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      Judicial record undermines Clarence Thomas defence in luxury gifts scandal

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      Earlier this month, the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas put out a statement in which he addressed the storm of criticism that has engulfed him following the blockbuster ProPublica report that revealed his failure to disclose lavish gifts of luxury vacations and private-jet travel from a Texan real estate magnate.Thomas confirmed that the Dallas billionaire and Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow and his wife Kathy were “among our dearest friends”. Thomas admitted, too, that he and his wife Ginni had “joined them on a number of family trips during the more-than-a-quarter-century we have known them”.The justice, who is the longest-serving member of the nation’s highest court and arguably its most staunch conservative, insisted he had taken advice that “this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends” did not have to be reported under federal ethics laws. He emphasized that the friend in question “did not have business before the court”.But a close look at Thomas’s judicial activities from the time he became friends with Crow, in the mid-1990s, suggests that the statement might fall short of the full picture. It reveals that a conservative organization affiliated with Crow did have business before the supreme court while Thomas was on the bench.In addition, Crow has been connected to several groups that over the years have lobbied the supreme court through so-called “amicus briefs” that provide legal arguments supporting a plaintiff or defendant.In 2003, the anti-tax group the Club for Growth joined other rightwing individuals and organisations, including the Republican senator Mitch McConnell and the National Rifle Association (NRA), in attempting to push back campaign finance restrictions on election spending.At the time of the legal challenge, from at least 2001 to 2004, Crow was a member of the Club for Growth’s prestigious “founders committee”. Though little is known about the role of the committee, it clearly commanded some influence over the group’s policymaking.During the course of a 2005 investigation into likely campaign finance violations by the Club for Growth, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) noted that rank-and-file club members could “vote on an annual policy question selected by the founders committee”.Crow has also been a major donor to the club, contributing $275,000 to its coffers in 2004 and a further $150,000 two years later.The 2003 legal challenge championed by the Club for Growth targeted the McCain-Feingold Act, which had been passed with cross-aisle backing the previous year. The legislation placed new controls on the amount of “soft money” political party committees and corporations could spend on elections.On appeal, a consolidated version of the lawsuit, Mitch McConnell v FEC, was taken up by the supreme court. In a majority ruling, the court allowed the most important elements of the McCain-Feingold Act to stand (though they were later nullified by the supreme court’s contentious 2010 Citizens United ruling).Thomas was livid. He issued a 25-page dissenting opinion that sided heavily with the anti-regulation stance taken by the Club for Growth and its rightwing allies. Thomas began his opinion by breathlessly accusing his fellow justices of upholding “what can only be described as the most significant abridgment of the freedoms of speech and association since the civil war”.By the time Thomas issued his opinion in December 2003 he had already forged his deep relationship with Crow. According to the billionaire, they first met at a conference in Dallas in 1994 – by which time Thomas had already been nominated by George HW Bush to the most powerful court in the land.The businessman had already showered Thomas with several lavish gifts before the McCain-Feingold challenge reached his court. Thomas disclosed for instance a 1997 flight from Washington to northern California on Crow’s private jet to attend an all-male retreat at Bohemian Grove at which the justice went on to become a regular guest.There was also a Bible once owned by Frederick Douglass, then valued at $19,000. In 2001 Crow made a $150,000 donation to create a Clarence Thomas wing within the Savannah, Georgia, library the justice frequented as a child.The federal law 28 US Code section 455 requires any federal judge – including the nine supreme court justices – to recuse themselves from any proceeding “in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned”.ProPublica’s explosive investigation earlier this month exposed undeclared gifts and travel that have continued to be bestowed by the billionaire on Thomas to this day. They included a nine-day vacation with Ginni in Indonesia in the summer of 2019 the cost of which probably exceeded $500,000.In a later report, ProPublica revealed that in 2014 Thomas sold his mother’s home in Savannah to Crow. That transaction was also left undisclosed.The ProPublica disclosures have prompted a debate about the need for greater scrutiny of the conduct of supreme court justices. Top Democrats have called for an official inquiry into Thomas’s behavior and for all the justices to be subject to a strict ethics code.The progressive Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, speaking on CNN, decried Crow’s largesse as “very serious corruption” and called for Thomas to be impeached.Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a non-partisan group which advocates supreme court reform, said that a crisis of trust in Thomas’s ethical judgments had been bubbling below the surface for some time. “The reason that it is so salient now is that the supreme court has grown exponentially in power since Justice Thomas took that first private plane ride in 1997 – when the court becomes the most powerful government body, then ethics issues become all the more critical.”The Guardian contacted Thomas at the supreme court but did not receive a response.This week, the normally media-shy Crow, who has assets valued at $30bn and who has donated at least $13m to Republicans, gave an in-depth interview to the Dallas Morning News. He claimed the furore around his relations with Thomas was a “political hit-job” by the liberal media.He insisted he and Thomas were just friends who spent their time talking about their kids and animals. “We talk about dogs a lot,” he said.Asked whether he ever considered their friendship as a ticket to quid pro quo, he replied: “Every single relationship – a baby’s relationship to his mom – has some kind of reciprocity.”Crow’s office, in a statement to the Guardian, disputed any relevance of Crow’s links with the Club for Growth, his friendship with Thomas, and the justice’s opinion in the McConnell v FEC case. “Harlan Crow was not a party to the litigation, was only a financial supporter of Club for Growth, and had no role whatsoever in any Club for Growth litigation decisions.”The statement continued: “Any insinuation that Justice Thomas wrote his opinion in this case because Harlan Crow was a supporter is ridiculous as Justice Thomas had already expressed these same views in a previous case, Nixon v Shrink MO PAC.”The billionaire’s office insisted that Thomas’s skepticism of the constitutionality of campaign finance regulation “was established before he had even met Harlan Crow”.Crow has never personally come before the supreme court, and denies ever trying to influence Thomas on any legal or political issue. But he has served on the boards of at least three conservative groups that have lobbied the supreme court through amicus briefs. Early in his friendship with Thomas, Crow sat on the national board of the now defunct Center for the Community Interest, which filed at least eight amicus briefs in supreme court cases backing rightwing causes such as sweeping crime off the streets and countering pornography.He has also been a trustee for more than 25 years of the American Enterprise Institute, a thinktank advancing free enterprise ideas that has filed several supporting briefs to the court. In 2001 AEI gave Thomas a bust of Abraham Lincoln then valued at $15,000.Crow is an overseer of the Hoover Institution, a conservative thinktank based at Stanford University. In February, Hoover senior fellows led an amicus brief filed to Thomas and his fellow justices challenging the $400bn student loan debt-relief program introduced by Joe Biden.The supreme court is likely to rule on whether the scheme can go ahead this summer. In oral arguments in February, Thomas was among the rightwing justices who hold the supermajority who indicated they were skeptical of the program, raising the possibility that the court will scupper the hopes of more than 40 million Americans eligible for the debt relief. More

