More evidence for the need of an ethics board to govern the SC.

He justified getting a free flight that was estimated to be worth $100,000 by saying he was only taking an empty seat on a plane that was already headed to its destination. Next time I fly on a commercial flight that is what I will tell the stewardess when I try to move up to first class. On another confusing point, he claims none of this matters because he doesn't know Singer while Clarence Thomas wants to be excused because he is a close friend of Crow. These guys need to get their stories straight.

 

Even if we assume all the preposterous things Alito said in his pre-buttal are true, it does not change the fact that if he was going to accept a free vacation from a Republican billionaire he should have recused himself from the cases Singer had before the court. He has clerks at his disposal to check for potential conflicts of interest. So claiming he was not aware he was ruling on a case involving Singer is not an acceptable excuse.

 

“We wouldn’t tolerate this from a city council member or an alderman,” Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said of Thomas in a recent hearing. “And yet the Supreme Court won’t even acknowledge it’s a problem.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/samuel-alito-luxury-fishing-trip-paul-singer-scotus-supreme-court

Some citizens won't either.

 

At least we can be thankful for the unprecedented humor Trump has enabled.


George Conway
@gtconway3d
·
6h

our forefathers didn’t fight the British for those colonial airports for nothing
Quote Tweet


Jennifer Elsea
@ElseaJnklz
·
16h
Replying to @BulwarkOnline @SykesCharlie and @AWeissmann_

But the important question is, how would the Founders classify rides in private jets?

 

Alito's Trip Not Nearly as Fishy as Campaign vs. the Court
Briana Oser, DC Examiner




In a June 20 essay in the Wall Street Journal, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito denied corruption allegations leveled against him by... Read More

 

Defenders of manifest abuses by certain members of the Court continue to hyperbolically mis-characterize the revelations of those abuses as a "campaign" or "attacks" against the Court. Clearly they don't like the exposés any more than Clarence and Sam.

 

Justice Scalia approves this message.

"There's nothing wrong with grabbing an unoccupied seat on a fishing trip"

 

Impossible.
"The next time" means that something has already been done.

 

Justice Samuel Alito IS the Salmon

The new ProPublica reporting about Justice Samuel Alito’s fishing trip to Alaska in 2008 makes perfectly clear that the justice did exactly what the reporters said he did—accepted a free flight on a private jet and a stay at a private resort, organized by the Federalist Society’s judicial kingmaker, Leonard Leo, and funded by Leo’s billionaire big donors. Justice Alito knew perfectly well that such gifts were to be reported, because he had reported others. He also knew that his relationship with Paul Singer, the hedge fund magnate with business before the court, might require recusal. Nothing in that reporting was in fact undermined by the justice’s response to ProPublica in the Wall Street Journal. He took the trip. He just also determined that a private jet was a “facility” for purposes of hospitality, and apparently he had no idea Singer was behind the Argentine debt case heard by the court in 2014, even though my cats knew it.

There’s no need for me to gild the lily in terms of debunking the Justice’s textualist reading of the relevant disclosure provisions, as others have ably rebutted Alito’s prebuttal since it surfaced. If Leonard Leo’s risible “he’s a stand-up guy with unimpeachable integrity and nothing but nothing can influence him” defense were a real defense, nobody would need to follow ethics and anticorruption rules, ever. They could just be honorable. Same with the “but here’s a time he didn’t do what Paul Singer wanted” defense, which is Dr. Pepper out your nose funny, but not a defense. I won’t waste your time or mine on the this-is-all-just a “liberal-smear” defense, because it’s boring.

The problem with continuing to frame the Harlan Crow/ Barre Seid/ Paul Singer stories as “ethics” issues is that we tend to think of “ethics” scandals in league with failures to use the correct shrimp fork. This is kind of what happened when we framed the great pay-to-play Supreme Court Historical Society caper that permitted one couple, the Wrights, to purchase access to the Alitos and the Scalias for the price of $125,000, as a “leak” story. We keep centering the justices and their “ethics” misfires at the expense of the real grifting here: Billionaires being assigned like something out of the Big Brothers program, to individual justices for the purposes of lavish gift giving and influence.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/06/justice-alito-fishing-trip-real-prize.html

As usual Lithwick crushes it.

 

In fact, the 2008 hospitality exclusion applied only to food, lodging and entertainment, with no mention of transportation. Alito attempts to avoid the plain language of the applicable law and regulations by raising an elaborate legal construct, built on unrelated statutes, dealing with interstate commerce rather than gift disclosure, leading to the rationalization that private jet flights count as hospitality “facilities.”

One would expect an avowed textualist like Alito to pay more attention to the disclosure language of the Ethics in Government Act, which unambiguously states that only “food, lodging, or entertainment received as personal hospitality of an individual need not be reported.”

Even more absurdly, Alito seems to argue that the flight to Alaska was not a gift at all, or perhaps did not exceed the $335 threshold in effect in 2008, given that he sat in “what would have otherwise been an unoccupied seat,” thereby adding no “extra cost” to Singer. But it is the value of the gift to the recipient, not the donor’s cost, that triggers disclosure. This is quite evident from the statutory definition of “gift,” which includes, for example, “free attendance at an event” – which likewise costs nothing to the benefactor.
https://thehill.com/opinion/judicia...nd-the-supreme-courts-culture-of-concealment/

Alito broke the law.

 

Sorry, but neither claim is true. You are a prisoner of your echo chamber.

 

Not surprising at all.

'Shady and corrupt': Barrett real estate deal added to list of Supreme Court ethics scandals


'Thursday reporting on a real estate deal made by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett months after her confirmation in 2020 was the latest evidence, said a government watchdog, that ethics reforms at the high court must either be imposed by the judiciary or Congress.

