Reading through these comments, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
From the Daily Beast:
>Clarence Thomas’ mom is definitely still living in a house bought by a Texas billionaire who bankrolled luxury trips for her Supreme Court justice son, according to a report. On Thursday, ProPublica reported that Republican megadonor Harlan Crow bought two vacant lots and a single-story home in Savannah, Georgia, from Thomas in 2014 and that experts believe Thomas violated a federal law by failing to disclose the sale. Crow also then reportedly spent tens of thousands of dollars on renovations at the home occupied by Leola Williams, Thomas’ mother, but ProPublica couldn’t definitively confirm that Williams was still living in the property after 2020. Later Thursday, Slate reported unequivocally that Williams remains in the house to this day. The outlet said one of its reporters interviewed Williams at the property “two weeks ago” for an upcoming podcast.
This is acceptable conduct? We should just accept this level of venality? Boggles my mind. Where are all the patriots?
You are taking crazy pills if you think you can find a majority in the House to impeach a conservative supreme court justice when there is a democrat in the White House. Holding onto power is all that matters, optics be dammed. These are the same people who refused to give Merrick Garland a vote because it was "too close to the election" 8 months away, then a mere 4 years later rammed through Amy Coney Barrett a week before the election.
The Garland/Barrett shenanigans were at least strategic. Kavanaugh was even worse in my opinion. There was nothing special about that man. They could have easily dumped him as soon as the credible accusation against him came out. There are plenty of other judges with similar ideology and opinions that could have replaced him and provided the exact same impact on the court. There was no strategic reason to stick by him. The only reason was to prove a point about not caring about these accusations.
The only way that any more than a couple Republicans vote to remove Thomas or Gorsuch is if they see an opportunity to replace an older conservative justice with a younger conservative justice.
Forget the rape accusation, I don't understand how his behavior at the review didn't get him disqualified.
Just the unhinged rants about beer and clinton alone were shocking.
And I can't "prove" this, but he straight up lied about those definitions like "devil's triangle", "boofing", etc. Those terms are extremely common, have well defined definitions and seemed like they were used in those contexts (parties). No doubt in my mind he lied about that. If he lies about simple stuff like that then God knows how much worse it can get.
Your comment reminds me of a quote from the movie Charlie Wilson's War:
"Well if anyone asks what the hell I'm doing on the ethics committee we'll just tell them I like chasing women and drinking whisky and the Speaker felt we were underrepresented."
In other words, even people who like to party deserve representation in government.
And as for lying about "devil's triangle", apparently several classmates from both Georgetown Prep and Boston College have confirmed his definition:
> And as for lying about "devil's triangle", apparently several classmates have confirmed his definition:
I am not going to debate this. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that anything can be debated, and with so many moving parts here, it's very easy to muddy the waters.
As an example, you linked an article where you chose to highlight friends of kavanaugh, impartial members, backing his claims and ignoring that others such as his roomate disagreed with those claims.
Here's the other thing I don't really get about these conservative types though. To a man, they claim that their Christian faith is extremely important to them. Like any good Catholic child, I was compelled to study the bible and while I took very little interest in it, my impression was that that sort of behavior was considered sinful and something one should seek to avoid and atone for if you should engage in sins involving bed and bottle. Things like this are why I've been an atheist from a single-digit age; I don't know much about the divine, but it doesn't seem like the people who claim to believe this stuff actually believe it either.
Leverage, pure and simple. He is absolutely beholden to them because they can ruin his career and life by turning on him at any wrong move by...just...telling the truth.
I'd guess it would be a complaint about the age of the accusation. Veteran watchers of the court know that those sort of accusations aren't a serious impediment to confirmation however. Who can forget Clarence Thomas's Coke cans? They were even more credible and provided only a minor delay in his appointment. If you want that sort of behavior to matter you need to elect better representatives.
>I'd guess it would be a complaint about the age of the accusation.
Anyone who knows anything about sexual assault would dismiss this as a serious threat to the credibility of the accusation. There was no reason for her to publicly make the accusation earlier. There is documentation of her privately making the accusation years before Kavanaugh's nomination.
>Veteran watchers of the court know that those sort of accusations aren't a serious impediment to confirmation however. Who can forget Clarence Thomas's Coke cans?
