Tag Archives: Justice Clarence Thomas

Grasping At Straws

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We all remember Bob McDonnell, Herman Cain, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and others who were smeared by the Democrats when they were moving up the ranks in the Republican Party. Some moved forward despite the false allegations. In the case of Herman Cain, the allegations disappeared as soon as he dropped his presidential campaign. In the case of Bob McDonnell, he was convicted of a crime, but the conviction was overturned unanimously by the Supreme Court. The purpose of all of the attacks on these people was to derail their careers. All of the attacks turned out to be much ado about nothing. That is the Democrat playbook. Right now the two biggest targets are Pete Hegseth and Matt Gaetz.

On Saturday, The Post Millennial reported:

President-elect Donald Trump‘s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has been targeted by the Associated Press for Hegseth having what the outlet claims is a tattoo associated with “white supremacy” despite the ink being a Christian slogan. Hegseth blasted the outlet for displaying “anti-Christian bigotry” by spreading the claim.

AP reporter Tara Copp posted on her X account, that Hegseth “was flagged as a possible ‘Insider Threat’ by a fellow service member due to a tattoo he has that’s associated with white supremacists,” adding a link to a report that she and others published in the post. 

The outlet cited an email that said a tattoo on Hegseth’s bicep that says “Deus Vult,” which is Latin for “God wills it” is associated with white supremacist groups. After JD Vance posted a response to the report, Hegseth chimed in and wrote that it was “anti-Christian bigotry in the media on full display.”

…Hegseth previously worked for the District of Columbia National Guard and was pulled from guarding Joe Biden’s inauguration after a fellow Guard member wrote an email to superiors saying that the “Deus Vult” tattoo made Hegseth a supposed “Insider Threat” from the military.

The attacks by the Democrats on President Trump’s cabinet picks are a bit much. The Republicans approved President Biden’s cabinet which was much less qualified than President Trump’s selections. There is a definite double standard at work here.

The Charges Against Justice Clarence Thomas

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Justice Thomas has been a problem for the political left since he was nominated. The trumped-up charges against him did not work, and the Democrats were not able to deny him a seat on the Supreme Court as they had done to Robert Bork in 1987. Now, the Democrats want him investigated for vacationing with a friend and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants him impeached. So what exactly is going on?

On Friday, The Epoch Times reported:

After a news report highlighted luxurious vacations Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas allegedly accepted from a wealthy friend, Thomas said he was advised he didn’t have to report the trips. In a new statement, Thomas denied any wrongdoing and vowed to follow new reporting requirements imposed on the federal judiciary.

Thomas’s critics in Congress promptly seized on the report last week of the vacations, suggesting it raised the appearance of impropriety.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) demanded that the justice be impeached, saying his actions evidenced an “almost cartoonish” level of corruption. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s panel on federal courts, called for an independent investigation of the justice, who has long been a target of the left.

Whitehouse and other critics also say that justices whose spouses are involved in political activism, like Thomas, whose wife, Ginni Thomas, a supporter of former President Donald Trump, is active in conservative politics, should have to recuse themselves from involvement in cases related to that activism. Despite pressure, the justice declined to recuse himself from the various challenges to the disputed 2020 presidential election that made it to the Supreme Court.

Billionaire businessman and Republican Party donor Harlan Crow, who made the gifts to Thomas, has reportedly not had any business before the Supreme Court, so any allegation of a conflict of interest rests on weak grounds.

Nor is it clear if Thomas violated the judicial ethics code by not declaring the vacations. Legal experts say the code does not apply to the Supreme Court. The court has said in the past that the justices voluntarily adhere to the ethics guidelines.

Crow reportedly said the trips with Thomas and his wife were “no different from the hospitality that we have extended to many other dear friends.”

The article notes that he probably was not required to report the vacations:

“As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them,” the justice 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.

“I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure, and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines. These guidelines are now being changed, as the committee of the Judicial Conference responsible for financial disclosure for the entire federal judiciary just this past month announced new guidance.

“And, it is, of course, my intent to follow this guidance in the future,” Thomas said.

Just another Democrat witch-hunt.

