The corruption engulfing the Supreme Court continues to make headlines this week. See below for two opinion pieces connecting the dots between the influence of unlimited and undisclosed money and the deregulation of corruption by right-wing justices.
LA Times: Opinion: The Supreme Court was enabling corruption well before the Clarence Thomas scandal
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy
May 30, 2023
Key Points:
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The court’s own ethics have come under renewed scrutiny lately thanks to revelations about Justice Clarence Thomas, among others. What’s less widely appreciated is the court’s accumulating record of making political corruption easier to engage in and harder to prosecute.
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Political corruption is a bipartisan, nationwide problem. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been legalizing corruption in cases involving both campaign finance and white-collar crime well beyond the Percoco case.
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This has been a big change. Under Roberts’ predecessor as chief justice, William H. Rehnquist, the Supreme Court routinely upheld reasonable campaign finance rules as a means of preventing corruption. And the Rehnquist court had a broad definition of corruption that encompassed rich donors’ power to “call the tune” for elected officials.
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The Roberts court has taken a decidedly different tack in cases such as McCutcheon vs. Federal Election Commission (2014), which undid some campaign contribution limits for individuals. Suddenly, wealthy contributors’ extraordinary access to elected officials was to be expected; it was no longer regarded as a facet of corrosive and potentially corrupt relationships between the donor class and elected officials.
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In Davis vs. Federal Election Commission (2007), in fact, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. asserted that campaign finance laws discriminate against the rich. This upside-down way of looking at the world showed up in a string of cases culminating in Citizens United, which allows corporations to spend an unlimited amount of money on American elections. The Supreme Court no longer acknowledges that corporate political spending could possibly corrupt candidates.
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These opinions have ranged from narrow majorities to unanimity, but one of the most consistent votes for deregulating corruption has been Thomas. He not only thinks most anticorruption laws are unconstitutional; he has also maintained the view, extreme even for the Roberts court, that mere disclosure of the sources of money in politics somehow violates the 1st Amendment.
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The recent revelations that a wealthy Republican donor gave Thomas, his wife, his mother and his grandnephew a host of valuable gifts further illuminates the justice’s zest for undisclosed relationships between the rich and those in power. And the entire court has effectively rebuffed any attempt at oversight, issuing a defiant response to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin’s recent request that Roberts answer questions about the court’s ethics.
Salon: Clarence Thomas, Ken Paxton and Donald Trump: The corrupting influence of oligarchy
Austin Sarat & Dennis Aftergut
June 2, 2023
Key Points:
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It is tempting to attribute the scandals now enveloping two right wing icons — Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton — to both men’s lack of an ethical compass. Resisting that temptation is necessary if we are to learn a larger lesson about the roots of much political corruption in this country.
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The through-line in those headline-grabbing events involves massive wealth, domestic and foreign, seeking to buy power and knowing how to cultivate those who have it as well as those who have had it and might regain it. Simply put, people with great wealth often seek to enlist the powerful to help them keep things as they are.
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That Harlan Crow lavished private jet flights and free vacations on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — not to mention paying tuition for Thomas’ adopted son and buying his mother’s house, so neither Thomas nor his mother had to pay rent or a mortgage — is just the latest example of oligarchy at work.
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The wealth-corruption-right-wing-
politics connection also plays out at the state level in this country, as came to light during the May 27 impeachment of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for taking bribes. -
He allegedly did so in return for helping donor Nate Paul, a wealthy Austin real estate developer, by appointing special counsels, one to look into a court-approved FBI search of Paul’s house and the other to question a local district attorney’s investigation of Paul.
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Corruption, the abuse of the political system by those with the means to abuse it, is certainly not limited to elected officials on the right. But it tends to hover more heavily on the conservative side of government, both here and internationally.
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What often unites those on the right, particularly those whose purpose in life is to accumulate greater and greater wealth, is opposition to democratizing measures that protect voting rights, restrict money in politics or expand the rights of underrepresented groups. Those who have “gotten theirs” prefer to keep their club exclusive.
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Today we have legislation that needs to be fought for, including bills that would impose ethical accountability on the Supreme Court, or limit the role of dark money in elections. To succeed, we all need to avoid treating the corruption of people like Clarence Thomas or Ken Paxton as a problem of a few “bad apples” and see it as symptomatic of oligarchs’ efforts to subvert democracy and equal opportunity.
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To protect those things, citizens have to speak out against corruption and the oligarchs who seek to destroy government by and for the people. The moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, but getting it there requires taking action to curb the power of public officials whose strings are pulled by the likes of Harlan Crow, Richard Uihlein and Mohammed bin Salman.
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