https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3989854-judicial-activist-urged-no-mention-of-ginni-in-arranged-payment-to-clarence-thomass-wife-wapo/Doc Holliday said:You have no proof of bad behavior by Thomas.TexasScientist said:Don't be silly. Your willingness to excuse bad behavior for partisan political reasons is symptomatic, and illustrates pervasive partisan attitudes in the country that are harmful to democracy.Doc Holliday said:Why can't you just be honest?TexasScientist said:No not really, and they're both grifters. Your argument is about relationships, and would excuse Hunter also.whiterock said:Hunter is a grifter who monetized the office of his father, floating first from industry to industry, then from country to country, getting lucrative board positions solely because of his last name from people with interests before the USG. He not only failed to avoid appearances of impropriety, he clearly sought them out, over and over and over. Conflicts of interest can be highly lucrative if one does not care about appearances.TexasScientist said:I'm sure your ok with Hunter's payments too.whiterock said:Yes, he took on a kid he didn't have to take on, and helped the kid. And he asked others to help. And he asked for advice on when & how to report that help from others. And he followed that advice. Does he have report all of the teachers who gave that kid an A as a potential inducement on the court? Does he have to report the shift supervisor at McDonalds who gave that kid his first job as an effort to influence the court?TexasScientist said:Then you're blind, or blinded by partisanship. This is a relative's kid he took on to raise as his. It should stop there. He should pay from his own means. But no, he turns to his sugar daddy, for more candy from the jar he's been eating from for years. Sugar from a man who funds and sits on the board of a lobbying organization (that lobbies all branches but especially the judicial). At the very least, it smacks of the appearance of impropriety. Justices shouldn't be accepting welfare from wealthy donors, whether it is for kids they are raising as their own, or for lavish trips and vacations. Claims of altruism and noble motives is nothing more than a faade to excuse impropriety. It begs the question is this the tip of the iceberg?whiterock said:Impropriety? Thomas steps forward and does something the very people criticizing him now would have criticized him for NOT doing.....a late-middle aged man taking on guardianship of the small child outside his immediate family....his sister's grandson. Then, instead of taking a minimalist approach....he gives the kid the best, private schools, etc.... He enlists others he knows, powerful people from his (white) wife's circle of contacts, to take an interest in the kid...to support the kid, a kid from a badly broken home who was facing a scenario of dysfunction from which few kids escape. He seeks legal advice on what support must be reported and not, and he heeds it. But some "experts" disagree with that legal advice, so praise the Lord we have you to step up to defend democracy by denouncing him as a crook, even though no one who has helped the kid has or has had business before the court.TexasScientist said:However you want to slice it, especially in the judiciary, it has to be in the very least about the appearance of impropriety. Our form of government can't survive without character and integrity in the judiciary. This doesn't pass the ethical standards for any judges on judges sitting on federal bench.whiterock said:Did you actually read this, and read the link about Martin?TexasScientist said:
Crow paid for private school for a relative Thomas said he was raising "as a son." "This is way outside the norm," said a former White House ethics lawyer.
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-private-school-tuition-scotus
by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they're published.
In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was "raising him as a son."
Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin's tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.
[url=https://propublica.org/][/url]
The payments extended beyond that month, according to Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at the school. Crow paid Martin's tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year, Grimwood told ProPublica.
"Harlan picked up the tab," said Grimwood, who got to know Crow and the Thomases and had access to school financial information through his work as an administrator.
Before and after his time at Hidden Lake, Martin attended a second boarding school, Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. "Harlan said he was paying for the tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy as well," Grimwood said, recalling a conversation he had with Crow during a visit to the billionaire's Adirondacks estate.
ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin's education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.
Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin's education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow's.
The tuition payments add to the picture of how the Republican megadonor has helped fund the lives of Thomas and his family.
"You can't be having secret financial arrangements," said Mark W. Bennett, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. Bennett said he was friendly with Thomas and declined to comment for the record about the specifics of Thomas' actions. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn't let his lawyer friends buy him lunch.
ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin's education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.
Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin's education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow's.
The tuition payments add to the picture of how the Republican megadonor has helped fund the lives of Thomas and his family.
"You can't be having secret financial arrangements," said Mark W. Bennett, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. Bennett said he was friendly with Thomas and declined to comment for the record about the specifics of Thomas' actions. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn't let his lawyer friends buy him lunch.?crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=1318&q=75&w=2000&s=2f6349679f0cd252fa35f21ecb4b5f1e
Thomas did not respond to questions. In response to previous ProPublica reporting on gifts of luxury travel, he said that the Crows "are among our dearest friends" and that he understood he didn't have to disclose the trips.
ProPublica sent Crow a detailed list of questions and his office responded with a statement that did not dispute the facts presented in this story.
"Harlan Crow has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate, especially at-risk youth," the statement said. "It's disappointing that those with partisan political interests would try to turn helping at-risk youth with tuition assistance into something nefarious or political." The statement added that Crow and his wife have "supported many young Americans" at a "variety of schools, including his alma mater." Crow went to Randolph-Macon Academy.
Crow did not address a question about how much he paid in total for Martin's tuition. Asked if Thomas had requested the support for either school, Crow's office responded, "No."
Last month, ProPublica reported that Thomas accepted luxury travel from Crow virtually every year for decades, including international superyacht cruises and private jet flights around the world. Crow also paid money to Thomas and his relatives in an undisclosed real estate deal, ProPublica found. After he purchased the house where Thomas' mother lives, Crow poured tens of thousands of dollars into improving the property. And roughly 15 years ago, Crow donated much of the budget of a political group founded by Thomas' wife, which paid her a $120,000 salary.
"This is way outside the norm. This is way in excess of anything I've seen," said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, referring to the cascade of gifts over the years.
Painter said that when he was at the White House, an official who'd taken what Thomas had would have been fired: "This amount of undisclosed gifts? You'd want to get them out of the government."
A federal law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to publicly report most gifts. Ethics law experts told ProPublica they believed Thomas was required by law to disclose the tuition payments because they appear to be a gift to him.
Justices also must report many gifts to their spouses and dependent children.
But that argument was far-fetched, experts said, because minor children rarely pay their own tuition. Typically, the legal guardian is responsible for the child's education.
"The most reasonable interpretation of the statute is that this was a gift to Thomas and thus had to be reported. It's common sense," said Kathleen Clark, an ethics law expert at Washington University in St. Louis. "It's all to the financial benefit of Clarence Thomas."
Martin, now in his 30s, told ProPublica he was not aware that Crow paid his tuition. But he defended Thomas and Crow, saying he believed there was no ulterior motive behind the real estate magnate's largesse over the decades. "I think his intentions behind everything is just a friend and just a good person," Martin said.
Crow has long been an influential figure in pro-business conservative politics. He has given millions to efforts to move the law and the judiciary to the right and serves on the boards of think tanks that publish scholarship advancing conservative legal theories.
Crow has denied trying to influence the justice but has said he extended hospitality to him just as he has to other dear friends. From the start, their relationship has intertwined expensive gifts and conservative politics. In a recent interview with The Dallas Morning News, Crow recounted how he first met Thomas. In 1996, the justice was scheduled to give a speech in Dallas for an anti-regulation think tank. Crow offered to fly him there on his private jet. "During that flight, we found out we were kind of simpatico," the billionaire said.
The following year, the Thomases began to discuss taking custody of Martin. His father, Thomas' nephew, had been imprisoned in connection with a drug case. Thomas has written that Martin's situation held deep resonance for him because his own father was absent and his grandparents had taken him in "under very similar circumstances."
Thomas had an adult son from a previous marriage, but he and wife, Ginni, didn't have children of their own. They pitched Martin's parents on taking the boy in.
"Thomas explained that the boy would have the best of everything his own room, a private school education, lots of extracurricular activities," journalists Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher reported in their biography of Thomas.
Thomas gained legal custody of Martin and became his legal guardian around January 1998, according to court records.
Martin, who had been living in Georgia with his mother and siblings, moved to Virginia, where he lived with the justice from the ages of 6 to 19, he said.
Living with the Thomases came with an unusual perk: lavish travel with Crow and his family. Martin told ProPublica that he and Thomas vacationed with the Crows "at least once a year" throughout his childhood.
That included visits to Camp Topridge, Crow's private resort in the Adirondacks, and two cruises on Crow's superyacht, Martin said. On a trip in the Caribbean, Martin recalled riding jet skis off the side of the billionaire's yacht.
Roughly 20 years ago, Martin, Thomas and the Crows went on a cruise on the yacht in Russia and the Baltics, according to Martin and two other people familiar with the trip. The group toured St. Petersburg in a rented helicopter and visited the Yusupov Palace, the site of Rasputin's murder, said one of the people. They were joined by Chris DeMuth, then the president of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. (Thomas' trips with Crow to the Baltics and the Caribbean have not previously been reported.)
Thomas reconfigured his life to balance the demands of raising a child with serving on the high court. He began going to the Supreme Court before 6 a.m. so he could leave in time to pick Martin up after class and help him with his homework. By 2001, the justice had moved Martin to private school out of frustration with the Fairfax County public school system's lax schedule, The American Lawyer magazine reported.
For high school, Thomas sent Martin to Randolph-Macon Academy, a military boarding school 75 miles west of Washington, D.C., where he was in the class of 2010. The school, which sits on a 135-acre campus in the Shenandoah Valley, charged between $25,000 to $30,000 a year. Martin played football and basketball, and the justice sometimes visited for games.
Randolph-Macon was also Crow's alma mater. Thomas and Crow visited the campus in April 2007 for the dedication of an imposing bronze sculpture of the Air Force Honor Guard, according to the school magazine. Crow donated the piece to Randolph-Macon, where it is a short walk from Crow Hall, a classroom building named after the Dallas billionaire's family.
Crow and Clarence Thomas attended the 2007 dedication of a statue gifted by Crow to Randolph-Macon Academy.
Martin sometimes chafed at the strictures of military school, according to people at Randolph-Macon at the time, and he spent his junior year at Hidden Lake Academy, a therapeutic boarding school in Georgia. Hidden Lake boasted one teacher for every 10 students and activities ranging from horseback riding to canoeing. Those services came at an added cost. At the time, a year of tuition was roughly $73,000, plus fees.
The July 2009 bank statement from Hidden Lake was filed in a bankruptcy case for the school, which later went under. The document shows that Crow Holdings LLC wired $6,200 to the school that month, the exact cost of the month's tuition. The wire is marked "Mark Martin" in the ledger.
Crow's office said in its statement that Crow's funding of students' tuition has "always been paid solely from personal funds, sometimes held at and paid through the family business."
Grimwood, the administrator at Hidden Lake, told ProPublica that Crow wired the school money once a month to pay Martin's tuition fees. Grimwood had multiple roles on the campus, including overseeing an affiliated wilderness program. He said he was speaking about the payments because he felt the public should know about outside financial support for Supreme Court justices. Martin returned to Randolph-Macon his senior year.
Thomas has long been one of the less wealthy members of the Supreme Court. Still, when Martin was in high school, he and Ginni Thomas had income that put them comfortably in the top echelon of Americans.
In 2006 for example, the Thomases brought in more than $500,000 in income. The following year, they made more than $850,000 from Clarence Thomas' salary from the court, Ginni Thomas' pay from the Heritage Foundation and book payments for the justice's memoir.
It appears that at some point in Martin's childhood, Thomas was paying for private school himself. Martin told ProPublica that Thomas sold his Corvette "his most prized car" to pay for a year of tuition, although he didn't remember when that occurred.
In 2002, a friend of Thomas' from the RV community who owned a Florida pest control company, Earl Dixon, offered Thomas $5,000 to help defray the costs of Martin's education. Thomas' disclosure of that earlier gift, several experts said, could be viewed as evidence that the justice himself understood he was required to report tuition aid from friends.
"At first, Thomas was worried about the propriety of the donation," Thomas biographers Merida and Fletcher recounted. "He agreed to accept it if the contribution was deposited directly into a special trust for Mark." In his annual filing, Thomas reported the money as an "education gift to Mark Martin."?crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=619&q=75&w=2000&s=5e4461e7080970e707f2bcc40bea93d5
is there not a reasonable case to make that the gift was to Martin instead of Thomas?