The Harassment Continues

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On Tuesday, Scott Johnson at Power Line Blog posted an article about Attorney John Eastman. Attorney Eastman has an impressive record as an attorney. He is the founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public interest law firm affiliated with the conservative think tank Claremont Institute. He is a former professor and dean at the Chapman University School of Law. He is also a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

His phone was recently seized by the FBI as he was leaving a restaurant. He was not shown a warrant for the seizure until after his phone was taken.

On Monday, The Washington Times reported:

Eastman said the agents who approached him identified themselves as from the FBI but appeared to be serving a warrant on behalf of the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General, which he contends has no jurisdiction to investigate him since he has never worked for the department. He said the cell phone that was seized contains emails that have been the subject of a months-long dispute between him and the House panel.

“That litigation has received extensive media attention, so it is hard to imagine that the Department of Justice, which apparently submitted the application for the warrant at issue here, was not aware of it,” wrote his lawyers, Charles Burnham and Joseph Gribble. 

There is little doubt that Attorney Eastman’s phone was seized because of his work on behalf of President Trump to investigate election fraud.

The article at Power Line Blog concludes:

The AP covers the story here. Orin Kerr takes up the legality of the search and seizure in a Twitter thread here. We remain to be illuminated on the criminal law for which the FBI claims it has probable cause against Eastman. Late in the thread he notes that the warrant does not extend beyond the seizure of John’s phone (i.e., it covers seizure only).

Eastman’s close encounter with the FBI last week was obviously coordinated with the close encounters of Trump Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark and Nevada GOP chairman Michael McDonald. The FBI appears to have taken up the role of the ruling party’s enforcement arm.

We are rapidly approaching banana-republic status if we have not reached it already.

 

 

Still Searching For The Leaker

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On Tuesday, The Western Journal reported that the investigation into the leaking of the abortion opinion draft from the Supreme Court is heating up.

The article reports:

Inside the Supreme Court, an investigation into the leak has now reached the point where law clerks are being asked to provide cellphone records and sign affidavits, CNN reported Tuesday, citing three sources it did not name.

Why are people inside the Court still leaking to CNN?

The article notes:

Chief Justice John Roberts met with law clerks after the leak. Each justice gets four clerks, and the prized spots that can be steppingstones to a high-profile career.

CNN estimated that in addition to the 36 clerks, others would have had access to the draft, totaling about 75 people in all.

The report said it was not clear whether other court employees were being asked to share cellphone records.

The court’s internal investigation is being led by the court’s marshal, Gail Curley.

Curley, a lawyer and former Army colonel, oversees the police stationed at the court’s building.

The article concludes:

Justice Clarence Thomas said the damage done to the court by the leak was severe.

“I do think that what happened at the court is tremendously bad,” Thomas said at a recent conference.

“I wonder how long we’re going to have these institutions at the rate we’re undermining them. And then I wonder when they’re gone or destabilized, what we will have as a country? And I don’t think the prospects are good if we continue to lose them,” he said.

If the pool of suspects is only 75 people, the investigation should be completed fairly quickly. I wonder why it has not been.

The Impact Of The Leak

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On Saturday, NewsMax posted an article featuring Justice Clarence Thomas’ comments about the leak of the Supreme Court draft of the abortion decision. Notice that somehow the leaker has not yet been identified.

The article reports:

Justice Clarence Thomas says the Supreme Court has been changed by the shocking leak of a draft opinion earlier this month. The opinion suggests the court is poised to overturn the right to an abortion recognized nearly 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade.

The conservative Thomas, who joined the court in 1991 and has long called for Roe v. Wade to be overturned, described the leak as an unthinkable breach of trust.

“When you lose that trust, especially in the institution that I’m in, it changes the institution fundamentally. You begin to look over your shoulder. It’s like kind of an infidelity that you can explain it, but you can’t undo it,” he said while speaking at a conference Friday evening in Dallas.

…Thomas, a nominee of President George H.W. Bush, said it was beyond “anyone’s imagination” before the May 2 leak of the opinion to Politico that even a line of a draft opinion would be released in advance, much less an entire draft that runs nearly 100 pages. Politico has also reported that in addition to Thomas, conservative justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett had voted with the draft opinion’s author, Samuel Alito, to overrule Roe v. Wade and a 1992 decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that affirmed Roe’s finding of a constitutional right to abortion.