Days after ProPublica reported on Justice Samuel Alito's previously undisclosed private jet trip—funded by a billionaire hedge fund owner whose business has been involved in numerous Supreme Court cases—CNN revealed that Barrett has had financial dealings with the Religious Liberty Initiative (RLI) at Notre Dame Law School.

A Note Dame professor who had just taken a leadership role at RLI purchased Barrett's private home months after she was sworn in in October 2020. The group, which advocates for religious freedom, was founded in 2020 and has filed numerous amicus briefs in cases related to the issue—related to questions surrounding abortion, public health precautions, and school prayer—since it was established. RLI has filed at least nine briefs with the court since the sale of Barrett's home.

The newly reported conflict of interest is one of several in recent months that have brought renewed scrutiny to the fact that the Supreme Court justices are not required to abide by an ethics code, as other federal judges are.

https://www.alternet.org/barrett-real-estate-deal-ethics/


"The endless drip of shady and corrupt Supreme Court dealings just further underscores the need for reform," said Kyle Herrig, president of the watchdog group Accountable.US. "Every federal judge is bound to an ethics code requiring them to avoid behavior that so much as looks improper, except for Supreme Court justices. Chief Justice Roberts has the power to change that, but so far he hasn't shown the courage. If he fails to do his job, Congress must do theirs."
41

 

If Alito had sent his response to us, we’d have asked some more questions. For example, Alito wrote that Supreme Court justices “commonly interpreted” the requirement to disclose gifts as not applying to “accommodations and transportation for social events.” We would have asked whether he meant to say it was common practice for justices to accept free vacations and private jet flights without disclosing them.

We also would have asked Alito more about his interpretation of the Watergate-era disclosure law that requires justices and many other federal officials to publicly report most gifts. The statute has a narrow “personal hospitality” exemption that allows federal officials to avoid disclosing “food, lodging, or entertainment” provided by a host on his own property. Seven ethics law experts, including former government ethics lawyers from both Republican and Democratic administrations, have told ProPublica that the exemption does not apply to private jet flights — and never has. Such flights, they said, are clearly not forms of food, lodging or entertainment. We had already combed through judicial disclosures, so we knew that several federal judges have disclosed gifts of private jet flights.

We might also have sent Alito some of the contemporaneous stories about Singer’s dispute with Argentina that were readily available online. Given Alito’s previous ties to the Journal’s editorial page — he granted it an exclusive interview this year complaining about negative coverage of the court — it’s probable that the stories we sent him would have included the page’s 2013 piece titled “Deadbeats Down South” that approvingly noted that “a subsidiary of Paul Singer’s Elliott Management” was holding out for a better deal from Argentina. We would have asked how his office checks for conflicts and whether he is concerned it didn’t catch Singer’s widely publicized connection to the case.
https://www.propublica.org/article/behind-scenes-alito-wall-street-journal-prebuttal-editorial

Referring to reporting like this as "attacks" sounds vaguely like something Trump would say.

 

They are nonetheless political attacks, nothing more. Decades of patient work by conservatives and some adroit maneuvering by Mitch McConnell have produced a SCOTUS that liberals don't like. Because they were beaten (fair and square, btw) in the regular political process, liberals now seek advantage via smearing conservative justices. From the DC Examiner article:

". . . . As the Washington Examiner previously noted, the media could be getting dirt on any member of the Supreme Court, but it is hyperfocused on the conservatives because, as an organization called Demand Justice puts it, liberals think that the Supreme Court’s “Republican supermajority is putting our rights and our democracy at risk.” Demand Justice, by the way, is funded by the same partisan foundation that donates huge amounts of money to ProPublica. . . . "

 

To quote you, "nope."

 

Funding source, timing and exclusive focus suggest otherwise.

 

The Fake Crisis at the Supreme Court
Rich Lowry, Politico



Progressives are trying to destroy the court now that they've lost control. Read More

". . . As for ethics, even if you think that Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito were imprudent in accepting free flights and nice trips, even if you think they should have disclosed these trips (they didn’t have to under the rules), it’s preposterous to believe that a lifetime of thought and jurisprudence that has been rigorously consistent for decades has been changed or influenced by a couple of vacations.

What’s the evidence for it? A common critique of Alito and Thomas is that they are too rigid.

Indeed, Thomas is the most fiercely independent mind and vote on the court. As for Alito, the smoking gun from ProPublica is supposed to be a case that came before the court involving a dispute over bonds between the government of Argentina and a hedge fund owned by Paul Singer, who six years earlier gave him a lift on his private jet to a fishing trip they both attended.

Alito was not a lone vote, sticking out from everyone else with an unconvincing defense of Singer’s hedge fund. Rather, he was part of a 7-vote majority finding for the hedge fund (the Singer connection didn’t have to be, and wasn’t, disclosed in the parties’ briefs).

It’s not unusual, by the way, for Supreme Court justices to take trips funded by others. In 2018 alone, Ginsburg took 14 and Justice Stephen Breyer took a dozen. . . . "

 

But not the facts.

 

The facts are in Alito's and Thomas's favor.

 

The Supreme Court’s nine justices disclosed taking a combined 64 trips in 2018

Hmmm. What makes that different from Alito's trip to an exclusive fishing lodge?

 

Nothing.
By definition we remain uninformed about undisclosed trips. Until all justices are subjected to the discriminatory focus applied to Thomas and Alito, the number of disclosed trips is meaningless.

 

See posts #360 and 365.

 

Nothing discriminatory about revealing violations of ethics rules and law.

 

The discrimination is in selecting investigation targets by political preference.

 

Impugning the motives of the investigators is exceedingly Trumpian and, again, doesn't change the facts.