I see no impropriety whatsoever. I see a good man doing the right things we expect good men to do. And it's to good effect: a black kid whose parents were unable to raise him now has Harlan Crow as a godfather. If Thomas was a Democrat, the glowing documentaries would already be on Netflix. The way I see it, the people attacking Thomas are discrediting themselves moreso than him. So by all means, carry on. Give a monkey enough rope and.....
I.m trying to figure out if the diameter of your hat is as big as the diameter of your backside.
Mrs. Thomas is a career lobbyist who took a retainer from a customer she'd lobbied for in the past on issues she lobbies all the time.
The only case you have here is that, to maintain appearances, judges cannot marry anyone engaged in the political arena. Not a lobbyist, not an elected official, not even a leader from a group with political interest like, say, a union. For that matter, union members pay dues and those dues are used to lobby elected officials, so a judge really couldn't even marry a machinist from Detroit. Hell, for that matter, that machinist has a brother who's on social security and another brother who sells medicare supplemental insurance. Couldn't marry them, either, as they have clear political conflicts regarding federal entitlement and health care programs. I mean, the premise of your argument is that judges must maintain a bright line between themselves and politics, right?
Pardon the reductio ad absurdum exercise, but you do have a patently stupid premise to defend.
You want Thomas removed by any means necessary so Dems can use the SC to push woke nonsense.
Clarence Thomas Had a Child in Private School. Harlan Crow Paid the Tuition.
25,136 Views |
248 Replies |
Last: 2 yr ago by TexasScientist
?crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=1318&q=75&w=2000&s=2f6349679f0cd252fa35f21ecb4b5f1e
?crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=619&q=75&w=2000&s=5e4461e7080970e707f2bcc40bea93d5so nothing..TexasScientist said:https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3989854-judicial-activist-urged-no-mention-of-ginni-in-arranged-payment-to-clarence-thomass-wife-wapo/Doc Holliday said:You have no proof of bad behavior by Thomas.TexasScientist said:Don't be silly. Your willingness to excuse bad behavior for partisan political reasons is symptomatic, and illustrates pervasive partisan attitudes in the country that are harmful to democracy.Doc Holliday said:Why can't you just be honest?TexasScientist said:No not really, and they're both grifters. Your argument is about relationships, and would excuse Hunter also.whiterock said:Hunter is a grifter who monetized the office of his father, floating first from industry to industry, then from country to country, getting lucrative board positions solely because of his last name from people with interests before the USG. He not only failed to avoid appearances of impropriety, he clearly sought them out, over and over and over. Conflicts of interest can be highly lucrative if one does not care about appearances.TexasScientist said:I'm sure your ok with Hunter's payments too.whiterock said:Yes, he took on a kid he didn't have to take on, and helped the kid. And he asked others to help. And he asked for advice on when & how to report that help from others. And he followed that advice. Does he have report all of the teachers who gave that kid an A as a potential inducement on the court? Does he have to report the shift supervisor at McDonalds who gave that kid his first job as an effort to influence the court?TexasScientist said:Then you're blind, or blinded by partisanship. This is a relative's kid he took on to raise as his. It should stop there. He should pay from his own means. But no, he turns to his sugar daddy, for more candy from the jar he's been eating from for years. Sugar from a man who funds and sits on the board of a lobbying organization (that lobbies all branches but especially the judicial). At the very least, it smacks of the appearance of impropriety. Justices shouldn't be accepting welfare from wealthy donors, whether it is for kids they are raising as their own, or for lavish trips and vacations. Claims of altruism and noble motives is nothing more than a faade to excuse impropriety. It begs the question is this the tip of the iceberg?whiterock said:Impropriety? Thomas steps forward and does something the very people criticizing him now would have criticized him for NOT doing.....a late-middle aged man taking on guardianship of the small child outside his immediate family....his sister's grandson. Then, instead of taking a minimalist approach....he gives the kid the best, private schools, etc.... He enlists others he knows, powerful people from his (white) wife's circle of contacts, to take an interest in the kid...to support the kid, a kid from a badly broken home who was facing a scenario of dysfunction from which few kids escape. He seeks legal advice on what support must be reported and not, and he heeds it. But some "experts" disagree with that legal advice, so praise the Lord we have you to step up to defend democracy by denouncing him as a crook, even though no one who has helped the kid has or has had business before the court.TexasScientist said:However you want to slice it, especially in the judiciary, it has to be in the very least about the appearance of impropriety. Our form of government can't survive without character and integrity in the judiciary. This doesn't pass the ethical standards for any judges on judges sitting on federal bench.whiterock said:Did you actually read this, and read the link about Martin?TexasScientist said:
Crow paid for private school for a relative Thomas said he was raising "as a son." "This is way outside the norm," said a former White House ethics lawyer.
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-private-school-tuition-scotus
by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they're published.
In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was "raising him as a son."
Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin's tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.
[url=https://propublica.org/][/url]
The payments extended beyond that month, according to Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at the school. Crow paid Martin's tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year, Grimwood told ProPublica.
"Harlan picked up the tab," said Grimwood, who got to know Crow and the Thomases and had access to school financial information through his work as an administrator.
Before and after his time at Hidden Lake, Martin attended a second boarding school, Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. "Harlan said he was paying for the tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy as well," Grimwood said, recalling a conversation he had with Crow during a visit to the billionaire's Adirondacks estate.
ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin's education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.
Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin's education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow's.
The tuition payments add to the picture of how the Republican megadonor has helped fund the lives of Thomas and his family.
"You can't be having secret financial arrangements," said Mark W. Bennett, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. Bennett said he was friendly with Thomas and declined to comment for the record about the specifics of Thomas' actions. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn't let his lawyer friends buy him lunch.
ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin's education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.
Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin's education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow's.
The tuition payments add to the picture of how the Republican megadonor has helped fund the lives of Thomas and his family.
"You can't be having secret financial arrangements," said Mark W. Bennett, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. Bennett said he was friendly with Thomas and declined to comment for the record about the specifics of Thomas' actions. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn't let his lawyer friends buy him lunch.
Thomas did not respond to questions. In response to previous ProPublica reporting on gifts of luxury travel, he said that the Crows "are among our dearest friends" and that he understood he didn't have to disclose the trips.
ProPublica sent Crow a detailed list of questions and his office responded with a statement that did not dispute the facts presented in this story.
"Harlan Crow has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate, especially at-risk youth," the statement said. "It's disappointing that those with partisan political interests would try to turn helping at-risk youth with tuition assistance into something nefarious or political." The statement added that Crow and his wife have "supported many young Americans" at a "variety of schools, including his alma mater." Crow went to Randolph-Macon Academy.
Crow did not address a question about how much he paid in total for Martin's tuition. Asked if Thomas had requested the support for either school, Crow's office responded, "No."
Last month, ProPublica reported that Thomas accepted luxury travel from Crow virtually every year for decades, including international superyacht cruises and private jet flights around the world. Crow also paid money to Thomas and his relatives in an undisclosed real estate deal, ProPublica found. After he purchased the house where Thomas' mother lives, Crow poured tens of thousands of dollars into improving the property. And roughly 15 years ago, Crow donated much of the budget of a political group founded by Thomas' wife, which paid her a $120,000 salary.
"This is way outside the norm. This is way in excess of anything I've seen," said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, referring to the cascade of gifts over the years.
Painter said that when he was at the White House, an official who'd taken what Thomas had would have been fired: "This amount of undisclosed gifts? You'd want to get them out of the government."
A federal law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to publicly report most gifts. Ethics law experts told ProPublica they believed Thomas was required by law to disclose the tuition payments because they appear to be a gift to him.
Justices also must report many gifts to their spouses and dependent children.
But that argument was far-fetched, experts said, because minor children rarely pay their own tuition. Typically, the legal guardian is responsible for the child's education.
"The most reasonable interpretation of the statute is that this was a gift to Thomas and thus had to be reported. It's common sense," said Kathleen Clark, an ethics law expert at Washington University in St. Louis. "It's all to the financial benefit of Clarence Thomas."
Martin, now in his 30s, told ProPublica he was not aware that Crow paid his tuition. But he defended Thomas and Crow, saying he believed there was no ulterior motive behind the real estate magnate's largesse over the decades. "I think his intentions behind everything is just a friend and just a good person," Martin said.
Crow has long been an influential figure in pro-business conservative politics. He has given millions to efforts to move the law and the judiciary to the right and serves on the boards of think tanks that publish scholarship advancing conservative legal theories.
Crow has denied trying to influence the justice but has said he extended hospitality to him just as he has to other dear friends. From the start, their relationship has intertwined expensive gifts and conservative politics. In a recent interview with The Dallas Morning News, Crow recounted how he first met Thomas. In 1996, the justice was scheduled to give a speech in Dallas for an anti-regulation think tank. Crow offered to fly him there on his private jet. "During that flight, we found out we were kind of simpatico," the billionaire said.
The following year, the Thomases began to discuss taking custody of Martin. His father, Thomas' nephew, had been imprisoned in connection with a drug case. Thomas has written that Martin's situation held deep resonance for him because his own father was absent and his grandparents had taken him in "under very similar circumstances."
Thomas had an adult son from a previous marriage, but he and wife, Ginni, didn't have children of their own. They pitched Martin's parents on taking the boy in.
"Thomas explained that the boy would have the best of everything his own room, a private school education, lots of extracurricular activities," journalists Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher reported in their biography of Thomas.
Thomas gained legal custody of Martin and became his legal guardian around January 1998, according to court records.
Martin, who had been living in Georgia with his mother and siblings, moved to Virginia, where he lived with the justice from the ages of 6 to 19, he said.
Living with the Thomases came with an unusual perk: lavish travel with Crow and his family. Martin told ProPublica that he and Thomas vacationed with the Crows "at least once a year" throughout his childhood.
That included visits to Camp Topridge, Crow's private resort in the Adirondacks, and two cruises on Crow's superyacht, Martin said. On a trip in the Caribbean, Martin recalled riding jet skis off the side of the billionaire's yacht.
Roughly 20 years ago, Martin, Thomas and the Crows went on a cruise on the yacht in Russia and the Baltics, according to Martin and two other people familiar with the trip. The group toured St. Petersburg in a rented helicopter and visited the Yusupov Palace, the site of Rasputin's murder, said one of the people. They were joined by Chris DeMuth, then the president of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. (Thomas' trips with Crow to the Baltics and the Caribbean have not previously been reported.)
Thomas reconfigured his life to balance the demands of raising a child with serving on the high court. He began going to the Supreme Court before 6 a.m. so he could leave in time to pick Martin up after class and help him with his homework. By 2001, the justice had moved Martin to private school out of frustration with the Fairfax County public school system's lax schedule, The American Lawyer magazine reported.
For high school, Thomas sent Martin to Randolph-Macon Academy, a military boarding school 75 miles west of Washington, D.C., where he was in the class of 2010. The school, which sits on a 135-acre campus in the Shenandoah Valley, charged between $25,000 to $30,000 a year. Martin played football and basketball, and the justice sometimes visited for games.
Randolph-Macon was also Crow's alma mater. Thomas and Crow visited the campus in April 2007 for the dedication of an imposing bronze sculpture of the Air Force Honor Guard, according to the school magazine. Crow donated the piece to Randolph-Macon, where it is a short walk from Crow Hall, a classroom building named after the Dallas billionaire's family.
Crow and Clarence Thomas attended the 2007 dedication of a statue gifted by Crow to Randolph-Macon Academy.
Martin sometimes chafed at the strictures of military school, according to people at Randolph-Macon at the time, and he spent his junior year at Hidden Lake Academy, a therapeutic boarding school in Georgia. Hidden Lake boasted one teacher for every 10 students and activities ranging from horseback riding to canoeing. Those services came at an added cost. At the time, a year of tuition was roughly $73,000, plus fees.
