🏴‍☠️ SUPREMELY CORRUPT! 🤮 — Clarence & Ginni Thomas Wined & Dined “Off The Books” By GOP Fat Cat! 🤑 “Let’s just say that none of the trips Thomas took with Crow on his yacht and to his private resort in the Adirondacks resembled a Walmart parking lot.“ 👎🏼

Clarence Thomas Gifts

Clarence Thomas Gifts
Cartoonist: Dave Whamond
Republished under license

https://open.substack.com/pub/steady/p/a-great-piece-of-journalism?r=330z7&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner write on Substack:

A hallmark of great journalism is that it shines a bright light on information that is in the public’s interest but that powerful forces and actors desperately want to remain hidden.

A perfect example of this came today with a blockbuster investigative report from ProPublica about serious ethical questions concerning Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. 

In a thorough examination of Thomas’s two-decade relationship with billionaire and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, reporters Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski detail a series of trips gifted to Thomas and his wife, Ginni, that on the open market would likely have totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars.

None of these were disclosed by Thomas, who likes to portray himself as a man of simple tastes. The report notes that in a recent documentary about his life, Thomas stated, “I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it.” Let’s just say that none of the trips Thomas took with Crow on his yacht and to his private resort in the Adirondacks resembled a Walmart parking lot.

It is fitting that this news would drop a day after we wrote about the election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The reporting on Thomas shows the utter hypocrisy of those on the political right claiming that progressive judges are the ones undermining faith in our judicial system.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts likes to intone on how much he cares for the integrity of the court. But under his watch, the court’s standing with the public has dropped precipitously. And he need look no further than his ideological counterparts in the court’s right-wing majority.

The damage to the court’s reputation has been manifest in a series of rulings that have made a mockery of the ideas of judicial restraint and precedent. These have overturned Roe v. Wade, emboldened unrestricted gun rights, and undermined our representative government through gerrymandered elections. And that’s just the beginning.

Then there is the personal conduct of the justices, of which Thomas, a hero to the right, is a particularly egregious example. Here he is hobnobbing with rich, powerful interests and not letting anyone know. There he was refusing to recuse himself from a case involving the January 6 insurrection even though his own wife was implicated. It is clear he feels he has no need to defend his actions to anyone. He is completely unaccountable and flaunts it.

Senate Democrats today called for an ethics code for the Supreme Court. But color us skeptical that anything will change anytime soon.

This is a time of great tension in the function (or perhaps more aptly, the dysfunction) of our democracy. It feels as if we have been walking a high wire for years. But the tension still increases. In just the last few days, we have seen a state legislator in North Carolina who had run as a solid Democrat switch parties, giving Republicans a supermajority. In Tennessee, Republicans in the state’s House expelled two Democratic representatives who had joined students in protesting inaction on gun violence. And this on top of what we saw in Wisconsin.

There is also the backdrop of the former president facing numerous strands of legal peril.

There has always been an element of hardball in politics. There have always been public officials who skirted or crossed the lines of ethics and the law. There have always been judges who had dubious connections. Democracy is always precarious.

But there is a sense that now the danger is building. Voters are angry. The will of the majority is being undermined on issues like abortion and gun safety. Power is being accrued for its own sake and not to address the needs of the people.

These are times when we need a fearless press to explain where there is peril and where there is promise around the ability of our nation to regain its footing and thrive. Kudos to ProPublica for its contribution to the health of American democracy.  

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For the last several weeks, the so-called “mainstream media” has been providing “wall to wall” coverage of a “non-event” that eventually “morphed” into yet another tawdry episode in the tawdry life of America’s most visible anti-democracy fascist! They worked hard to give “equal (or greater) time” to a unified disingenuous effort by this guy’s supporters to portray him as “the victim!” In perhaps a new “modern journalistic low” they willingly provided a platform for dangerous wacko conspiracy theorist “MTG” to spew forth her vile “sicko-fascist” rantings — with little pushback and no fact checking!

Fortunately, as pointed out by Rather and Kirschner, somebody, in this case Pro Publica, was out there doing serious investigative journalism while their “mainstream” colleagues indulged their fantasies!

For more on the GOP’s concerted, nationwide assault on democracy and fundamental values, read historian Heather Cox Richardson, here:

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/april-6-2023?r=330z7&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

 

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

04-07-23

GONZO’S WORLD: ATTACK ON U.S. CENSUS LATEST FRONT IN GONZO’S WAR ON AMERICAN DEMOCRACY!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-justice-department-pushes-for-citizenship-question-on-census-alarming-experts_us_5a46fc79e4b0b0e5a7a68d3d

Justin Elliott reports for HuffPost:

“The Justice Department is pushing for a question on citizenship to be added to the 2020 census, a move that observers say could depress participation by immigrants who fear that the government could use the information against them. That, in turn, could have potentially large ripple effects for everything the once-a-decade census determines — from how congressional seats are distributed around the country to where hundreds of billions of federal dollars are spent.
The DOJ made the request in a previously unreported letter, dated Dec. 12 and obtained by ProPublica, from DOJ official Arthur Gary to the top official at the Census Bureau, which is part of the Commerce Department. The letter argues that the DOJ needs better citizenship data to better enforce the Voting Rights Act “and its important protections against racial discrimination in voting.”
A Census Bureau spokesperson confirmed the agency received the letter and said the “request will go through the well-established process that any potential question would go through.” The DOJ declined to comment and the White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Observers said they feared adding a citizenship question would not only lower response rates, but also make the census more expensive and throw a wrench into the system with just two years to go before the 2020 count. Questions are usually carefully field-tested, a process that can take years.
“This is a recipe for sabotaging the census,” said Arturo Vargas, a member of the National Advisory Committee of the Census and the executive director of NALEO Educational Fund, a Latino advocacy group. “When you start adding last-minute questions that are not tested — how will the public understand the question? How much will it suppress response rates?”
The 2010 census included a handful of questions covering age, sex, race, Hispanic origin, household relationship and owner/renter status — but not citizenship.
“People are not going to come out to be counted because they’re going to be fearful the information would be used for negative purposes,” said Steve Jost, a former top bureau official during the 2010 census. “This line about enforcing voting rights is a new and scary twist.” He noted that since the first census in 1790, the goal has been to count everyone in the country, not just citizens.”

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Read the complete article at the link.

Under the law and Supreme Court precedents, census data is used to draw Congeessional districts. Indeed, quite contrary to the way the GOP operates, Reprsentatives are supposed to represent the interests of all of the residents of their district, not just “voters” or “GOP voters.”

The DOJ’s bogus request to add a citizenship question is a rather transparent attempt to reduce Hispanic political power, in line with the overall White Nationalist anti-democracy direction the party is moving under Trump.

PWS

12-30-17m