The hope was that society progressed in those nearly 30 years between the two nominations.
We need a different process, and no, I don't know what. But the current system is electing people based on sound-bites and posturing. The results, which are terrible, speak for themselves.
>- The accuser's story had a number of missing (and, IIRC, contradictory) details
No one's memory is perfect after nearly 40 years.
>- There were no corroborating witnesses
What witnesses do you expect? The direct witnesses would have been implicating themselves. There were witnesses and evidence that showed she talked about these accusations years before Kavanaugh's nomination.
>- Kavanaugh's own personal calendar from the year in question has no entries for the party at which the assault allegedly happened
A teenage not documenting their illicit behavior is a rather weak argument that they never participated in said illicit behavior.
> No one's memory is perfect after nearly 40 years.
Indeed! Which is one of the reasons why we should question her accusation! How can we be sure she even accurately remembers who committed the assault? It might very well have been that she was assaulted, but by someone else. It could also be that it was Kavanaugh, but the interaction played out differently that she remembers.
> What witnesses do you expect? The direct witnesses would have been implicating themselves. There were witnesses and evidence that showed she talked about these accusations years before Kavanaugh's nomination.
She named witnesses to the actual event (or at least the party at which it took place) and none of them corroborated her story. They wouldn't have even been implicating themselves in the assault.
As I recall, she did talk about the incident years after it happened (long enough for details to have become muddled) but as I recall she didn't name Kavanaugh until after his nomination.
> A teenage not documenting their illicit behavior is a rather weak argument that they never participated in said illicit behavior.
Kavanaugh kept a fairly detailed social calendar. In conjunction with the fact that none of the other supposed attendees to this party remembers it happening, significantly undermines credibility of the accusation.
The US system of governance at this point is such a failure for real democratic rule. It's devolved into a two-party system, and for some reason we grant whichever party happens to be in power the ability to appoint party apparatchiks to vacancies on the Supreme Court. These people then rule until death, when they are replaced in the same manner.
This being the framework, there is never any structural incentive to do anything but convince voters that your opponent is a monster, so you can retain power. Good governance is not rewarded, bad behavior is not punished - we may only rely on the questionable morality of the elected officials to "do the right thing," since they cannot be held accountable.
The Democrats helped force a Democrat appointed supreme court justice out in 1969, over a similar but lesser situation, even though Nixon would get to appoint a replacement.
> In 1969, Justice Abe Fortas was forced to resign after his financial relationship came to light with businessman Louis Wolfson, who paid Fortas to consult for his foundation. Fortas was a Democratic appointee, but the scandal led to a bipartisan call for his resignation — even though his replacement would be named by Republican President Richard Nixon and shift the balance of the court [0]
I definitely don't see today's Republicans doing that. Eleven months before an election they unconstitutionally refused to vote on Obama's nomination of Garland [1] to the Supreme Court, but afterwards they were ok breaking convention and approving Barret and other judges as lame ducks after an election where they lost their senate majority [2].
This is quite the change from several decades ago when Nixon resigned because he knew that some Republicans would vote with Democrats to impeach him. I guess that back then our constitution and institutions were more important than party and power [3].
Robert Bork's nomination was rejected by the Senate in a vote after about 3 months (about typical time for a Supreme Court nomination hearing).
Merrick Garland's nomination was never heard by the Senate, and lapsed at the end of the Senate session with no hearings nor votes taking place for almost 9 months.
A more critical difference to me seems to be the abhorrent character assassination tactics employed against Bork, Thomas, and Kavanaugh during their confirmation hearings.
Merely refusing to consider Garland seems much milder than to attempt to destroy his reputation and career.
There is so much to dislike about your answer, but let's start with this: You haven't established that it was "character assassination", rather than a rather honest assessment of character, in any of these cases... and I think the evidence strongly leans against you.
The second issue is that people deserve a hearing after nomination -- failing to give Garland one was intensely disrespectful. If you don't want to face the possible heat of a hearing, you don't accept the nomination.
There was nothing mild about it. It was Mitch McConnell playing politics and overturning established precedent for the sake of a political result. It has not been forgotten, and it will get paid back, with interest.
> and I think the evidence strongly leans against you.
What evidence, exactly? In the case of Kavanaugh there was literally none beyond mere accusations (including some that were entertained on mainstream news that ended up being exposed as fraudulent).