The July 2009 bank statement from Hidden Lake was filed in a bankruptcy case for the school, which later went under. The document shows that Crow Holdings LLC wired $6,200 to the school that month, the exact cost of the month's tuition. The wire is marked "Mark Martin" in the ledger.
Crow's office said in its statement that Crow's funding of students' tuition has "always been paid solely from personal funds, sometimes held at and paid through the family business."
Grimwood, the administrator at Hidden Lake, told ProPublica that Crow wired the school money once a month to pay Martin's tuition fees. Grimwood had multiple roles on the campus, including overseeing an affiliated wilderness program. He said he was speaking about the payments because he felt the public should know about outside financial support for Supreme Court justices. Martin returned to Randolph-Macon his senior year.
Thomas has long been one of the less wealthy members of the Supreme Court. Still, when Martin was in high school, he and Ginni Thomas had income that put them comfortably in the top echelon of Americans.
In 2006 for example, the Thomases brought in more than $500,000 in income. The following year, they made more than $850,000 from Clarence Thomas' salary from the court, Ginni Thomas' pay from the Heritage Foundation and book payments for the justice's memoir.
It appears that at some point in Martin's childhood, Thomas was paying for private school himself. Martin told ProPublica that Thomas sold his Corvette "his most prized car" to pay for a year of tuition, although he didn't remember when that occurred.
In 2002, a friend of Thomas' from the RV community who owned a Florida pest control company, Earl Dixon, offered Thomas $5,000 to help defray the costs of Martin's education. Thomas' disclosure of that earlier gift, several experts said, could be viewed as evidence that the justice himself understood he was required to report tuition aid from friends.
"At first, Thomas was worried about the propriety of the donation," Thomas biographers Merida and Fletcher recounted. "He agreed to accept it if the contribution was deposited directly into a special trust for Mark." In his annual filing, Thomas reported the money as an "education gift to Mark Martin."
is there not a reasonable case to make that the gift was to Martin instead of Thomas?
I see no impropriety whatsoever. I see a good man doing the right things we expect good men to do. And it's to good effect: a black kid whose parents were unable to raise him now has Harlan Crow as a godfather. If Thomas was a Democrat, the glowing documentaries would already be on Netflix. The way I see it, the people attacking Thomas are discrediting themselves moreso than him. So by all means, carry on. Give a monkey enough rope and.....
I.m trying to figure out if the diameter of your hat is as big as the diameter of your backside.
Mrs. Thomas is a career lobbyist who took a retainer from a customer she'd lobbied for in the past on issues she lobbies all the time.
The only case you have here is that, to maintain appearances, judges cannot marry anyone engaged in the political arena. Not a lobbyist, not an elected official, not even a leader from a group with political interest like, say, a union. For that matter, union members pay dues and those dues are used to lobby elected officials, so a judge really couldn't even marry a machinist from Detroit. Hell, for that matter, that machinist has a brother who's on social security and another brother who sells medicare supplemental insurance. Couldn't marry them, either, as they have clear political conflicts regarding federal entitlement and health care programs. I mean, the premise of your argument is that judges must maintain a bright line between themselves and politics, right?
Pardon the reductio ad absurdum exercise, but you do have a patently stupid premise to defend.
You want Thomas removed by any means necessary so Dems can use the SC to push woke nonsense.
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
“The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.”
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart
Read the article.4th and Inches said:so nothing..TexasScientist said:https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3989854-judicial-activist-urged-no-mention-of-ginni-in-arranged-payment-to-clarence-thomass-wife-wapo/Doc Holliday said:You have no proof of bad behavior by Thomas.TexasScientist said:Don't be silly. Your willingness to excuse bad behavior for partisan political reasons is symptomatic, and illustrates pervasive partisan attitudes in the country that are harmful to democracy.Doc Holliday said:Why can't you just be honest?TexasScientist said:No not really, and they're both grifters. Your argument is about relationships, and would excuse Hunter also.whiterock said:Hunter is a grifter who monetized the office of his father, floating first from industry to industry, then from country to country, getting lucrative board positions solely because of his last name from people with interests before the USG. He not only failed to avoid appearances of impropriety, he clearly sought them out, over and over and over. Conflicts of interest can be highly lucrative if one does not care about appearances.TexasScientist said:I'm sure your ok with Hunter's payments too.whiterock said:Yes, he took on a kid he didn't have to take on, and helped the kid. And he asked others to help. And he asked for advice on when & how to report that help from others. And he followed that advice. Does he have report all of the teachers who gave that kid an A as a potential inducement on the court? Does he have to report the shift supervisor at McDonalds who gave that kid his first job as an effort to influence the court?TexasScientist said:Then you're blind, or blinded by partisanship. This is a relative's kid he took on to raise as his. It should stop there. He should pay from his own means. But no, he turns to his sugar daddy, for more candy from the jar he's been eating from for years. Sugar from a man who funds and sits on the board of a lobbying organization (that lobbies all branches but especially the judicial). At the very least, it smacks of the appearance of impropriety. Justices shouldn't be accepting welfare from wealthy donors, whether it is for kids they are raising as their own, or for lavish trips and vacations. Claims of altruism and noble motives is nothing more than a faade to excuse impropriety. It begs the question is this the tip of the iceberg?whiterock said:Impropriety? Thomas steps forward and does something the very people criticizing him now would have criticized him for NOT doing.....a late-middle aged man taking on guardianship of the small child outside his immediate family....his sister's grandson. Then, instead of taking a minimalist approach....he gives the kid the best, private schools, etc.... He enlists others he knows, powerful people from his (white) wife's circle of contacts, to take an interest in the kid...to support the kid, a kid from a badly broken home who was facing a scenario of dysfunction from which few kids escape. He seeks legal advice on what support must be reported and not, and he heeds it. But some "experts" disagree with that legal advice, so praise the Lord we have you to step up to defend democracy by denouncing him as a crook, even though no one who has helped the kid has or has had business before the court.TexasScientist said:However you want to slice it, especially in the judiciary, it has to be in the very least about the appearance of impropriety. Our form of government can't survive without character and integrity in the judiciary. This doesn't pass the ethical standards for any judges on judges sitting on federal bench.whiterock said:Did you actually read this, and read the link about Martin?TexasScientist said:
Crow paid for private school for a relative Thomas said he was raising "as a son." "This is way outside the norm," said a former White House ethics lawyer.
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-private-school-tuition-scotus
by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they're published.
In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was "raising him as a son."
Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin's tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.
[url=https://propublica.org/][/url]
The payments extended beyond that month, according to Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at the school. Crow paid Martin's tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year, Grimwood told ProPublica.
"Harlan picked up the tab," said Grimwood, who got to know Crow and the Thomases and had access to school financial information through his work as an administrator.
Before and after his time at Hidden Lake, Martin attended a second boarding school, Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. "Harlan said he was paying for the tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy as well," Grimwood said, recalling a conversation he had with Crow during a visit to the billionaire's Adirondacks estate.
ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin's education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.
Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin's education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow's.
The tuition payments add to the picture of how the Republican megadonor has helped fund the lives of Thomas and his family.
"You can't be having secret financial arrangements," said Mark W. Bennett, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. Bennett said he was friendly with Thomas and declined to comment for the record about the specifics of Thomas' actions. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn't let his lawyer friends buy him lunch.
ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin's education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.
Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin's education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow's.
The tuition payments add to the picture of how the Republican megadonor has helped fund the lives of Thomas and his family.
"You can't be having secret financial arrangements," said Mark W. Bennett, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. Bennett said he was friendly with Thomas and declined to comment for the record about the specifics of Thomas' actions. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn't let his lawyer friends buy him lunch.
Thomas did not respond to questions. In response to previous ProPublica reporting on gifts of luxury travel, he said that the Crows "are among our dearest friends" and that he understood he didn't have to disclose the trips.
ProPublica sent Crow a detailed list of questions and his office responded with a statement that did not dispute the facts presented in this story.
"Harlan Crow has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate, especially at-risk youth," the statement said. "It's disappointing that those with partisan political interests would try to turn helping at-risk youth with tuition assistance into something nefarious or political." The statement added that Crow and his wife have "supported many young Americans" at a "variety of schools, including his alma mater." Crow went to Randolph-Macon Academy.
Crow did not address a question about how much he paid in total for Martin's tuition. Asked if Thomas had requested the support for either school, Crow's office responded, "No."
Last month, ProPublica reported that Thomas accepted luxury travel from Crow virtually every year for decades, including international superyacht cruises and private jet flights around the world. Crow also paid money to Thomas and his relatives in an undisclosed real estate deal, ProPublica found. After he purchased the house where Thomas' mother lives, Crow poured tens of thousands of dollars into improving the property. And roughly 15 years ago, Crow donated much of the budget of a political group founded by Thomas' wife, which paid her a $120,000 salary.
"This is way outside the norm. This is way in excess of anything I've seen," said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, referring to the cascade of gifts over the years.
Painter said that when he was at the White House, an official who'd taken what Thomas had would have been fired: "This amount of undisclosed gifts? You'd want to get them out of the government."
A federal law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to publicly report most gifts. Ethics law experts told ProPublica they believed Thomas was required by law to disclose the tuition payments because they appear to be a gift to him.
Justices also must report many gifts to their spouses and dependent children.
But that argument was far-fetched, experts said, because minor children rarely pay their own tuition. Typically, the legal guardian is responsible for the child's education.
"The most reasonable interpretation of the statute is that this was a gift to Thomas and thus had to be reported. It's common sense," said Kathleen Clark, an ethics law expert at Washington University in St. Louis. "It's all to the financial benefit of Clarence Thomas."
Martin, now in his 30s, told ProPublica he was not aware that Crow paid his tuition. But he defended Thomas and Crow, saying he believed there was no ulterior motive behind the real estate magnate's largesse over the decades. "I think his intentions behind everything is just a friend and just a good person," Martin said.
Crow has long been an influential figure in pro-business conservative politics. He has given millions to efforts to move the law and the judiciary to the right and serves on the boards of think tanks that publish scholarship advancing conservative legal theories.
Crow has denied trying to influence the justice but has said he extended hospitality to him just as he has to other dear friends. From the start, their relationship has intertwined expensive gifts and conservative politics. In a recent interview with The Dallas Morning News, Crow recounted how he first met Thomas. In 1996, the justice was scheduled to give a speech in Dallas for an anti-regulation think tank. Crow offered to fly him there on his private jet. "During that flight, we found out we were kind of simpatico," the billionaire said.
The following year, the Thomases began to discuss taking custody of Martin. His father, Thomas' nephew, had been imprisoned in connection with a drug case. Thomas has written that Martin's situation held deep resonance for him because his own father was absent and his grandparents had taken him in "under very similar circumstances."
Thomas had an adult son from a previous marriage, but he and wife, Ginni, didn't have children of their own. They pitched Martin's parents on taking the boy in.
"Thomas explained that the boy would have the best of everything his own room, a private school education, lots of extracurricular activities," journalists Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher reported in their biography of Thomas.
Thomas gained legal custody of Martin and became his legal guardian around January 1998, according to court records.
Martin, who had been living in Georgia with his mother and siblings, moved to Virginia, where he lived with the justice from the ages of 6 to 19, he said.
Living with the Thomases came with an unusual perk: lavish travel with Crow and his family. Martin told ProPublica that he and Thomas vacationed with the Crows "at least once a year" throughout his childhood.
That included visits to Camp Topridge, Crow's private resort in the Adirondacks, and two cruises on Crow's superyacht, Martin said. On a trip in the Caribbean, Martin recalled riding jet skis off the side of the billionaire's yacht.
Roughly 20 years ago, Martin, Thomas and the Crows went on a cruise on the yacht in Russia and the Baltics, according to Martin and two other people familiar with the trip. The group toured St. Petersburg in a rented helicopter and visited the Yusupov Palace, the site of Rasputin's murder, said one of the people. They were joined by Chris DeMuth, then the president of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. (Thomas' trips with Crow to the Baltics and the Caribbean have not previously been reported.)
