakeside resort in upstate New York sitting alongside Crow and Thomas in amicable conversation.A month later the Washington Post revealed that Leo had arranged for Thomas’s wife, the pro-Trump extremist Ginni Thomas, to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting. “No mention of Ginni, of course,” Leo instructed the polling firm that supplied the cash.A month after that, ProPublica unleashed another blockbuster that disclosed the luxury fishing trip in Alaska that Justice Samuel Alito went on in 2008 bankrolled by the hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer. There was Leo again, pictured with Singer and Alito holding king salmon they had caught.Leo, who assisted Alito in his 2006 confirmation to the supreme court, had a hand in arranging the trip. That included asking Singer for seats on his private jet which the justice failed to disclose as he was legally required to do.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the wake of these ethically dubious bombshells, Durbin and Whitehouse decided to conduct their own inquiry as part of congressional oversight. They wanted to know from Leo further details of the Alaska fishing trip and what transportation, lodging and gifts he had provided to any of the justices.In his response, Leo turned once more to the first amendment. This time, though, he made the opposite argument: unlike the Maine protester who he said had no free speech right to harass him, Leo said he had an absolute first amendment right that protected his dealings and communications with Alito and the other justices.“Mr Leo is entitled by the First Amendment to engage in public advocacy, associate with others who share his views, and express opinions on important matters of public concern,” his lawyer wrote. Leo declined to cooperate with Congress.One of the striking aspects of Leo’s use of the first amendment in these two events is that in both instances he sets himself up as the victim of harassment. In Maine, he was “harassed” by Durand-McDonnell who in Leo’s view went beyond civil speech and therefore forfeited his first amendment protections.In the letter to Congress, Leo presents himself as being “harassed” by the senators for exercising his first amendment rights to interact with the supreme court justices in any way they liked.This glaring duality – the same harassment claim played both ways with the first amendment – has caught the attention of Leo’s critics. “He’s a free speech champion when it means forcing his radical agenda on everyday Americans and refusing to cooperate with Congress,” said Kyle Herrig, senior adviser to the government corruption watchdog Accountable.US. “But he does an about-face as soon as the free speech is directed at him.”The Guardian reached out to Leo to invite his reaction to this criticism, but he did not respond.Aronson called the arguments laid out in Leo’s letter refusing to cooperate with Congress “comically absurd”. “What Leo argued here is that Congress lacks authority to investigate the supreme court. That position has no basis in the constitution or in any precedent.”Aronson said that this was nothing new: Leo and the network of dark money groups he coordinates, along with the conservative justices of the supreme court he helped into power, have long massaged the first amendment for political gain. “The first amendment has been a particular target of political manipulation by Leo and the conservative legal movement across a range of subjects,” he said.In 2010 the supreme court ruling Citizens United used free speech as a way to open the door to massive spending in elections by corporate donors. Then in 2021, in a much less noticed ruling, Americans for Prosperity v Bonta, the rightwing justices effectively created a new first amendment right to keep the identity of big donors secret.In the judicial term that ended in June, the six conservative justices again turned to the first amendment – this time to unleash open discrimination against LGBTQ+ communities in the name of protected speech. In a dissent, Sonia Sotomayor warned that business services could now be denied any vulnerable group, such as interracial couples or parents with disabled children, all in the name of “free speech”.Now, in the latest iteration of the use of the argument by the right, Trump himself is leaning on a free speech defense in response to this week’s indictment over his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election.Stand back from all this, and Aronson believes we are witnessing the unfolding of Leo’s judicial revolution. “Highly influential political actors are developing incomparable sway over the judiciary after decades of coordinated investment,” he said.“The law is becoming manipulable to advance their ends. And hurt their adversaries.” More

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      Supreme court reinstates Biden’s ‘ghost gun’ restrictions for now

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      The US supreme court on Tuesday granted a request by President Joe Biden’s administration to reinstate – at least for now – a federal regulation aimed at reining in privately made firearms called “ghost guns” that are difficult for law enforcement to trace.The justices put on hold a 5 July decision by US district judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth, Texas, that had blocked the 2022 rule nationwide pending the administration’s appeal. O’Connor found that the administration exceeded its authority under a 1968 federal law called the Gun Control Act in implementing the rule relating to ghost guns, firearms that are privately assembled and lack the usual serial numbers required by the federal government.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMore details soon… More