ProPublica Exposes Clarence Thomas: He Has A Rich Friend!
Thomas has zero legal obligation to disclose where he goes on vacation to journalists or anyone else whether they are luxury trips or not. The idea that Thomas is secretly engaging in these activities because he fails to provide the editors at ProPublica or The New York Times with his itinerary is beyond preposterous. The only even debatable part of the disclosures would be his failure to report private flights as transportation expenses. (A genuine piece of journalism would have investigated the practices of all justices on this front.) But the idea, as one expert claims in the piece, that spending time on a friend s yacht should be reported as transportation, rather than a vacation, is also nonsensical.
While the purpose of ProPublica s piece is to frame all this as unethical, it offers not a single substantive instance of anything remotely approaching a conflict of interest. No cases involving Harlan Crow have ever reached Thomas. And there are no examples of Thomas having changed his positions to accommodate anyone. ProPublica takes an embarrassing stab at making this contention by noting that Thomas s criticism of an old Chevron-related case means that he s adopted a concept newly popular on the right, that would limit government regulation. Yes, limiting government regulation is a wholly newfangled idea within Federalist Society circles. Pulitzer on the way.
But, of course, leftists can t believe anyone has a good-faith position in opposition to their own. A person can either be bought by nefarious moneymen, be misled by nefarious moneymen, or be nefarious themselves. Those are the choices.
You want to write about Thomas vacations, fine. A Supreme Court justice is a public figure. The real story here is a boring one. Then again, the decades-long smearing of Thomas is unprecedented in modern American history. And with renewed efforts to delegitimize any court bound to constitutional limits which is what all this is really about it s only going to get worse.
Well fair enough. But I still think it’s not an especially good look for a Justice to be sporting around with the super rich. He lends a big rich guy with sorts of irons in the fire the prestige of the Supreme Court as well as getting a taste of how the other .001 percent lives. Such a lot of nonsense.