Thomas reconfigured his life to balance the demands of raising a child with serving on the high court. He began going to the Supreme Court before 6 a.m. so he could leave in time to pick Martin up after class and help him with his homework. By 2001, the justice had moved Martin to private school out of frustration with the Fairfax County public school system's lax schedule, The American Lawyer magazine reported.
For high school, Thomas sent Martin to Randolph-Macon Academy, a military boarding school 75 miles west of Washington, D.C., where he was in the class of 2010. The school, which sits on a 135-acre campus in the Shenandoah Valley, charged between $25,000 to $30,000 a year. Martin played football and basketball, and the justice sometimes visited for games.
Randolph-Macon was also Crow's alma mater. Thomas and Crow visited the campus in April 2007 for the dedication of an imposing bronze sculpture of the Air Force Honor Guard, according to the school magazine. Crow donated the piece to Randolph-Macon, where it is a short walk from Crow Hall, a classroom building named after the Dallas billionaire's family.
Crow and Clarence Thomas attended the 2007 dedication of a statue gifted by Crow to Randolph-Macon Academy.
Martin sometimes chafed at the strictures of military school, according to people at Randolph-Macon at the time, and he spent his junior year at Hidden Lake Academy, a therapeutic boarding school in Georgia. Hidden Lake boasted one teacher for every 10 students and activities ranging from horseback riding to canoeing. Those services came at an added cost. At the time, a year of tuition was roughly $73,000, plus fees.
The July 2009 bank statement from Hidden Lake was filed in a bankruptcy case for the school, which later went under. The document shows that Crow Holdings LLC wired $6,200 to the school that month, the exact cost of the month's tuition. The wire is marked "Mark Martin" in the ledger.
Crow's office said in its statement that Crow's funding of students' tuition has "always been paid solely from personal funds, sometimes held at and paid through the family business."
Grimwood, the administrator at Hidden Lake, told ProPublica that Crow wired the school money once a month to pay Martin's tuition fees. Grimwood had multiple roles on the campus, including overseeing an affiliated wilderness program. He said he was speaking about the payments because he felt the public should know about outside financial support for Supreme Court justices. Martin returned to Randolph-Macon his senior year.
Thomas has long been one of the less wealthy members of the Supreme Court. Still, when Martin was in high school, he and Ginni Thomas had income that put them comfortably in the top echelon of Americans.
In 2006 for example, the Thomases brought in more than $500,000 in income. The following year, they made more than $850,000 from Clarence Thomas' salary from the court, Ginni Thomas' pay from the Heritage Foundation and book payments for the justice's memoir.
It appears that at some point in Martin's childhood, Thomas was paying for private school himself. Martin told ProPublica that Thomas sold his Corvette "his most prized car" to pay for a year of tuition, although he didn't remember when that occurred.
In 2002, a friend of Thomas' from the RV community who owned a Florida pest control company, Earl Dixon, offered Thomas $5,000 to help defray the costs of Martin's education. Thomas' disclosure of that earlier gift, several experts said, could be viewed as evidence that the justice himself understood he was required to report tuition aid from friends.
"At first, Thomas was worried about the propriety of the donation," Thomas biographers Merida and Fletcher recounted. "He agreed to accept it if the contribution was deposited directly into a special trust for Mark." In his annual filing, Thomas reported the money as an "education gift to Mark Martin."
is there not a reasonable case to make that the gift was to Martin instead of Thomas?
I see no impropriety whatsoever. I see a good man doing the right things we expect good men to do. And it's to good effect: a black kid whose parents were unable to raise him now has Harlan Crow as a godfather. If Thomas was a Democrat, the glowing documentaries would already be on Netflix. The way I see it, the people attacking Thomas are discrediting themselves moreso than him. So by all means, carry on. Give a monkey enough rope and.....
I.m trying to figure out if the diameter of your hat is as big as the diameter of your backside.
Mrs. Thomas is a career lobbyist who took a retainer from a customer she'd lobbied for in the past on issues she lobbies all the time.
The only case you have here is that, to maintain appearances, judges cannot marry anyone engaged in the political arena. Not a lobbyist, not an elected official, not even a leader from a group with political interest like, say, a union. For that matter, union members pay dues and those dues are used to lobby elected officials, so a judge really couldn't even marry a machinist from Detroit. Hell, for that matter, that machinist has a brother who's on social security and another brother who sells medicare supplemental insurance. Couldn't marry them, either, as they have clear political conflicts regarding federal entitlement and health care programs. I mean, the premise of your argument is that judges must maintain a bright line between themselves and politics, right?
Pardon the reductio ad absurdum exercise, but you do have a patently stupid premise to defend.
You want Thomas removed by any means necessary so Dems can use the SC to push woke nonsense.
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
i read it..TexasScientist said:Read the article.4th and Inches said:so nothing..TexasScientist said:https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3989854-judicial-activist-urged-no-mention-of-ginni-in-arranged-payment-to-clarence-thomass-wife-wapo/Doc Holliday said:You have no proof of bad behavior by Thomas.TexasScientist said:Don't be silly. Your willingness to excuse bad behavior for partisan political reasons is symptomatic, and illustrates pervasive partisan attitudes in the country that are harmful to democracy.Doc Holliday said:Why can't you just be honest?TexasScientist said:No not really, and they're both grifters. Your argument is about relationships, and would excuse Hunter also.whiterock said:Hunter is a grifter who monetized the office of his father, floating first from industry to industry, then from country to country, getting lucrative board positions solely because of his last name from people with interests before the USG. He not only failed to avoid appearances of impropriety, he clearly sought them out, over and over and over. Conflicts of interest can be highly lucrative if one does not care about appearances.TexasScientist said:I'm sure your ok with Hunter's payments too.whiterock said:Yes, he took on a kid he didn't have to take on, and helped the kid. And he asked others to help. And he asked for advice on when & how to report that help from others. And he followed that advice. Does he have report all of the teachers who gave that kid an A as a potential inducement on the court? Does he have to report the shift supervisor at McDonalds who gave that kid his first job as an effort to influence the court?TexasScientist said:Then you're blind, or blinded by partisanship. This is a relative's kid he took on to raise as his. It should stop there. He should pay from his own means. But no, he turns to his sugar daddy, for more candy from the jar he's been eating from for years. Sugar from a man who funds and sits on the board of a lobbying organization (that lobbies all branches but especially the judicial). At the very least, it smacks of the appearance of impropriety. Justices shouldn't be accepting welfare from wealthy donors, whether it is for kids they are raising as their own, or for lavish trips and vacations. Claims of altruism and noble motives is nothing more than a faade to excuse impropriety. It begs the question is this the tip of the iceberg?whiterock said:Impropriety? Thomas steps forward and does something the very people criticizing him now would have criticized him for NOT doing.....a late-middle aged man taking on guardianship of the small child outside his immediate family....his sister's grandson. Then, instead of taking a minimalist approach....he gives the kid the best, private schools, etc.... He enlists others he knows, powerful people from his (white) wife's circle of contacts, to take an interest in the kid...to support the kid, a kid from a badly broken home who was facing a scenario of dysfunction from which few kids escape. He seeks legal advice on what support must be reported and not, and he heeds it. But some "experts" disagree with that legal advice, so praise the Lord we have you to step up to defend democracy by denouncing him as a crook, even though no one who has helped the kid has or has had business before the court.TexasScientist said:However you want to slice it, especially in the judiciary, it has to be in the very least about the appearance of impropriety. Our form of government can't survive without character and integrity in the judiciary. This doesn't pass the ethical standards for any judges on judges sitting on federal bench.whiterock said:Did you actually read this, and read the link about Martin?TexasScientist said:
Crow paid for private school for a relative Thomas said he was raising "as a son." "This is way outside the norm," said a former White House ethics lawyer.
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-private-school-tuition-scotus
by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they're published.
In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was "raising him as a son."
Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin's tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.
[url=https://propublica.org/][/url]
The payments extended beyond that month, according to Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at the school. Crow paid Martin's tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year, Grimwood told ProPublica.
"Harlan picked up the tab," said Grimwood, who got to know Crow and the Thomases and had access to school financial information through his work as an administrator.
Before and after his time at Hidden Lake, Martin attended a second boarding school, Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. "Harlan said he was paying for the tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy as well," Grimwood said, recalling a conversation he had with Crow during a visit to the billionaire's Adirondacks estate.
ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin's education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.
Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin's education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow's.
The tuition payments add to the picture of how the Republican megadonor has helped fund the lives of Thomas and his family.
"You can't be having secret financial arrangements," said Mark W. Bennett, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. Bennett said he was friendly with Thomas and declined to comment for the record about the specifics of Thomas' actions. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn't let his lawyer friends buy him lunch.
ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin's education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.
Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin's education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow's.
The tuition payments add to the picture of how the Republican megadonor has helped fund the lives of Thomas and his family.
"You can't be having secret financial arrangements," said Mark W. Bennett, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. Bennett said he was friendly with Thomas and declined to comment for the record about the specifics of Thomas' actions. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn't let his lawyer friends buy him lunch.
Thomas did not respond to questions. In response to previous ProPublica reporting on gifts of luxury travel, he said that the Crows "are among our dearest friends" and that he understood he didn't have to disclose the trips.
ProPublica sent Crow a detailed list of questions and his office responded with a statement that did not dispute the facts presented in this story.
"Harlan Crow has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate, especially at-risk youth," the statement said. "It's disappointing that those with partisan political interests would try to turn helping at-risk youth with tuition assistance into something nefarious or political." The statement added that Crow and his wife have "supported many young Americans" at a "variety of schools, including his alma mater." Crow went to Randolph-Macon Academy.
Crow did not address a question about how much he paid in total for Martin's tuition. Asked if Thomas had requested the support for either school, Crow's office responded, "No."
Last month, ProPublica reported that Thomas accepted luxury travel from Crow virtually every year for decades, including international superyacht cruises and private jet flights around the world. Crow also paid money to Thomas and his relatives in an undisclosed real estate deal, ProPublica found. After he purchased the house where Thomas' mother lives, Crow poured tens of thousands of dollars into improving the property. And roughly 15 years ago, Crow donated much of the budget of a political group founded by Thomas' wife, which paid her a $120,000 salary.
"This is way outside the norm. This is way in excess of anything I've seen," said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, referring to the cascade of gifts over the years.
Painter said that when he was at the White House, an official who'd taken what Thomas had would have been fired: "This amount of undisclosed gifts? You'd want to get them out of the government."
A federal law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to publicly report most gifts. Ethics law experts told ProPublica they believed Thomas was required by law to disclose the tuition payments because they appear to be a gift to him.
Justices also must report many gifts to their spouses and dependent children.
But that argument was far-fetched, experts said, because minor children rarely pay their own tuition. Typically, the legal guardian is responsible for the child's education.
"The most reasonable interpretation of the statute is that this was a gift to Thomas and thus had to be reported. It's common sense," said Kathleen Clark, an ethics law expert at Washington University in St. Louis. "It's all to the financial benefit of Clarence Thomas."
Martin, now in his 30s, told ProPublica he was not aware that Crow paid his tuition. But he defended Thomas and Crow, saying he believed there was no ulterior motive behind the real estate magnate's largesse over the decades. "I think his intentions behind everything is just a friend and just a good person," Martin said.
Crow has long been an influential figure in pro-business conservative politics. He has given millions to efforts to move the law and the judiciary to the right and serves on the boards of think tanks that publish scholarship advancing conservative legal theories.
Crow has denied trying to influence the justice but has said he extended hospitality to him just as he has to other dear friends. From the start, their relationship has intertwined expensive gifts and conservative politics. In a recent interview with The Dallas Morning News, Crow recounted how he first met Thomas. In 1996, the justice was scheduled to give a speech in Dallas for an anti-regulation think tank. Crow offered to fly him there on his private jet. "During that flight, we found out we were kind of simpatico," the billionaire said.
The following year, the Thomases began to discuss taking custody of Martin. His father, Thomas' nephew, had been imprisoned in connection with a drug case. Thomas has written that Martin's situation held deep resonance for him because his own father was absent and his grandparents had taken him in "under very similar circumstances."