Thomas said that previously, “if someone said that one line of one opinion” would be leaked, the response would have been: “Oh, that’s impossible. No one would ever do that.”

“Now that trust or that belief is gone forever,” Thomas said at the Old Parkland Conference, which describes itself as a conference “to discuss alternative proven approaches to tackling the challenges facing Black Americans today.”

There is a need for confidentiality in Supreme Court negotiations and drafts. Justices need to be free to offer opinions, popular or unpopular, to reach a consensus on a decision. Knowing that drafts or notes from these deliberations are subject to being leaked could seriously impact the debates needed to rule on an issue. It bothers me that no one has yet been held responsible for the leak (only a small number of people had access to the draft), and the news reports do not see to be interested in finding out who the leaker is. This leak needs to be dealt with quickly and strongly in order to prevent future leaks.

Good News

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Townhall reported yesterday that Justice Clarence Thomas is back at the Supreme Court after a recent, week-long stay in the hospital.

The article reports:

“Justice Clarence Thomas was admitted to Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., on Friday evening after experiencing flu-like symptoms. He underwent tests, was diagnosed with an infection, and is being treated with intravenous antibiotics. His symptoms are abating, he is resting comfortably, and he expects to be released from the hospital in a day or two. Justice Thomas will participate in the consideration and discussion of any cases for which he is not present on the basis of the briefs, transcripts, and audio of the oral arguments,” the Court said.

That’s good news for America.

The Basis Of The Argument

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The Democrats have become somewhat unglued at the prospect of President Trump nominating someone to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg before the November election. They have said that if they win the Senate, they will add justices to the Supreme Court to blunt the influence of President Trump’s appointees and that they will end the filibuster (which allows the minority in the Senate to have some degree of power). It is becoming obvious that they have no intention of ‘playing well with others.’ Considering how they have handled some nominations in the past (Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, to name a few), we can expect a true ‘scorched earth’ policy when someone is nominated. They are very upset at the prospect of the President naming a Justice during an election year. But they were also upset when the Senate refused to consider the nomination of Merrick Garland. Mitch McConnell cited the ‘Biden Rule’ as the reason the nomination was not considered. So what is the Biden rule?

In a speech given on June 25, 1992, Joe Biden, who was then Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee stated:

Given the unusual rancor that prevailed in the Thomas nomination, the need for some serious reevaluation of the nomination and confirmation process and the overall level of bitterness that sadly infects our political system and this Presidential campaign already, it is my view that the prospects for anything but conflagration with respect to a Supreme Court nomination this year are remote at best.

Of Presidents Reagan’s and Bush’s last seven selections of the Court, two were not confirmed and two more were approved with the most votes cast against them in the history of the United States of America.

We have seen how, Mr. President, in my view, politics has played far too large a role in the Reagan-Bush nominations to date. One can only imagine that role becoming overarching if a choice were made this year, assuming a Justice announced tomorrow that he or she was stepping down.

Should a Justice resign this summer and the President move to name a successor, actions that will occur just days before the Democratic Presidential Convention and weeks before the Republican Convention meets, a process that is already in doubt in the minds of many will become distrusted by all. Senate consideration of a nominee under these circumstances is not fair to the President, to the nominee, or to the Senate itself.

Mr. President, where the Nation should be treated to a consideration of constitutional philosophy, all it will get in such circumstances is partisan bickering and political posturing from both parties and from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. As a result, it is my view that if a Supreme Court Justice resigns tomorrow, or within the next several weeks, or resigns at the end of the summer, President Bush should consider following the practice of a majority of his predecessors and not–and not–name a nominee until after the November election is completed.

In 2016, the Democrats said there was no ‘Biden rule.’ Now there is a ‘Biden rule.’ So which is it? Either you believe that the Merrick Garland nomination was handled properly and the rule should be followed or you don’t. This is a glaring example of why Americans do not trust politicians to do the right thing.

There was a valid argument in 2016. The President was a lame duck, and the Senate was controlled by the opposing party. If the President were a Republican and the Senate controlled by the Democrats, would the Democrats have acted any differently than the Republicans? I believe that is the real question here.