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      Democratic senators condemn federal judge’s ruling to block abortion drug

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      Top Democratic senators across the US are pushing back after a federal judge in Texas decided to block the FDA-approved abortion drug mifepristone.On Sunday, the New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand criticized as an “outrage” Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s decision, which is currently halted until at least Wednesday 19 April by the supreme court.Speaking to CNN, Gillibrand said: “To take away the right to have medicine is an extension of taking away this right to privacy, to say we can’t have medicine sent by doctors by mail to people across the country is further invading into this right to privacy, where the court and government has a right to what’s in your mail, and who you’re talking to and what communications you’re having. It’s an outrage.”She went on to condemn the supreme court, which in June 2022 decided to overturn Roe v Wade, a ruling that declared the constitutional right to an abortion for nearly half a century.Gillibrand said the supreme court’s decision was an “all-out assault on women’s reproductive freedom,” adding: “What we are seeing in these Republican legislatures as well as these very conservative courts is a continuation of that assault.”Similarly, the Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar called Kacsmaryk’s decision “unbelievable”.“What is going to be next? Is that judge going to not like birth control pills? Are we going to have a judge that doesn’t like [cholesterol medication] Lipitor? There’s a reason that Congress gave the FDA the power to make these decisions about safety,” Klobuchar told ABC.“I can tell you who is harmed by this. It’s women that are going to have to take a bus across the country from Texas to Minnesota or to Illinois. That’s the problem right now,” she added, pledging to “aggressively litigate” the ruling if the supreme court decides to uphold it.The Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin, meanwhile, said that Kacsmaryk “is not guided by science”.“What we have in Texas is a judge who is not guided by science, but is part of an extreme Republican concerted effort to ban abortion nationwide,” Baldwin told NBC.“We do not need judges, politicians or government telling women about what sort of healthcare they can have. It is an issue that is not only playing out in the court in Texas, but in the state of Florida, with the governor signing a near six-week ban, Idaho forbidding travel out of state for minors, Wisconsin where we’ve gone back to literally 1849. That is the date our criminal abortion ban was passed and that’s 174 years ago,” Baldwin said.Last month, Baldwin and the Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, led the introduction of the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2023, which would safeguard abortion rights nationwide and “restore the right to comprehensive reproductive healthcare for millions of Americans”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFollowing Kacsmaryk’s ruling, the justice department and the drug’s manufacturer, Danco Laboratories, asked the supreme court to intervene in an attempt to halt the restrictions, which would have limited mifepristone’s use after seven weeks of pregnancy as well as ban mail delivery of the drug. Mifepristone is currently approved until 10 weeks.On Friday, the conservative supreme court justice Samuel Alito temporarily blocked the Texas lower court ruling and instead imposed on to it a five-day stay, allowing the justices more time to decide on their next steps.Alito’s move allows for the country’s most common method of pregnancy termination to remain unchanged until at least the end of Wednesday.Despite nationwide outrage from progressive lawmakers and reproductive rights activists, conservative lawmakers have defended the growing wave of various abortion bans.In an interview on Sunday with NBC, the Republican senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said reactions to the Texas ruling are “totally alarmist”.“It’s totally alarmist. And by the way, when did the FDA think they could go above the law?” Cassidy said, adding: “Dobbs, I think, was the correct decision,” in reference to the supreme court’s overturning of federal abortion rights last year.Cassidy’s comments come two days after Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed into law a six-week abortion ban across the state, which currently has a 15-week ban. More

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      ‘They created this’: are Republicans willing to lose elections to retain their abortion stance?