Thomas had an adult son from a previous marriage, but he and wife, Ginni, didn't have children of their own. They pitched Martin's parents on taking the boy in.
"Thomas explained that the boy would have the best of everything his own room, a private school education, lots of extracurricular activities," journalists Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher reported in their biography of Thomas.
Thomas gained legal custody of Martin and became his legal guardian around January 1998, according to court records.
Martin, who had been living in Georgia with his mother and siblings, moved to Virginia, where he lived with the justice from the ages of 6 to 19, he said.
Living with the Thomases came with an unusual perk: lavish travel with Crow and his family. Martin told ProPublica that he and Thomas vacationed with the Crows "at least once a year" throughout his childhood.
That included visits to Camp Topridge, Crow's private resort in the Adirondacks, and two cruises on Crow's superyacht, Martin said. On a trip in the Caribbean, Martin recalled riding jet skis off the side of the billionaire's yacht.
Roughly 20 years ago, Martin, Thomas and the Crows went on a cruise on the yacht in Russia and the Baltics, according to Martin and two other people familiar with the trip. The group toured St. Petersburg in a rented helicopter and visited the Yusupov Palace, the site of Rasputin's murder, said one of the people. They were joined by Chris DeMuth, then the president of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. (Thomas' trips with Crow to the Baltics and the Caribbean have not previously been reported.)
Thomas reconfigured his life to balance the demands of raising a child with serving on the high court. He began going to the Supreme Court before 6 a.m. so he could leave in time to pick Martin up after class and help him with his homework. By 2001, the justice had moved Martin to private school out of frustration with the Fairfax County public school system's lax schedule, The American Lawyer magazine reported.
For high school, Thomas sent Martin to Randolph-Macon Academy, a military boarding school 75 miles west of Washington, D.C., where he was in the class of 2010. The school, which sits on a 135-acre campus in the Shenandoah Valley, charged between $25,000 to $30,000 a year. Martin played football and basketball, and the justice sometimes visited for games.
Randolph-Macon was also Crow's alma mater. Thomas and Crow visited the campus in April 2007 for the dedication of an imposing bronze sculpture of the Air Force Honor Guard, according to the school magazine. Crow donated the piece to Randolph-Macon, where it is a short walk from Crow Hall, a classroom building named after the Dallas billionaire's family.
Crow and Clarence Thomas attended the 2007 dedication of a statue gifted by Crow to Randolph-Macon Academy.
Martin sometimes chafed at the strictures of military school, according to people at Randolph-Macon at the time, and he spent his junior year at Hidden Lake Academy, a therapeutic boarding school in Georgia. Hidden Lake boasted one teacher for every 10 students and activities ranging from horseback riding to canoeing. Those services came at an added cost. At the time, a year of tuition was roughly $73,000, plus fees.
The July 2009 bank statement from Hidden Lake was filed in a bankruptcy case for the school, which later went under. The document shows that Crow Holdings LLC wired $6,200 to the school that month, the exact cost of the month's tuition. The wire is marked "Mark Martin" in the ledger.
Crow's office said in its statement that Crow's funding of students' tuition has "always been paid solely from personal funds, sometimes held at and paid through the family business."
Grimwood, the administrator at Hidden Lake, told ProPublica that Crow wired the school money once a month to pay Martin's tuition fees. Grimwood had multiple roles on the campus, including overseeing an affiliated wilderness program. He said he was speaking about the payments because he felt the public should know about outside financial support for Supreme Court justices. Martin returned to Randolph-Macon his senior year.
Thomas has long been one of the less wealthy members of the Supreme Court. Still, when Martin was in high school, he and Ginni Thomas had income that put them comfortably in the top echelon of Americans.
In 2006 for example, the Thomases brought in more than $500,000 in income. The following year, they made more than $850,000 from Clarence Thomas' salary from the court, Ginni Thomas' pay from the Heritage Foundation and book payments for the justice's memoir.
It appears that at some point in Martin's childhood, Thomas was paying for private school himself. Martin told ProPublica that Thomas sold his Corvette "his most prized car" to pay for a year of tuition, although he didn't remember when that occurred.
In 2002, a friend of Thomas' from the RV community who owned a Florida pest control company, Earl Dixon, offered Thomas $5,000 to help defray the costs of Martin's education. Thomas' disclosure of that earlier gift, several experts said, could be viewed as evidence that the justice himself understood he was required to report tuition aid from friends.
"At first, Thomas was worried about the propriety of the donation," Thomas biographers Merida and Fletcher recounted. "He agreed to accept it if the contribution was deposited directly into a special trust for Mark." In his annual filing, Thomas reported the money as an "education gift to Mark Martin."
is there not a reasonable case to make that the gift was to Martin instead of Thomas?
I see no impropriety whatsoever. I see a good man doing the right things we expect good men to do. And it's to good effect: a black kid whose parents were unable to raise him now has Harlan Crow as a godfather. If Thomas was a Democrat, the glowing documentaries would already be on Netflix. The way I see it, the people attacking Thomas are discrediting themselves moreso than him. So by all means, carry on. Give a monkey enough rope and.....
I.m trying to figure out if the diameter of your hat is as big as the diameter of your backside.
Mrs. Thomas is a career lobbyist who took a retainer from a customer she'd lobbied for in the past on issues she lobbies all the time.
The only case you have here is that, to maintain appearances, judges cannot marry anyone engaged in the political arena. Not a lobbyist, not an elected official, not even a leader from a group with political interest like, say, a union. For that matter, union members pay dues and those dues are used to lobby elected officials, so a judge really couldn't even marry a machinist from Detroit. Hell, for that matter, that machinist has a brother who's on social security and another brother who sells medicare supplemental insurance. Couldn't marry them, either, as they have clear political conflicts regarding federal entitlement and health care programs. I mean, the premise of your argument is that judges must maintain a bright line between themselves and politics, right?
Pardon the reductio ad absurdum exercise, but you do have a patently stupid premise to defend.
You want Thomas removed by any means necessary so Dems can use the SC to push woke nonsense.
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
“The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.”
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart
You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
So it is unethical for a judge to marry someone who works for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
No. It's unethical for the wife of a sitting Justice to accept secret payments through a bagman from a judicial activist, with instructions to the bagman that the paperwork associated with the transaction should have "no mention of Ginni, of course."whiterock said:So it is unethical for a judge to marry someone who works for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
you might want to figure out that giving money to a lobbyist isnt necessarily illegal or unethical no matter who they are married to..TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
You are accusing Clarence Thomas of doing something because his wife was paid to be a lobbyist. Thats an easy reach if you are biased, which you are..
I dont think you should go to court because your wife ran a stop light.
“The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.”
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart
assumption and hearsayTexasScientist said:No. It's unethical for the wife of a sitting Justice to accept secret payments through a bagman from a judicial activist, with instructions to the bagman that the paperwork associated with the transaction should have "no mention of Ginni, of course."whiterock said:So it is unethical for a judge to marry someone who works for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
“The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.”
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart
4th and Inches said:assumption and hearsayTexasScientist said:No. It's unethical for the wife of a sitting Justice to accept secret payments through a bagman from a judicial activist, with instructions to the bagman that the paperwork associated with the transaction should have "no mention of Ginni, of course."whiterock said:So it is unethical for a judge to marry someone who works for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
"Don't make the check out to Ginni. Make it out to her company." is now graft?
Or evidence.4th and Inches said:assumption and hearsayTexasScientist said:No. It's unethical for the wife of a sitting Justice to accept secret payments through a bagman from a judicial activist, with instructions to the bagman that the paperwork associated with the transaction should have "no mention of Ginni, of course."whiterock said:So it is unethical for a judge to marry someone who works for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
It's unethical by judicial code standards. You're ignoring the fact that they are married, which negates they lobbyist argument. It certainly would be illegal if he acted upon it.4th and Inches said:you might want to figure out that giving money to a lobbyist isnt necessarily illegal or unethical no matter who they are married to..TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
You are accusing Clarence Thomas of doing something because his wife was paid to be a lobbyist. Thats an easy reach if you are biased, which you are..
I dont think you should go to court because your wife ran a stop light.
LoLTexasScientist said:Or evidence.4th and Inches said:assumption and hearsayTexasScientist said:No. It's unethical for the wife of a sitting Justice to accept secret payments through a bagman from a judicial activist, with instructions to the bagman that the paperwork associated with the transaction should have "no mention of Ginni, of course."whiterock said:So it is unethical for a judge to marry someone who works for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
“The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.”
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart
you are assuming there is a connection. It would be illegal if he acted upon it, you assume he did without evidence and I assume he didnt because there is no evidence. Who is the scientist in this debate?TexasScientist said:It's unethical by judicial code standards. You're ignoring the fact that they are married, which negates they lobbyist argument. It certainly would be illegal if he acted upon it.4th and Inches said:you might want to figure out that giving money to a lobbyist isnt necessarily illegal or unethical no matter who they are married to..TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
You are accusing Clarence Thomas of doing something because his wife was paid to be a lobbyist. Thats an easy reach if you are biased, which you are..
I dont think you should go to court because your wife ran a stop light.
“The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.”
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart
How?TexasScientist said:It's unethical by judicial code standards. You're ignoring the fact that they are married, which negates they lobbyist argument. It certainly would be illegal if he acted upon it.4th and Inches said:you might want to figure out that giving money to a lobbyist isnt necessarily illegal or unethical no matter who they are married to..TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
You are accusing Clarence Thomas of doing something because his wife was paid to be a lobbyist. Thats an easy reach if you are biased, which you are..
I dont think you should go to court because your wife ran a stop light.
Stop begging the question.
Please explain clearly .
I'm not assuming he did anything illegal. You need learn the definitions of illegal and unethical. It's all about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. The difference between you and me is that you have a double standard.4th and Inches said:you are assuming there is a connection. It would be illegal if he acted upon it, you assume he did without evidence and I assume he didnt because there is no evidence. Who is the scientist in this debate?TexasScientist said:It's unethical by judicial code standards. You're ignoring the fact that they are married, which negates they lobbyist argument. It certainly would be illegal if he acted upon it.4th and Inches said:you might want to figure out that giving money to a lobbyist isnt necessarily illegal or unethical no matter who they are married to..TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
You are accusing Clarence Thomas of doing something because his wife was paid to be a lobbyist. Thats an easy reach if you are biased, which you are..
I dont think you should go to court because your wife ran a stop light.
For one, a payment from someone with interests before the court, through a bagman with instructions to keep it quiet, to the spouse of a justice gives the appearance of impropriety at the the very least. It's analogous to paying Hunter Biden, whose father is the VP, when the payor has a vested interest a specific U S policy.whiterock said:How?TexasScientist said:It's unethical by judicial code standards. You're ignoring the fact that they are married, which negates they lobbyist argument. It certainly would be illegal if he acted upon it.4th and Inches said:you might want to figure out that giving money to a lobbyist isnt necessarily illegal or unethical no matter who they are married to..TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
You are accusing Clarence Thomas of doing something because his wife was paid to be a lobbyist. Thats an easy reach if you are biased, which you are..
I dont think you should go to court because your wife ran a stop light.
Stop begging the question.
Please explain clearly .
TexasScientist said:I'm not assuming he did anything illegal. You need learn the definitions of illegal and unethical. It's all about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. The difference between you and me is that you have a double standard.4th and Inches said:you are assuming there is a connection. It would be illegal if he acted upon it, you assume he did without evidence and I assume he didnt because there is no evidence. Who is the scientist in this debate?TexasScientist said:It's unethical by judicial code standards. You're ignoring the fact that they are married, which negates they lobbyist argument. It certainly would be illegal if he acted upon it.4th and Inches said:you might want to figure out that giving money to a lobbyist isnt necessarily illegal or unethical no matter who they are married to..TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
You are accusing Clarence Thomas of doing something because his wife was paid to be a lobbyist. Thats an easy reach if you are biased, which you are..
I dont think you should go to court because your wife ran a stop light.
