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<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us">We Can’t Trust the Supreme Court Five</SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us">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.</SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us">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.</SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us">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."</SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us">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."</SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us">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.</SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us">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.</SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us">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. </SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us">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</SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us">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.</SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us">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.</SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us">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. </SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us">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". </SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us">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.</SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us">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.</SPAN></P>
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