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      Democrats have taken multiple actions in response to what they say is a “draconian” and “dangerous” decision by a federal judge in Texas threatening access to the most commonly used method of abortion in the US.Several Democratic governors have begun to stockpile doses of the drugs used in medication abortions. Nearly every Democrat in Congress signed onto an amicus brief urging an appeals court to stay the decision, while some called on the Biden administration to simply “ignore” the ruling, should it be allowed to stand. A group of House Democrats introduced a bill that would give the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) final approval over drugs used in medication abortion.Their fury over the ruling has been met with relative silence from Republicans.Only a handful of congressional Republicans offered immediate comment on judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s decision last week to revoke the FDA’s 23-year-old approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. Just a fraction of Republicans on Capitol Hill signed onto an amicus brief urging an appeals court to uphold the ruling. And among the party’s national field of Republican presidential nominees, just one – the former vice president, Mike Pence – unabashedly praised the decision.The starkly different reactions underscores just how dramatically the politics of abortion have shifted since last June, when conservatives achieved their once-unimaginable goal of overturning Roe v Wade.For decades, Republicans relied on abortion to rally their conservative base, calling for the reversal of Roe v Wade and vowing to outlaw the procedure if given the chance. But since the supreme court’s ruling in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, abortion has emerged as a potent issue for Democrats, galvanizing voters furious over the thicket of state bans and restrictions ushered in by the decision.Republicans have struggled to respond, lacking a unified policy on abortion in the nearly 10 months since the landmark decision.“Dobbs really did get Republicans, especially elected Republicans, running scared,” said Jon Schweppe, policy director at the conservative American Principles Project.Polling has consistently found a clear majority of Americans believe abortion should remain legal in all or most cases, though partisan divisions have deepened over the years. A new survey released by the Pew Research Center this week showed that by a margin of more than 2 to 1, Americans believe medication abortion, which is at the center of the current legal battle, should be legal in their state.‘Let the states work this out’A post-Dobbs backlash fueled a string of victories for abortions rights, including in more conservative states, and powered Democratic victories in last year’s November midterm elections. And this month, just days before the Texas ruling on mifepristone, abortion rights were a dominant force in a liberal judge’s landslide victory in a key race for a Wisconsin supreme court seat.“It’s no surprise that GOP candidates are scared to tie themselves to a decision that is wildly out of step with what voters want,” Mini Timmaraju, the president of Naral Pro-Choice American told reporters this week. “They can’t be eager to repeat last week’s double-digit walloping of extremist judicial candidate, Dan Kelly, in Wisconsin.”In that race, Kelly’s opponent, judge Janet Protasiewicz, had effectively promised voters that if she won, flipping the ideological balance of the court from conservative to liberal, the new majority would overturn Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban.“People understood the stakes and they were ready to vote for Judge Protasiewicz,” said Timmaraju, whose group was active in the contest.Now, with the 2024 presidential election looming, an increasingly vocal group of Republicans are urging moderation on abortion, warning that the uncompromising positions of their party’s culturally conservative base risk alienating crucial swing voters.“This is an issue that Republicans have been largely on the wrong side of,” congresswoman Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, said in a recent appearance on CNN.Mace, who considers herself “pro-life”, said her party had “not shown compassion towards women” since the fall of Roe. She has urged flexibility, pushing Republicans to expand access to contraception and include exceptions for abortions in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at risk or the fetus is no longer viable.Since June, Republican-led legislatures have charged ahead with new restrictions. More than a dozen states ban abortion, with several other Republican-led state legislatures considering new restrictions this session.On Thursday, the Florida legislature voted to prohibit abortions after six weeks – before many women realize they are pregnant – delivering a major policy victory for