This is rich. Do you also do stand up?
you havent pointed out anything he did that would cause a rational person to think something he did was unethical.TexasScientist said:I'm not assuming he did anything illegal. You need learn the definitions of illegal and unethical. It's all about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. The difference between you and me is that you have a double standard.4th and Inches said:you are assuming there is a connection. It would be illegal if he acted upon it, you assume he did without evidence and I assume he didnt because there is no evidence. Who is the scientist in this debate?TexasScientist said:It's unethical by judicial code standards. You're ignoring the fact that they are married, which negates they lobbyist argument. It certainly would be illegal if he acted upon it.4th and Inches said:you might want to figure out that giving money to a lobbyist isnt necessarily illegal or unethical no matter who they are married to..TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
You are accusing Clarence Thomas of doing something because his wife was paid to be a lobbyist. Thats an easy reach if you are biased, which you are..
I dont think you should go to court because your wife ran a stop light.
This is mildly interesting so keep trying.. maybe we will get somewhere before one of us gets bored
“The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.”
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart
Please cite the case before SCOTUS which created the conflict you allegeTexasScientist said:For one, a payment from someone with interests before the court, through a bagman with instructions to keep it quiet, to the spouse of a justice gives the appearance of impropriety at the the very least. It's analogous to paying Hunter Biden, whose father is the VP, when the payor has a vested interest a specific U S policy.whiterock said:How?TexasScientist said:It's unethical by judicial code standards. You're ignoring the fact that they are married, which negates they lobbyist argument. It certainly would be illegal if he acted upon it.4th and Inches said:you might want to figure out that giving money to a lobbyist isnt necessarily illegal or unethical no matter who they are married to..TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
You are accusing Clarence Thomas of doing something because his wife was paid to be a lobbyist. Thats an easy reach if you are biased, which you are..
I dont think you should go to court because your wife ran a stop light.
Stop begging the question.
Please explain clearly .
Odd that this page is still going. If Thomas violated his oath, seems like 218 representatives should say as much, along with 67 senators. Otherwise, this is just pissing in the wind now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/us/supreme-court-clarence-thomas-recusal.html4th and Inches said:you havent pointed out anything he did that would cause a rational person to think something he did was unethical.TexasScientist said:I'm not assuming he did anything illegal. You need learn the definitions of illegal and unethical. It's all about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. The difference between you and me is that you have a double standard.4th and Inches said:you are assuming there is a connection. It would be illegal if he acted upon it, you assume he did without evidence and I assume he didnt because there is no evidence. Who is the scientist in this debate?TexasScientist said:It's unethical by judicial code standards. You're ignoring the fact that they are married, which negates they lobbyist argument. It certainly would be illegal if he acted upon it.4th and Inches said:you might want to figure out that giving money to a lobbyist isnt necessarily illegal or unethical no matter who they are married to..TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
You are accusing Clarence Thomas of doing something because his wife was paid to be a lobbyist. Thats an easy reach if you are biased, which you are..
I dont think you should go to court because your wife ran a stop light.
This is mildly interesting so keep trying.. maybe we will get somewhere before one of us gets bored
"I'm not sure how I would have come out if we just had a lot of texts from her saying that 'this is terrible,' said Amanda Frost, a law professor at American University in Washington.
"But she wasn't doing just that," Professor Frost said. "She was strategizing. She was promoting. She was haranguing."
The texts were among about 9,000 pages of documents that Mr. Meadows turned over to the congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack. Democrats immediately seized on the disclosure to draw attention to the conflicts they said were presented by Ms. Thomas's political activities and to press Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases concerning the election and its aftermath. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said that Justice Thomas's "conduct on the Supreme Court looks increasingly corrupt" and that he had been "the lone dissent in a case that could have denied the Jan. 6 committee records pertaining to the same plot his wife supported."
If these were Democrats, with the same scenario, you and I would be complaining of unethical behavior.
See my previous post above to 4th.whiterock said:Please cite the case before SCOTUS which created the conflict you allegeTexasScientist said:For one, a payment from someone with interests before the court, through a bagman with instructions to keep it quiet, to the spouse of a justice gives the appearance of impropriety at the the very least. It's analogous to paying Hunter Biden, whose father is the VP, when the payor has a vested interest a specific U S policy.whiterock said:How?TexasScientist said:It's unethical by judicial code standards. You're ignoring the fact that they are married, which negates they lobbyist argument. It certainly would be illegal if he acted upon it.4th and Inches said:you might want to figure out that giving money to a lobbyist isnt necessarily illegal or unethical no matter who they are married to..TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
You are accusing Clarence Thomas of doing something because his wife was paid to be a lobbyist. Thats an easy reach if you are biased, which you are..
I dont think you should go to court because your wife ran a stop light.
Stop begging the question.
Please explain clearly .
Thank you for admitting the party providing the payment to Ginni Thomas had no case before the court, ergo the payment could not be anything other than it purported to be: remuneration for lobbying services to executive and legislative branches.TexasScientist said:https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/us/supreme-court-clarence-thomas-recusal.html4th and Inches said:you havent pointed out anything he did that would cause a rational person to think something he did was unethical.TexasScientist said:I'm not assuming he did anything illegal. You need learn the definitions of illegal and unethical. It's all about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. The difference between you and me is that you have a double standard.4th and Inches said:you are assuming there is a connection. It would be illegal if he acted upon it, you assume he did without evidence and I assume he didnt because there is no evidence. Who is the scientist in this debate?TexasScientist said:It's unethical by judicial code standards. You're ignoring the fact that they are married, which negates they lobbyist argument. It certainly would be illegal if he acted upon it.4th and Inches said:you might want to figure out that giving money to a lobbyist isnt necessarily illegal or unethical no matter who they are married to..TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
You are accusing Clarence Thomas of doing something because his wife was paid to be a lobbyist. Thats an easy reach if you are biased, which you are..
I dont think you should go to court because your wife ran a stop light.
This is mildly interesting so keep trying.. maybe we will get somewhere before one of us gets bored
"I'm not sure how I would have come out if we just had a lot of texts from her saying that 'this is terrible,' said Amanda Frost, a law professor at American University in Washington.
"But she wasn't doing just that," Professor Frost said. "She was strategizing. She was promoting. She was haranguing."
The texts were among about 9,000 pages of documents that Mr. Meadows turned over to the congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack. Democrats immediately seized on the disclosure to draw attention to the conflicts they said were presented by Ms. Thomas's political activities and to press Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases concerning the election and its aftermath. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said that Justice Thomas's "conduct on the Supreme Court looks increasingly corrupt" and that he had been "the lone dissent in a case that could have denied the Jan. 6 committee records pertaining to the same plot his wife supported."
If these were Democrats, with the same scenario, you and I would be complaining of unethical behavior.
Your example leaves us with but one scenario: GT's political beliefs about the 2000 election were a potential conflict of interest for CT, if/when a case on the 2000 election were to have reached the full court.
Can you cite the precedence for the public political statement of a spouse prompting a recusal of a sitting judge?
And we don't know that the payor had no interest in the outcome of cases before the court.whiterock said:Thank you for admitting the party providing the payment to Ginni Thomas had no case before the court, ergo the payment could not be anything other than it purported to be: remuneration for lobbying services to executive and legislative branches.TexasScientist said:https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/us/supreme-court-clarence-thomas-recusal.html4th and Inches said:you havent pointed out anything he did that would cause a rational person to think something he did was unethical.TexasScientist said:I'm not assuming he did anything illegal. You need learn the definitions of illegal and unethical. It's all about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. The difference between you and me is that you have a double standard.4th and Inches said:you are assuming there is a connection. It would be illegal if he acted upon it, you assume he did without evidence and I assume he didnt because there is no evidence. Who is the scientist in this debate?TexasScientist said:It's unethical by judicial code standards. You're ignoring the fact that they are married, which negates they lobbyist argument. It certainly would be illegal if he acted upon it.4th and Inches said:you might want to figure out that giving money to a lobbyist isnt necessarily illegal or unethical no matter who they are married to..TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
You are accusing Clarence Thomas of doing something because his wife was paid to be a lobbyist. Thats an easy reach if you are biased, which you are..
I dont think you should go to court because your wife ran a stop light.
This is mildly interesting so keep trying.. maybe we will get somewhere before one of us gets bored
"I'm not sure how I would have come out if we just had a lot of texts from her saying that 'this is terrible,' said Amanda Frost, a law professor at American University in Washington.
"But she wasn't doing just that," Professor Frost said. "She was strategizing. She was promoting. She was haranguing."
The texts were among about 9,000 pages of documents that Mr. Meadows turned over to the congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack. Democrats immediately seized on the disclosure to draw attention to the conflicts they said were presented by Ms. Thomas's political activities and to press Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases concerning the election and its aftermath. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said that Justice Thomas's "conduct on the Supreme Court looks increasingly corrupt" and that he had been "the lone dissent in a case that could have denied the Jan. 6 committee records pertaining to the same plot his wife supported."
If these were Democrats, with the same scenario, you and I would be complaining of unethical behavior.
Your example leaves us with but one scenario: GT's political beliefs about the 2000 election were a potential conflict of interest for CT, if/when a case on the 2000 election were to have reached the full court.
Can you cite the precedence for the public political statement of a spouse prompting a recusal of a sitting judge?
It's not necessary and irrelevant. It is inherently unethical, in and of itself.
Technically, we all have an interest in the outcome of a SCOTUS case, but you could do a bit more research and see if the interest group she represented ever had a case before the court. But you have not done that.TexasScientist said:And we don't know that the payor had no interest in the outcome of cases before the court.whiterock said:Thank you for admitting the party providing the payment to Ginni Thomas had no case before the court, ergo the payment could not be anything other than it purported to be: remuneration for lobbying services to executive and legislative branches.TexasScientist said:https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/us/supreme-court-clarence-thomas-recusal.html4th and Inches said:you havent pointed out anything he did that would cause a rational person to think something he did was unethical.TexasScientist said:I'm not assuming he did anything illegal. You need learn the definitions of illegal and unethical. It's all about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. The difference between you and me is that you have a double standard.4th and Inches said:you are assuming there is a connection. It would be illegal if he acted upon it, you assume he did without evidence and I assume he didnt because there is no evidence. Who is the scientist in this debate?TexasScientist said:It's unethical by judicial code standards. You're ignoring the fact that they are married, which negates they lobbyist argument. It certainly would be illegal if he acted upon it.4th and Inches said:you might want to figure out that giving money to a lobbyist isnt necessarily illegal or unethical no matter who they are married to..TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
You are accusing Clarence Thomas of doing something because his wife was paid to be a lobbyist. Thats an easy reach if you are biased, which you are..
I dont think you should go to court because your wife ran a stop light.
This is mildly interesting so keep trying.. maybe we will get somewhere before one of us gets bored
"I'm not sure how I would have come out if we just had a lot of texts from her saying that 'this is terrible,' said Amanda Frost, a law professor at American University in Washington.
"But she wasn't doing just that," Professor Frost said. "She was strategizing. She was promoting. She was haranguing."
The texts were among about 9,000 pages of documents that Mr. Meadows turned over to the congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack. Democrats immediately seized on the disclosure to draw attention to the conflicts they said were presented by Ms. Thomas's political activities and to press Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases concerning the election and its aftermath. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said that Justice Thomas's "conduct on the Supreme Court looks increasingly corrupt" and that he had been "the lone dissent in a case that could have denied the Jan. 6 committee records pertaining to the same plot his wife supported."
If these were Democrats, with the same scenario, you and I would be complaining of unethical behavior.
Your example leaves us with but one scenario: GT's political beliefs about the 2000 election were a potential conflict of interest for CT, if/when a case on the 2000 election were to have reached the full court.
Can you cite the precedence for the public political statement of a spouse prompting a recusal of a sitting judge?
It's not necessary and irrelevant. It is inherently unethical, in and of itself.
You could do a bit more research and see if GT has ever taken from any other interest group a payment contemporaneous to a case said group(s) had before the court. But you have not done that.