> If you don't want to face the possible heat of a hearing, you don't accept the nomination.
You are right that politics is always going to require a thick skin. But platforming baseless, sensationalized accusations of criminal conduct (the kind that would never turn into actual charges) is the kind of thing that is going to prevent anyone with any kind of reputation worth protecting from seeking office. This seems like a bad equilibrium state.
> It has not been forgotten, and it will get paid back, with interest.
I'm sure Democratic politicians will use any excuse they can to capture more power, just as most all politicians do. But you are in no position to make such threats, and I am in no position to respond to them. We are just two people with different beliefs arguing on the internet. Let's focus on the arguments.
If you've ever heard of something being "borked", the phrase comes precisely from what happened Bork.
I don't think Kavanaugh is especially impressive as a legal mind, but in the debates I had at the time with staunch opponents of Kavanaugh, none of them could produce anything to substantiate the allegations. Their whole argument rested solely on the allegations themselves. What little evidence that was presented only served to undermine those allegations. I don't see how that is anything other than character assassination.
I haven't actually looked deeply into the accusations against Thomas during his confirmation hearing, but I have read several of his legal opinions, all of which were quite impressive.
The fact that Garland got no confirmation hearings or consideration at all, as well as the bipartisan nature of the confirmation vote Bork actually received that Garland did not, both seem more than sufficient to make these entirely unrelated.
Sure. I think ProPublica is reporting an angle here that can't be proven that Harlan Crow is attempting influence peddling or trying to put cash in the pocket of Clarence Thomas illegally. This doesn't look like a corruption case. The situation is somewhat reasonable and Thomas might have profited by 1/3 of the ~$130,000 house that he inherited which is not really a big deal.
It should have been reported, yes, absolutely. But I think this is fairly mundane.
I also think it's worth pointing out that Justice Ginsburg received a $1M award from Russian oligarchs[1][2]. She also received a trip to Israel[3] from an Israeli billionaire. I suppose if I were a ProPublica journalist I would say she was lavished with a private arrangement in Israel by a foreign billionaire. These are probably also mundane, I don't think she was corrupted by foreign influences.
It's a good question of whether all of this is appropriate, I don't know. But ProPublica is not exactly an unbiased reporter in my opinion. Being donor funded probably makes one even more susceptible to political bias than corporate media imo.
He bought her house for almost $200k, spent tens of thousands of dollars on improvements, bought the house next door with the loud annoying neighbors and tore it down, bought two more houses on the street, fixed them up and sold them and doesn’t charge her rent to live there… basically gentrified her street.
Always remember that the vote buying process is more about guaranteeing further alignment, instead of straight out buying. I can't imagine, for instance, Kagan receiving similar gifts, from similar donors, to make her vote with Thomas. I also don't think that some left wing billionaire could throw a million or two at Thomas and suddenly turn him into a swing voter.
High brow political corruption everywhere is more about those small, marginal adjustments, which also lead to less obvious quid pro quo. It's not that your buddy renovated your house, so you pick his company in a government bid worth a few hundred million: He becomes your buddy first, and gives you smaller gifts, and when you are adequately aligned, bigger gifts keep getting exchanged.
This is what makes the actual corruption always seem very cheap: It was never that huge a push, and the long term social component is always far more important than just the money.
From the Daily Beast:
>Clarence Thomas’ mom is definitely still living in a house bought by a Texas billionaire who bankrolled luxury trips for her Supreme Court justice son, according to a report. On Thursday, ProPublica reported that Republican megadonor Harlan Crow bought two vacant lots and a single-story home in Savannah, Georgia, from Thomas in 2014 and that experts believe Thomas violated a federal law by failing to disclose the sale. Crow also then reportedly spent tens of thousands of dollars on renovations at the home occupied by Leola Williams, Thomas’ mother, but ProPublica couldn’t definitively confirm that Williams was still living in the property after 2020. Later Thursday, Slate reported unequivocally that Williams remains in the house to this day. The outlet said one of its reporters interviewed Williams at the property “two weeks ago” for an upcoming podcast.
This is acceptable conduct? We should just accept this level of venality? Boggles my mind. Where are all the patriots?
[1]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/clarence-thomas-mom-definitely...