the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. Hours later, DeSantis, who is widely expected to run for president in 2024, quietly signed the ban into law with little fanfare, underscoring just how complicated the issue has become for Republicans.In Nebraska, the state legislature is in the process of debating a six-week ban. But even in the reliably conservative state, some Republican lawmakers are floating an alternative that would expand the window to 12 weeks, a sign that a ban any earlier in pregnancy could stoke public outcry.One option floated as a politically palatable “compromise” is a proposal by South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham that would implement a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.But the legislation divided Republicans and ultimately only attracted a handful of co-sponsors when he introduced it last year ahead of the midterms. Several Republicans, including the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, argued that limits on abortion should be set by the states.Asked whether he supported Graham’s proposal, Senator Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina who this week formed an exploratory committee for a 2024 presidential run, said was “100% pro-life” but declined to answer the question directly. He clarified later that he would back a federal ban at 20 weeks of pregnancy.Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s former UN ambassador who is running for the nomination, urged Republicans to seek consensus on the issue, asserting that she was “pro-life” but did not “judge anyone who is pro-choice”.“Let’s let the states work this out,” Haley said, according to the Des Moines Register. “If Congress decides to do it – but don’t get in that game of them saying ‘how many weeks, how many’ – no. Let’s first figure out what we agree on.”DeSantis has sought to position himself as a reliable ally of the anti-abortion movement, hoping his support of a six-week ban will appeal to social conservatives searching for an alternative to Trump in the early-voting states Iowa and South Carolina.Earlier this year, Trump, whose conservative supreme court appointees enabled Roe to be struck down, angered abortion opponents when he warned that abortion is a political liability for Republicans and blamed extremism on the issue for their lackluster performance in the 2022 midterms.‘Ostrich strategy’In the escalating legal battle over access to medication abortion, supreme court justice Samuel Alito on Friday temporarily halted a federal appeals court ruling that would have reimposed restrictions on mifepristone. The stay will expire on Wednesday while the court deliberate next steps.Reproductive rights advocates say the ongoing threat to medication abortion nationwide makes clear that Republicans never actually believed abortion was an issue best handled by the states, as Alito wrote in his 2022 decision overturning the federal right to abortion.“They are seeking a nationwide ban – but they are not going to stop there,” Jennifer Dalven, director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, told reporters this week. “We are already seeing attacks on birth control.”As a starting point, Schweppe believes social conservatives must be willing to compromise on a federal ban, possibly accepting legislation that falls well short of their long-held goal to end all abortions. He urged Republicans to adopt positions that are broadly popular with wide swaths of voters, including allowances for pregnancies that result from rape or incest, or when the health or life of the mother is at risk.“We have to be honest about where the fault lines lie,” he said. “Exceptions are what drives voter sentiment. That’s what Democrats are attacking us on.”Many leading abortion opponents blame recent losses on Republicans’ embrace of a so-called “ostrich strategy” – avoiding the topic or trying to change the subject – not their opposition to abortion.“Republicans have cowered in fear as the consultants and campaign advisors tell them not to talk about abortion,” Penny Young Nance, the chief executive and president of evangelical Christian group, Concerned Women for America. In the Wisconsin supreme court race, she said the conservative’s defeat was an example of what happens when Republicans are badly outspent and fail to “boldly” defend their position on an issue that has been a defining policy of American conservatism.“The winning strategy is to tell the truth about the left’s extremist position on the issue that is out of [sync] with the views of the American people,” Nance said in an email.As Republicans search for a path forward, Democrats, confident public opinion is on their side, are already preparing to make abortion a central theme of the coming election cycles.“Even though some in the GOP are trying to stay quiet about the Texas ruling, back home they’re still passing and signing abortion bans,” Timmaraju said.“They created this reality,” she added. “They cannot run away from it.” More