All you have is conduct a smear campaign, with the latent premise being that any political views/activities of a spouse are ipso facto a potential conflict of interest for a judge, ergo any employment that spouse might have that bound on those views/activities would require recusal. Under that line of reasoning, any judge married to a teacher would have to recuse on cases involving education. A judge married to a banker would have recuse from any cases involving finance. And, of course, a judge married to a lobbyist would have to recuse from any cases involving anything a lobbyist might lobby, which of course is everything.
You are making a very silly argument.
4th and Inches said:is what you cited applicable to the issue at hand?quash said:4th and Inches said:yes, now let congress do its job and make a decision on impeachment after investigation if they so choose to do one.. if they dont, i guess they felt it didnt rise to the level that some of yall believe it is..quash said:OsoCoreyell said:
Getting to the actual point, what evidence is there that this influenced his decision-making in his jurisprudence? Is there any? Did Crowe have business before the court?
There isn't an ethical code or law against having friends, even friends that help you and your family out.
Actually there is an ethical policy in play: avoid the appearance of impropriety.ABA Code of Professional Responsibility, Canon 9 and caption to Disciplinary Rule (DR) 9-101,
Stay in your lane.
I never said this was impeachable, I merely cited the standard.
You get lost in the weeds every time I cite legal standards.
Yes
“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.” (The Law, p.6) Frederic Bastiat
go on..quash said:4th and Inches said:is what you cited applicable to the issue at hand?quash said:4th and Inches said:yes, now let congress do its job and make a decision on impeachment after investigation if they so choose to do one.. if they dont, i guess they felt it didnt rise to the level that some of yall believe it is..quash said:OsoCoreyell said:
Getting to the actual point, what evidence is there that this influenced his decision-making in his jurisprudence? Is there any? Did Crowe have business before the court?
There isn't an ethical code or law against having friends, even friends that help you and your family out.
Actually there is an ethical policy in play: avoid the appearance of impropriety.ABA Code of Professional Responsibility, Canon 9 and caption to Disciplinary Rule (DR) 9-101,
Stay in your lane.
I never said this was impeachable, I merely cited the standard.
You get lost in the weeds every time I cite legal standards.
Yes
“The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.”
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart
Once is enough, and more than sufficient to question their eithics. The mere appearance of impropriety is enough. Why do you think the "gift' came, with the admonition to keep it quiet, from someone who has an interest in many issues that come before the court?whiterock said:Technically, we all have an interest in the outcome of a SCOTUS case, but you could do a bit more research and see if the interest group she represented ever had a case before the court. But you have not done that.TexasScientist said:And we don't know that the payor had no interest in the outcome of cases before the court.whiterock said:Thank you for admitting the party providing the payment to Ginni Thomas had no case before the court, ergo the payment could not be anything other than it purported to be: remuneration for lobbying services to executive and legislative branches.TexasScientist said:https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/us/supreme-court-clarence-thomas-recusal.html4th and Inches said:you havent pointed out anything he did that would cause a rational person to think something he did was unethical.TexasScientist said:I'm not assuming he did anything illegal. You need learn the definitions of illegal and unethical. It's all about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. The difference between you and me is that you have a double standard.4th and Inches said:you are assuming there is a connection. It would be illegal if he acted upon it, you assume he did without evidence and I assume he didnt because there is no evidence. Who is the scientist in this debate?TexasScientist said:It's unethical by judicial code standards. You're ignoring the fact that they are married, which negates they lobbyist argument. It certainly would be illegal if he acted upon it.4th and Inches said:you might want to figure out that giving money to a lobbyist isnt necessarily illegal or unethical no matter who they are married to..TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
You are accusing Clarence Thomas of doing something because his wife was paid to be a lobbyist. Thats an easy reach if you are biased, which you are..
I dont think you should go to court because your wife ran a stop light.
This is mildly interesting so keep trying.. maybe we will get somewhere before one of us gets bored
"I'm not sure how I would have come out if we just had a lot of texts from her saying that 'this is terrible,' said Amanda Frost, a law professor at American University in Washington.
"But she wasn't doing just that," Professor Frost said. "She was strategizing. She was promoting. She was haranguing."
The texts were among about 9,000 pages of documents that Mr. Meadows turned over to the congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack. Democrats immediately seized on the disclosure to draw attention to the conflicts they said were presented by Ms. Thomas's political activities and to press Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases concerning the election and its aftermath. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said that Justice Thomas's "conduct on the Supreme Court looks increasingly corrupt" and that he had been "the lone dissent in a case that could have denied the Jan. 6 committee records pertaining to the same plot his wife supported."
If these were Democrats, with the same scenario, you and I would be complaining of unethical behavior.
Your example leaves us with but one scenario: GT's political beliefs about the 2000 election were a potential conflict of interest for CT, if/when a case on the 2000 election were to have reached the full court.
Can you cite the precedence for the public political statement of a spouse prompting a recusal of a sitting judge?
It's not necessary and irrelevant. It is inherently unethical, in and of itself.
You could do a bit more research and see if GT has ever taken from any other interest group a payment contemporaneous to a case said group(s) had before the court. But you have not done that.
All you have is conduct a smear campaign, with the latent premise being that any political views/activities of a spouse are ipso facto a potential conflict of interest for a judge, ergo any employment that spouse might have that bound on those views/activities would require recusal. Under that line of reasoning, any judge married to a teacher would have to recuse on cases involving education. A judge married to a banker would have recuse from any cases involving finance. And, of course, a judge married to a lobbyist would have to recuse from any cases involving anything a lobbyist might lobby, which of course is everything.
You are making a very silly argument.
Success of democracy demands impeccable character and integrity on the court. There is no place for grifters.
Well, you are ranting here like a madman, so that is more than sufficient to question your sanity. I'll call the nuthouse to send you a car.Quote:Once is enough, and more than sufficient to question their eithics. The mere appearance of impropriety is enough. Why do you think the "gift' came, with the admonition to keep it quiet, from someone who has an interest in many issues that come before the court?Quote:Technically, we all have an interest in the outcome of a SCOTUS case, but you could do a bit more research and see if the interest group she represented ever had a case before the court. But you have not done that.Quote:
It's not necessary and irrelevant. It is inherently unethical, in and of itself.
You could do a bit more research and see if GT has ever taken from any other interest group a payment contemporaneous to a case said group(s) had before the court. But you have not done that.
All you have is conduct a smear campaign, with the latent premise being that any political views/activities of a spouse are ipso facto a potential conflict of interest for a judge, ergo any employment that spouse might have that bound on those views/activities would require recusal. Under that line of reasoning, any judge married to a teacher would have to recuse on cases involving education. A judge married to a banker would have recuse from any cases involving finance. And, of course, a judge married to a lobbyist would have to recuse from any cases involving anything a lobbyist might lobby, which of course is everything.
You are making a very silly argument.
Success of democracy demands impeccable character and integrity on the court. There is no place for grifters.
I have a friend who is a former congressman. While in office, he had a personal email (and cell phone) account, and a government email (and cell phone) account. He often gave instructions to people to send/not send certain things to certain accounts, occasionally even correcting them and asking them to resend to the other account. Is that fraud? Or an effort to keep things in proper channels? If you've ever engaged in small business, you'd know that often checks get made out to the owner instead of the company (because the owner really IS the business). That owner will not irritate the customers by asking for them to write a new check. The owner will just sign the back of the check given and deposit it in the company account. Is that fraud? Of course not. So telling an employee to "send Ginni a check, but make sure it's made out to her company" is hardly something alarming, or even out of the ordinary. It's what good business people do. And it's what a prudent politician would do, given that he/she knows that, in politics, even the slightest out-of-place comma can attract the attention of muck-raking scumbags who will attempt to personally destroy things they cannot defeat at the ballot box.
TexasScientist said:Once is enough, and more than sufficient to question their eithics. The mere appearance of impropriety is enough. Why do you think the "gift' came, with the admonition to keep it quiet, from someone who has an interest in many issues that come before the court?whiterock said:Technically, we all have an interest in the outcome of a SCOTUS case, but you could do a bit more research and see if the interest group she represented ever had a case before the court. But you have not done that.TexasScientist said:And we don't know that the payor had no interest in the outcome of cases before the court.whiterock said:Thank you for admitting the party providing the payment to Ginni Thomas had no case before the court, ergo the payment could not be anything other than it purported to be: remuneration for lobbying services to executive and legislative branches.TexasScientist said:https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/us/supreme-court-clarence-thomas-recusal.html4th and Inches said:you havent pointed out anything he did that would cause a rational person to think something he did was unethical.TexasScientist said:I'm not assuming he did anything illegal. You need learn the definitions of illegal and unethical. It's all about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. The difference between you and me is that you have a double standard.4th and Inches said:you are assuming there is a connection. It would be illegal if he acted upon it, you assume he did without evidence and I assume he didnt because there is no evidence. Who is the scientist in this debate?TexasScientist said:It's unethical by judicial code standards. You're ignoring the fact that they are married, which negates they lobbyist argument. It certainly would be illegal if he acted upon it.4th and Inches said:you might want to figure out that giving money to a lobbyist isnt necessarily illegal or unethical no matter who they are married to..TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
You are accusing Clarence Thomas of doing something because his wife was paid to be a lobbyist. Thats an easy reach if you are biased, which you are..
I dont think you should go to court because your wife ran a stop light.
This is mildly interesting so keep trying.. maybe we will get somewhere before one of us gets bored
"I'm not sure how I would have come out if we just had a lot of texts from her saying that 'this is terrible,' said Amanda Frost, a law professor at American University in Washington.
"But she wasn't doing just that," Professor Frost said. "She was strategizing. She was promoting. She was haranguing."
The texts were among about 9,000 pages of documents that Mr. Meadows turned over to the congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack. Democrats immediately seized on the disclosure to draw attention to the conflicts they said were presented by Ms. Thomas's political activities and to press Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases concerning the election and its aftermath. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said that Justice Thomas's "conduct on the Supreme Court looks increasingly corrupt" and that he had been "the lone dissent in a case that could have denied the Jan. 6 committee records pertaining to the same plot his wife supported."
If these were Democrats, with the same scenario, you and I would be complaining of unethical behavior.
Your example leaves us with but one scenario: GT's political beliefs about the 2000 election were a potential conflict of interest for CT, if/when a case on the 2000 election were to have reached the full court.
Can you cite the precedence for the public political statement of a spouse prompting a recusal of a sitting judge?
It's not necessary and irrelevant. It is inherently unethical, in and of itself.
You could do a bit more research and see if GT has ever taken from any other interest group a payment contemporaneous to a case said group(s) had before the court. But you have not done that.
All you have is conduct a smear campaign, with the latent premise being that any political views/activities of a spouse are ipso facto a potential conflict of interest for a judge, ergo any employment that spouse might have that bound on those views/activities would require recusal. Under that line of reasoning, any judge married to a teacher would have to recuse on cases involving education. A judge married to a banker would have recuse from any cases involving finance. And, of course, a judge married to a lobbyist would have to recuse from any cases involving anything a lobbyist might lobby, which of course is everything.
You are making a very silly argument.
Success of democracy demands impeccable character and integrity on the court. There is no place for grifters.
Interesting that as many grifters as we have in politics, you singled out the black man whose politics differs from your own.
Sleep tight.
It's all about integrity, character, and the appearance of impropriety in the judiciary. By making excuses for unethical behavior, you're essentially advocating for 'third world corruption' in our government.whiterock said:Well, you are ranting here like a madman, so that is more than sufficient to question your sanity. I'll call the nuthouse to send you a car.Quote:Once is enough, and more than sufficient to question their eithics. The mere appearance of impropriety is enough. Why do you think the "gift' came, with the admonition to keep it quiet, from someone who has an interest in many issues that come before the court?Quote:Technically, we all have an interest in the outcome of a SCOTUS case, but you could do a bit more research and see if the interest group she represented ever had a case before the court. But you have not done that.Quote:
It's not necessary and irrelevant. It is inherently unethical, in and of itself.