 

The Untold Story Of Abortion

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The following is a chart from a website called blackgenocide.org:

It is a negative reflection on our society that the African American deaths caused by violent crimes spawned the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, but the number of African American deaths due to abortion has been met with silence.

On Tuesday, The Washington Examiner posted an article about some recent comments by Justice Clarence Thomas.

The article reports:

Justice Clarence Thomas said Tuesday the Supreme Court will not be able to duck the issue of abortion forever and raised concerns about the potential for abortion to “become a tool of eugenic manipulation.”

…The conservative justice focused specifically on Indiana’s prohibition of abortion based on sex, race, or disability and charted the history of the eugenics movement in the United States.

The dispute before the court, he warned, “highlights the fact that abortion is an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation.”

“Enshrining a constitutional right to an abortion based solely on the race, sex, or disability of an unborn child, as Planned Parenthood advocates, would constitutionalize the views of the 20th-century eugenics movement,” Thomas wrote.

Thomas highlighted comments from Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and its former President Alan Guttmacher and cited a “growing body of evidence” that suggests “eugenic goals are already being realized through abortion.”

In Iceland, for example, Thomas wrote the abortion rate for children diagnosed with Down syndrome in utero is nearing 100%. He also noted that the nationwide abortion rate among black women in the U.S. is roughly 3.5 times that for white women.

“Some believe that the United States is already experiencing the eugenic effects of abortion,” Thomas said.

It’s time for all Americans, including minorities, to extend helping hands to pregnant women and encourage adoption.

 

Why Supreme Court Justices Matter

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Theoretically the Supreme Court is the third part of the checks and balances in our Representative Republic. They are sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution and make decisions according to that Constitution. Unfortunately there are Americans who either do not understand the Constitution or choose to ignore it. Right now the Supreme Court is balanced four to four in terms of conservative and liberal interpretations of the law. The next President will have the responsibility of choosing the Justice that will decide cases involving gun rights, voting rights, medical care, religious freedom, and other important issues. A recent case illustrates how important the selection of the next Supreme Court Justice will be.

The Wall Street Journal posted an opinion piece on Tuesday about a recent Supreme Court decision. The case illustrates the problems police face when trying to keep us safe when dealing with the drug problem in America.

The piece reports:

The Supreme Court term is ending on a whimper of narrow decisions without Justice Antonin Scalia. But you wouldn’t know it from the overwrought progressive outrage after a 5-3 majority issued a common-sense ruling Monday concerning the so-called exclusionary rule for admitting evidence in criminal cases.

In Utah v. Strieff, police stopped Edward Strieff on his way out of a building after a tip that it was a drug-dealing location. After discovering an outstanding arrest warrant against Mr. Strieff, a police officer searched him and found methamphetamines and drug paraphernalia. Mr. Strieff claims the police lacked reasonable suspicion to stop him under the Fourth Amendment, so the evidence of his law-breaking should be dismissed.

The majority opinion was written by Justice Clarence Thomas and stated that the discovery of the outstanding arrest warrant required the police to arrest and thus search Mr. Strieff.

There was, however, a different opinion.

The article reports;

The outlier was Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who went off the deep end with an extended polemic about police misconduct, events in Ferguson, Mo., and race in America. “Although many Americans have been stopped for speeding or jaywalking, few may realize how degrading a stop can be when the officer is looking for more,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. And although Mr. Strieff is white, “it is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny.”

The Justice is getting huzzahs on the left, but her opinion is troubling for her insistence on dragging racial politics into a case that had nothing to do with race. This dissent continues her habit of wandering far from the law or precedent to decide cases based on her personal political and policy views. Her colleagues showed more judicial wisdom.

There are a few things to note here. Mr. Strieff was leaving a place where it was suspected drugs were being sold. Didn’t the police have a responsibility to investigate a tip about a location where drugs were being sold? Shouldn’t that investigation include stopping people leaving that location? If there was an outstanding arrest warrant for Mr. Strieff, didn’t the police have an obligation to arrest him? It is very possible that I am naive, but I believe that Mr. Strieff would have been treated the same way regardless of what color he is. Everything is not about race, and in the majority of cases, police are merely attempting to keep our communities safe and free from illegal drugs and the crime that goes with the drug trade. Bringing race into a situation where it is not relevant only divides Americans–it does not help us solve our problems.