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      Fate of US abortion drug hangs in balance ahead of Friday deadline

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      FDA authorization for a key abortion drug could be nullified after Friday, unless an appeals court acts on a Biden administration request to block last week’s ruling suspending approval of the drug.The drug, mifepristone, is used in more than half of all the abortions in the US. The ruling, issued by a federal judge in Texas, applies across the country.Writing that the ruling would “inflict grave harm on women, the medical system, and the public” if it went into effect, the Department of Justice on Monday requested the fifth US circuit court of appeals temporarily block Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling while the appeals process plays out.The issue may ultimately fall into the hands of the US supreme court and its conservative supermajority, which eradicated abortion rights last year by overturning Roe v Wade.Kacsmaryk stayed his decision for seven days to allow the Biden administration time to appeal. Shortly after the ruling from Texas, Obama-appointed Washington district judge Thomas Rice issued a contradictory ruling that directs the FDA to keep the drug available in 17 states.The dueling opinions set the stage for the supreme court to possibly intervene.“On one hand, you have a ruling that says to defer to the expertise of the FDA and keep the status quo while another says to second-guess the FDA with junk science,” says David S Cohen, law professor at Drexel University, who focuses on reproductive rights.“When you have different rulings from different federal courts it is more likely for the US supreme court to get involved.”The New Orleans-based appellate court is one of the most conservative in the US. Republican appointees comprise three-quarters of its bench, with six judges nominated by former President Donald Trump. The court has routinely ruled against the Biden administration and on behalf of Texas’s abortion laws.If the appeals court declines to put a hold on Kacsmaryk’s ruling, then the Biden administration would likely appeal to the high court.“It’s possible that the mifepristone issue makes its way to the [Supreme] Court this week, either because the Fifth Circuit refuses to even temporarily pause Kacsmaryk’s ruling, or because it takes too long to do anything,” writes Steve Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at The University of Texas.In his ruling, Kacsmaryk echoed the arguments of the anti-abortion groups that brought the case, writing that the FDA disregarded science that the drug causes harm, despite repeated studies finding it extremely safe. Legal experts say that the decision – the first time the judiciary has intervened to overturn FDA approval of a drug – could create a precedent that throws the entire drug approvals system into disarray.More than 250 pharmaceutical and biomedical companies who strongly denounced Kacsmaryk’s ruling in an open letter and warned that it could upend the FDA approval process as well as the entire US healthcare system.“Judicial activism will not stop here,” they cautioned. “If courts can overturn drug approvals without regard for science and evidence, or for the complexity required to fully vet the safety and efficacy of new drugs, any medicine is at risk for the same outcome as mifepristone.”Mifepristone is used for abortion, miscarriage management and other medical care. If access to the drug is upended, abortion providers have said they will continue to prescribe the second of the two-drug protocol for abortions. However, that drug, misoprostol, has been found to be somewhat less effective and associated with more painful side effects than the combination of pills.With the mifepristone in doubt, the Biden administration asked Rice, the district judge in Washington, for clarification on how to proceed if the Texas ruling goes into effect, given that his decision orders the government to take no action that would hinder its availability.Legal experts have argued that the FDA does not need to enforce Kacsmaryk’s ruling, even if it goes into effect.The ruling does not formally compel the FDA to seize the pills and take them off the market, Cohen says, and leaves the door open for the Biden administration to apply what’s called “enforcement discretion”, which would entail issuing guidance protecting the distribution of mifepristone. In the past, the FDA has granted drug manufacturers this type of safe harbor even in the absence of agency authorization, including for infant formula.“The ruling does not force the FDA to do anything,” says Cohen. “It’s up to the FDA to determine what to do next. They can use enforcement discretion to protect access to mifepristone. We shouldn’t read into Kacsmaryk’s ruling as having more power than it does – it is limited – and there’s a huge amount of authority the FDA can retain.” More