You could do a bit more research and see if GT has ever taken from any other interest group a payment contemporaneous to a case said group(s) had before the court. But you have not done that.
All you have is conduct a smear campaign, with the latent premise being that any political views/activities of a spouse are ipso facto a potential conflict of interest for a judge, ergo any employment that spouse might have that bound on those views/activities would require recusal. Under that line of reasoning, any judge married to a teacher would have to recuse on cases involving education. A judge married to a banker would have recuse from any cases involving finance. And, of course, a judge married to a lobbyist would have to recuse from any cases involving anything a lobbyist might lobby, which of course is everything.
You are making a very silly argument.
Success of democracy demands impeccable character and integrity on the court. There is no place for grifters.
I have a friend who is a former congressman. While in office, he had a personal email (and cell phone) account, and a government email (and cell phone) account. He often gave instructions to people to send/not send certain things to certain accounts, occasionally even correcting them and asking them to resend to the other account. Is that fraud? Or an effort to keep things in proper channels? If you've ever engaged in small business, you'd know that often checks get made out to the owner instead of the company (because the owner really IS the business). That owner will not irritate the customers by asking for them to write a new check. The owner will just sign the back of the check given and deposit it in the company account. Is that fraud? Of course not. So telling an employee to "send Ginni a check, but make sure it's made out to her company" is hardly something alarming, or even out of the ordinary. It's what good business people do. And it's what a prudent politician would do, given that he/she knows that, in politics, even the slightest out-of-place comma can attract the attention of muck-raking scumbags who will attempt to personally destroy things they cannot defeat at the ballot box.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/may/05/clarence-thomas-kellyanne-conway-leonard-leo-payments
Leonard Leo paid Clarence Thomas's wife, Ginni Thomas, via the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway. Citing documents it had obtained, the Post said that Leo told Conway to bill one of his non-profits and send the funds to Thomas, at one point mentioning that paperwork associated with the transaction should have "no mention of Ginni, of course".
If you read some of my posts, you would know that I criticized Sotomayor for her non-disclosures. So far, Thomas is the only one exposed for receiving gifts. You're the only one who seems to think his race has anything to do with his behavior.LIB,MR BEARS said:TexasScientist said:Once is enough, and more than sufficient to question their eithics. The mere appearance of impropriety is enough. Why do you think the "gift' came, with the admonition to keep it quiet, from someone who has an interest in many issues that come before the court?whiterock said:Technically, we all have an interest in the outcome of a SCOTUS case, but you could do a bit more research and see if the interest group she represented ever had a case before the court. But you have not done that.TexasScientist said:And we don't know that the payor had no interest in the outcome of cases before the court.whiterock said:Thank you for admitting the party providing the payment to Ginni Thomas had no case before the court, ergo the payment could not be anything other than it purported to be: remuneration for lobbying services to executive and legislative branches.TexasScientist said:https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/us/supreme-court-clarence-thomas-recusal.html4th and Inches said:you havent pointed out anything he did that would cause a rational person to think something he did was unethical.TexasScientist said:I'm not assuming he did anything illegal. You need learn the definitions of illegal and unethical. It's all about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. The difference between you and me is that you have a double standard.4th and Inches said:you are assuming there is a connection. It would be illegal if he acted upon it, you assume he did without evidence and I assume he didnt because there is no evidence. Who is the scientist in this debate?TexasScientist said:It's unethical by judicial code standards. You're ignoring the fact that they are married, which negates they lobbyist argument. It certainly would be illegal if he acted upon it.4th and Inches said:you might want to figure out that giving money to a lobbyist isnt necessarily illegal or unethical no matter who they are married to..TexasScientist said:You might want to consider if your lack of concern for holding officeholders to ethical standards for partisan reasons, and trying to deflect the discussion into a racism red hearing argument reveals something about your character.Quote:i read it..Quote:TexasScientist said:Quote:
4th and Inches said:
so nothing..
I will help you out.. Ginni isnt a nickname for Clarence. They two different people.
Read the article.
Ginni got paid as a lobbyist which is totally legal because she is not a SCOTUS judge.. crazy right?!
Being a SCOTUS judge and being married to a Lobbyist isnt against the rules unethical or illegal.
Stop discriminating against people, they are free to love and marry who they want..
You are accusing Clarence Thomas of doing something because his wife was paid to be a lobbyist. Thats an easy reach if you are biased, which you are..
I dont think you should go to court because your wife ran a stop light.
This is mildly interesting so keep trying.. maybe we will get somewhere before one of us gets bored
"I'm not sure how I would have come out if we just had a lot of texts from her saying that 'this is terrible,' said Amanda Frost, a law professor at American University in Washington.
"But she wasn't doing just that," Professor Frost said. "She was strategizing. She was promoting. She was haranguing."
The texts were among about 9,000 pages of documents that Mr. Meadows turned over to the congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack. Democrats immediately seized on the disclosure to draw attention to the conflicts they said were presented by Ms. Thomas's political activities and to press Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases concerning the election and its aftermath. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said that Justice Thomas's "conduct on the Supreme Court looks increasingly corrupt" and that he had been "the lone dissent in a case that could have denied the Jan. 6 committee records pertaining to the same plot his wife supported."
If these were Democrats, with the same scenario, you and I would be complaining of unethical behavior.
Your example leaves us with but one scenario: GT's political beliefs about the 2000 election were a potential conflict of interest for CT, if/when a case on the 2000 election were to have reached the full court.
Can you cite the precedence for the public political statement of a spouse prompting a recusal of a sitting judge?
It's not necessary and irrelevant. It is inherently unethical, in and of itself.
You could do a bit more research and see if GT has ever taken from any other interest group a payment contemporaneous to a case said group(s) had before the court. But you have not done that.
All you have is conduct a smear campaign, with the latent premise being that any political views/activities of a spouse are ipso facto a potential conflict of interest for a judge, ergo any employment that spouse might have that bound on those views/activities would require recusal. Under that line of reasoning, any judge married to a teacher would have to recuse on cases involving education. A judge married to a banker would have recuse from any cases involving finance. And, of course, a judge married to a lobbyist would have to recuse from any cases involving anything a lobbyist might lobby, which of course is everything.
You are making a very silly argument.
Success of democracy demands impeccable character and integrity on the court. There is no place for grifters.
Interesting that as many grifters as we have in politics, you singled out the black man whose politics differs from your own.
Sleep tight.
so if you were the DA and your wife owned a bakery, does me buying a large cupcake order equal a bribe not to prosecute my brother in law?TexasScientist said:It's all about integrity, character, and the appearance of impropriety in the judiciary. By making excuses for unethical behavior, you're essentially advocating for 'third world corruption' in our government.whiterock said:Well, you are ranting here like a madman, so that is more than sufficient to question your sanity. I'll call the nuthouse to send you a car.Quote:Once is enough, and more than sufficient to question their eithics. The mere appearance of impropriety is enough. Why do you think the "gift' came, with the admonition to keep it quiet, from someone who has an interest in many issues that come before the court?Quote:Technically, we all have an interest in the outcome of a SCOTUS case, but you could do a bit more research and see if the interest group she represented ever had a case before the court. But you have not done that.Quote:
It's not necessary and irrelevant. It is inherently unethical, in and of itself.
You could do a bit more research and see if GT has ever taken from any other interest group a payment contemporaneous to a case said group(s) had before the court. But you have not done that.
All you have is conduct a smear campaign, with the latent premise being that any political views/activities of a spouse are ipso facto a potential conflict of interest for a judge, ergo any employment that spouse might have that bound on those views/activities would require recusal. Under that line of reasoning, any judge married to a teacher would have to recuse on cases involving education. A judge married to a banker would have recuse from any cases involving finance. And, of course, a judge married to a lobbyist would have to recuse from any cases involving anything a lobbyist might lobby, which of course is everything.
You are making a very silly argument.
Success of democracy demands impeccable character and integrity on the court. There is no place for grifters.
I have a friend who is a former congressman. While in office, he had a personal email (and cell phone) account, and a government email (and cell phone) account. He often gave instructions to people to send/not send certain things to certain accounts, occasionally even correcting them and asking them to resend to the other account. Is that fraud? Or an effort to keep things in proper channels? If you've ever engaged in small business, you'd know that often checks get made out to the owner instead of the company (because the owner really IS the business). That owner will not irritate the customers by asking for them to write a new check. The owner will just sign the back of the check given and deposit it in the company account. Is that fraud? Of course not. So telling an employee to "send Ginni a check, but make sure it's made out to her company" is hardly something alarming, or even out of the ordinary. It's what good business people do. And it's what a prudent politician would do, given that he/she knows that, in politics, even the slightest out-of-place comma can attract the attention of muck-raking scumbags who will attempt to personally destroy things they cannot defeat at the ballot box.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/may/05/clarence-thomas-kellyanne-conway-leonard-leo-payments
Leonard Leo paid Clarence Thomas's wife, Ginni Thomas, via the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway. Citing documents it had obtained, the Post said that Leo told Conway to bill one of his non-profits and send the funds to Thomas, at one point mentioning that paperwork associated with the transaction should have "no mention of Ginni, of course".
“The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.”
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart
If you wrote her a check for thousands of dollars it would be questionable. Ginni wasn't selling cup cakes. She's selling influence.4th and Inches said:so if you were the DA and your wife owned a bakery, does me buying a large cupcake order equal a bribe not to prosecute my brother in law?TexasScientist said:It's all about integrity, character, and the appearance of impropriety in the judiciary. By making excuses for unethical behavior, you're essentially advocating for 'third world corruption' in our government.whiterock said:Well, you are ranting here like a madman, so that is more than sufficient to question your sanity. I'll call the nuthouse to send you a car.Quote:Once is enough, and more than sufficient to question their eithics. The mere appearance of impropriety is enough. Why do you think the "gift' came, with the admonition to keep it quiet, from someone who has an interest in many issues that come before the court?Quote:Technically, we all have an interest in the outcome of a SCOTUS case, but you could do a bit more research and see if the interest group she represented ever had a case before the court. But you have not done that.Quote:
It's not necessary and irrelevant. It is inherently unethical, in and of itself.
You could do a bit more research and see if GT has ever taken from any other interest group a payment contemporaneous to a case said group(s) had before the court. But you have not done that.
All you have is conduct a smear campaign, with the latent premise being that any political views/activities of a spouse are ipso facto a potential conflict of interest for a judge, ergo any employment that spouse might have that bound on those views/activities would require recusal. Under that line of reasoning, any judge married to a teacher would have to recuse on cases involving education. A judge married to a banker would have recuse from any cases involving finance. And, of course, a judge married to a lobbyist would have to recuse from any cases involving anything a lobbyist might lobby, which of course is everything.
You are making a very silly argument.
Success of democracy demands impeccable character and integrity on the court. There is no place for grifters.
I have a friend who is a former congressman. While in office, he had a personal email (and cell phone) account, and a government email (and cell phone) account. He often gave instructions to people to send/not send certain things to certain accounts, occasionally even correcting them and asking them to resend to the other account. Is that fraud? Or an effort to keep things in proper channels? If you've ever engaged in small business, you'd know that often checks get made out to the owner instead of the company (because the owner really IS the business). That owner will not irritate the customers by asking for them to write a new check. The owner will just sign the back of the check given and deposit it in the company account. Is that fraud? Of course not. So telling an employee to "send Ginni a check, but make sure it's made out to her company" is hardly something alarming, or even out of the ordinary. It's what good business people do. And it's what a prudent politician would do, given that he/she knows that, in politics, even the slightest out-of-place comma can attract the attention of muck-raking scumbags who will attempt to personally destroy things they cannot defeat at the ballot box.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/may/05/clarence-thomas-kellyanne-conway-leonard-leo-payments
Leonard Leo paid Clarence Thomas's wife, Ginni Thomas, via the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway. Citing documents it had obtained, the Post said that Leo told Conway to bill one of his non-profits and send the funds to Thomas, at one point mentioning that paperwork associated with the transaction should have "no mention of Ginni, of course".