[GPSCC-chat] Other Voices

[Rob Means]

We Can't Trust the Supreme Court Five

House Republicans are preparing to investigate President Obama.  In
1994, they did the same to then-President Clinton, spending $75M and
four years chasing rumors of misbehavior only to discover at the end a
personal peccadillo, not a public crime.  (Compare that to the mere $3M
they spent to investigate 9/11 --leaving over 200 unanswered questions
troubling investigators.)  Such an obvious waste of time, attention and
money seems particularly egregious when various Supreme Court justices
are far more suspect.

Conflicts of interest by the right-wing justices started with their
decision in the 2000 Bush vs. Gore case which stopped the vote counting
in Florida and effectively appointed Bush president.  The fact that a
final count showed that Gore got more votes than Bush even though over
50,000 legitimate Democratic voters were wrongfully removed from the
rolls didn't bother the lamestream media.  Nor did the obvious conflict
of interest presented by two of Justice Scalia's sons working in the law
firm representing Bush in the case.

Justice Thomas also should have recused himself.  His wife long worked
on behalf of political conservatives. While her husband was deciding who
would occupy the White House, she was working at the conservative
Heritage Foundation, helping to recruit right-thinking staff for the
incoming Bush administration.  Although she saw no conflict between her
job and her husband's deliberations on a case that decided the
presidency, I certainly do.  And so does Section 455 of Title 28 of the
United States Code, "Disqualification of Justices, Judges or
Magistrates" that requires court officers to excuse themselves if a
spouse has "an interest that could be substantially affected by the
outcome of the proceeding."

The dissenting opinions in the case strongly criticized the five-justice
majority for involving the Court in state-level affairs. Justice
Stevens' dissent concluded: "Although we may never know with complete
certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential
election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the
Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of
law."

If that case did not shake the public's confidence in the impartiality
of the Supreme Court (and by extension all U.S. courts), the Citizens
United case certainly did.  In their closely-divided case last year, the
Court's right-wing ideologues basically ruled that corporations are
persons, and entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run
our government.  The absurdity of that opinion rivals the Dred Scott
decision that (black) people are property.  (That case was reversed a
few years later by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.)  For the
record, human beings are people; corporations are legal fictions.

In his 2009 State of the Union speech, President Obama criticized the
Supreme Court for that decision.  "With all due deference to separation
of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I
believe will open the floodgates for special interests - including
foreign corporations - to spend without limit in our elections."
Despite Justice Alito's mouthed "not true", the 2010 campaigns proved
the President correct.

Apparently, three of the Justices had serious conflicts of interest at
the time of the decision.  At least twice, Justice Alito attended a gala
fund raising dinner sponsored by American Spectator, a right-wing
magazine.  At the 2008 gala, Alito spent much of his speech ripping then
Vice President-elect Joe Biden.  Alito seems to be a regular benefactor
for highly political conservative fundraisers. 

Justices Thomas and Scalia have also attended secret conservative
fundraising events organized by oil billionaires David and Charles Koch
to fund Republican campaigns, judicial elections, and groups running ads
in elections.  The fundraisers, attended by some of the nation's
wealthiest bankers, industrialists, and other executives, help fund much
of the conservative infrastructure (including the 90% of America's talk
radio that is right-wing).  Remember, these are the richest guys on the
planet who live in a different world from us - and like it that way.
The top one percent are estimated to own nearly fifty percent of the
nation's wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 95%.  To
get a visual of how distorted this imbalance between the rich and all
the rest of us, check out Lcurve.org

Considering that three of the Justices who voted for Citizens United v
FEC had serious conflicts of interest, one might expect them to fully
disclose all their fundraising activities and donations to clear up what
appears to be egregious conflicts of interest.  Federal judges in the
lower courts can be removed from a case over a conflict - but in the
Supreme Court, the individual justices make the decision for themselves,
and it is not subject to review by anyone else.  "Controversies over
conflicts of interest involving the Supreme Court justices have been
steadily increasing," said Jonathan Turley, a constitutional scholar at
George Washington University. "There is an obvious lack of deterrent for
individual justices. The problem is that justices have shown
increasingly little judgment or restraint in avoiding conflicts of
interest."   Since they clearly are not self-disclosing, the House
Judiciary Committees should begin an investigation. Unfortunately, with
Republicans controlling the House (and focused on screwing the
President), I don't expect this Constitutional remedy will be exercised.
Instead, I expect we real people will join MoveToAmend.org in pushing
for an amendment to the Constitution.

More recently, it has come to light that Justice Thomas' wife has been
on the payroll of a right-wing think tank for years, and more recently
on the payroll of one of these astroturf tea party organizations.  His
wife is getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by special
interests groups trying to influence the government. Back in 1997,
Justice Thomas stopped disclosing information about his wife's
employment which is required.  Maybe he was embarrassed by the fact that
she earned $686,589 between 2003 and 2007.  Rather than noting her
employers during those years in his financial disclosure forms, he
checked a box titled "none" where "spousal non-investment income" would
normally be disclosed.  For most government employees that is an
imprisonable offense.

Perhaps my favorite conflict of interest story is about the nomination
of Chief Justice Roberts.  Just four days before George W. Bush named
him to fill the seat of retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, then D.C.
Federal Appeals Court Judge Roberts cast the deciding vote in Hamdan vs.
Rumsfeld. It was a crucial victory for the administration because it
upheld President Bush's creation of special military tribunals for
trials of alleged terrorists and allowed the administration to continue
their torture operations. 

Here's the conflict.  While the case was pending in his court, Roberts
was interviewing with high White House officials--including Atty. Gen.
Alberto R. Gonzales, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Deputy Chief of
Staff Karl Rove--for a seat on the Supreme Court. Thus, Roberts cast a
deciding vote on an issue of central importance to the president, just
as administration aides were holding out the possibility of a place on
the highest court in the land.  In the words of the federal law on
judicial disqualification, this placed the judge in a situation where
"his impartiality might reasonably be questioned".  

During Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, Roberts claimed "I have no
platform." He said that he aspired to a humble and limited role as
leader of the Supreme Court, and that "Judges are like umpires. Umpires
don't make the rules; they apply them."  In his subsequent performance
in Citizens United, however, activist judge Roberts overturned campaign
finance laws and court decisions of the past century, and grossly
distorting the intention of the 14th Amendment.  That decision puts him
beyond mere conflict of interest and into the felony category of lying
to a Congress - for which he richly deserves to be impeached.

By allowing unlimited, special-interest money to be spent in our local,
state and federal elections, the court empowered corporations like
Walmart and countries like China.  They are now free to spend as much
money as they want on behalf of a candidate they favor, or against one
they wish to silence - like they did with Alan Grayson.  No grassroots
organization will ever be able to raise enough money for their candidate
to level the playing field against folks that make a billion dollars a
year.  Unless this crime against democracy is reversed, we can expect
more Tea Party crazies to be elected to Congress in 2012.  And,
ultimately, we can expect corporate - and maybe international -
interference in our local elections.  And that would conflict with the
interests of our community.

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