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      Senate Democrats urge supreme court investigation of Clarence Thomas

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      The US Senate judiciary committee’s Democratic members on Monday unanimously urged the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, to investigate luxury trips taken by associate justice Clarence Thomas that were paid for by a hugely wealthy Republican party donor.The senators deemed the justice’s conduct inconsistent with ethical standards for “any person in a position of public trust”, they said.The committee will hold a hearing in the coming days on the matter, chairman Richard Durbin, the senior senator from Illinois, and the panel’s 10 other Democratic members wrote in a letter to Roberts.The hearing, they said, would focus on “the need to restore confidence in the supreme court’s ethical standards”.“And if the court does not resolve this issue on its own, the committee will consider legislation to resolve it,” they told Roberts. “But you do not need to wait for Congress to act to undertake your own investigation into the reported conduct and to ensure that it cannot happen again. We urge you to do so.”ProPublica reported last Thursday that Thomas accepted expensive trips from Republican donor and real estate magnate Harlan Crow over decades without disclosing them.Thomas defended the trips on Friday, saying he had been advised he was not required to report that type of “personal hospitality”. But the conservative justice said he would abide by new, tighter rules that recently took effect.Crow told ProPublica he had “never sought to influence Justice Thomas on any legal or political issue”.The senators in the letter told Roberts: “You have a role to play as well, both in investigating how such conduct could take place at the Court under your watch, and in ensuring that such conduct does not happen again.”The report by ProPublica found that Thomas had repeatedly vacationed with Crow, including on his private jet and superyacht in the US and around the globe. The news outlet said the frequency of the gifts has “no known precedent in the modern history of the US supreme court”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The report describes conduct by a sitting justice that he did not disclose to the public and that is plainly inconsistent with the ethical standards the American people expect of any person in a position of public trust,” the senators wrote.Democratic US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Sunday she wants Thomas impeached over his trips.“It is the House’s responsibility to pursue that investigation in the form of impeachment,” she told CNN in an interview.Ocasio-Cortez acknowledged, however, it was unlikely the Republican majority in the House of Representatives would want to take action against the conservative justice. More

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      Nine Black Robes review: how Trump turned the supreme court right

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      Joan Biskupic is senior supreme court analyst at CNN, a Pulitzer finalist and an established biographer. In her latest book, she seeks to make sense of the court during and after the presidency of Donald J Trump, culminating last June when five conservative justices overturned Roe v Wade, the ruling which guaranteed access to abortion. In one swoop, the court gutted the rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.It was more important for the favourites of the Federalist Society to be “right” than smart. As we saw this week, Wisconsin Democrats say thank you.On the US supreme court, the majority in Dobbs v Jackson, the abortion ruling, said personal autonomy lacked constitutional safeguards unless explicitly enumerated in the text of the document. Precedents protecting the right to contraception, interracial marriage, same-sex relations and marriage now stand on shaky ground.“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell,” Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion in Dobbs, referring to the rulings on contraception, same-sex relations and marriage.Thomas did not mention Loving v Virginia, which guaranteed the right to interracial marriage. He is Black. His wife, the far-right activist Ginni Thomas, is white.Biskupic knows the history of the court. In earlier biographies, she studied the chief justice, John Roberts, the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor, the retired Sandra Day O’Connor and the late Antonin Scalia.As expected, Nine Black Robes is well researched. Biskupic plumbs the papers of the late William Brennan, a liberal appointed by Dwight D Eisenhower in 1956. But her book also contains more than its fair share of chambers chatter.Biskupic captures the unease of some court members at being used as props by Trump. They felt “tricked”. Trump assured them a party for Brett Kavanaugh, his second nominee, would not turn overtly political. It did.“Some justices told me later that they were sorry they had gone,” Biskupic writes.Among the “stone faced” justices at the White House, Thomas was “conspicuously enthusiastic, alone applaud[ing] heartily after Kavanaugh spoke”. Later, Thomas’s wife would seek to help Trump overturn an election.Biskupic also recounts tensions between Roberts and Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first conservative pick for the court. Gorsuch did not attend his first scheduled justices-only meeting. Roberts’s entreaties meant little.According to Biskupic, Gorsuch penned dissents and chivvied other justices. For example, in Torres v Madrid, a police abuse case, he “suggested his colleagues were kowtowing to policing concerns and the Black Lives Matter movement”.In his dissent, Gorsuch asked: “If efficiency cannot explain today’s decision, what’s left? Maybe it is an impulse that individuals like Ms Torres should be able to sue for damages. Sometimes police shootings are justified, but other times they cry out for a remedy.”Gorsuch also accused the majority of a “schizophrenic reading of the word ‘seizure’”. The chief justice was not amused.“The dissent speculates that the real reason for today’s decision is an ‘impulse’ to provide relief to Torres,” Roberts noted. “There is no call for such surmise.”Comity and appearances do not weigh heavily on Gorsuch. As Biskupic notes, his mother, Ann Gorsuch Burford, was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under Ronald Reagan but was found in contempt of Congress, a first for an agency head. She resigned, feeling used.After less than a year on the court, Gorsuch spoke at the Trump International hotel in Washington, addressing a “Defending Freedom Luncheon” sponsored by the Fund for American Studies, a conservative group. As Biskupic notes, the hotel then stood “embroiled in litigation about unconstitutional financial benefit for the president who appointed him”.Gorsuch’s appearance may have been an act of contrition, designed to placate Trump’s wrath. Months earlier, Gorsuch reportedly conveyed criticism of the president to Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, during a courtesy call. Trump’s attacks on the judiciary were too much even for Gorsuch.But he is not the only justice with limited bandwidth for playing nice. Biskupic “learned” that Sotomayor circulated “a blistering draft dissent” which caused colleagues to back off from barring racially conscious preferences in college admissions. Now, Sotomayor’s luck may be running out. In challenges to affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the court is expected to strike down race-based admissions.Two years ago, Sotomayor attacked Kavanaugh’s legal reasoning in a case that involved a juvenile life sentence without parole.“The court is fooling no one,” she thundered, in Jones v Mississippi. “The court’s misreading is egregious enough on its own … The court twists precedent even further.”Biskupic also considers Trump’s legal woes, reporting on deliberations surrounding a ruling in favor of Cy Vance Jr, then Manhattan district attorney, in June 2020. The court upheld a subpoena demanding eight years of Trump’s tax returns. Voting 7-2, the court rejected Trump’s contention that he was immune from investigation simply because he was president. A little more than two years later, Trump stands indicted in the same jurisdiction.“We cannot conclude that absolute immunity is necessary or appropriate under article II or the supremacy clause,” Roberts wrote in 2020. “No citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding.”But the margin of the decision was not preordained.Biskupic writes: “In their private telephonic conference, the Trump v Vance case produced a 5-4 split, I later learned, to affirm the lower-court judgment against Trump.”Roberts’s cajoling made a difference.“Over the course of two months he coaxed and compromised,” Biskupic writes. “Only Thomas and Alito declined to sign on.”Nowadays, Biskupic laments, “the court has no middle, no center to hold.“… Donald Trump, who had demonstrated so little respect for the law, truth and democracy, changed the balance for at least a generation.”
      Nine Black Robes: Inside the Supreme Court’s Drive to the Right and Its Historic Consequences is published in the US by HarperCollins More

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      Justice Clarence Thomas’s megadonor friend collects Hitler memorabilia – report

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      The Republican megadonor whose gifts to the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas have come under the spotlight has a private collection including a garden of statues of dictators, including Mussolini and Stalin; Nazi memorabilia; and paintings including two works by Adolf Hitler, the Washingtonian reported.“I still can’t get over the collection of Nazi memorabilia,” the Washingtonian quoted an anonymous source as saying, regarding a visit to Harlan Crow’s Texas home. “It would have been helpful to have someone explain the significance of all the items. Without that context, you sort of just gasp when you walk into the room.”Crow, the source said, also had paintings “done by George W Bush next to a Norman Rockwell next to one by Hitler”.A painting of Thomas and Crow smoking cigars in company including the rightwing activist Leonard Leo was included in an explosive report by ProPublica, detailing Crow’s lavish gifts to Thomas over more than 25 years.ProPublica also described trips on private planes and yachts and stays at lavish resorts.In a rare statement, Thomas said he had been advised such “personal hospitality” did not have to be declared under federal rules.He added: “I have endeavoured to follow that counsel throughout my tenure and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines.”Critics said Thomas had “clearly” broken the law regarding the declaration of gifts. The Washington Post noted Thomas has declared just two since 2004.Crow denied discussing or seeking to influence the court through his friendship with Thomas and his wife, the far-right activist Ginni Thomas.Critics questioned that, given Crow’s seat on the board of the American Enterprise Institute, a rightwing thinktank which regularly files amicus briefs with the court.Outraged Democrats promised investigations and, in the case of the New York Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, threatened to introduce articles of impeachment.Thomas is the senior conservative on a conservative-dominated court that has issued controversial rulings including Dobbs v Jackson, which last year removed the federal right to abortion.But impeachment and removal is highly unlikely. Supreme court justices effectively govern themselves. Only one has ever been impeached, in 1804, before being acquitted. Republicans hold the House, where impeachment would start.Still, news of Crow’s far-right memorabilia seemed bound to add to Thomas’s embarrassment – perhaps in part because Thomas has written that arguments for abortion rights spring from theories of eugenics, as espoused by Hitler and the Nazis.When Thomas made that argument, in an opinion in 2019, Philippa Levine, a University of Texas history professor, told the Washington Post the justice was “guilty of a gross misuse of historical facts”.On Friday, the Washingtonian published pictures of Thomas’s friend’s collection of Nazi artefacts, which includes a signed copy of Hitler’s memoir, Mein Kampf.The magazine also noted how the Florida senator Marco Rubio ran into problems in 2015, over a Crow-hosted fundraiser on the eve of Yom Kippur.The year before that, the Dallas Morning News reported that Crow became “visibly uncomfortable” with questions about his dictator statues and collectibles of Hitler, whose regime murdered 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.The paper described the statues of dictators as “a historical nod to the facts of man’s inhumanity to man”.Crow also reportedly owns statues of two British prime ministers he counts among his heroes: Winston Churchill – who defeated Hitler – and Margaret Thatcher.The megadonor and his wife were “such hospitable Texas hosts”, according to the Washingtonian’s source.But, the source added, it was “just strange – they had family photos in one room, then all this world war II stuff in another room, and dictators in the backyard”. More

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      in US Politics

      Clarence Thomas defends himself after undisclosed gifts revelation

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      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