Opinion: Supreme Court's corruption of election law - Fred Wertheimer. With its disastrous Citizens United decision in January, the Supreme Court, its eyes wide shut, opened a Pandora’s box. The five justices who struck down the ban on corporate expenditures in federal elections had no idea what they were unleashing on our democracy; no understanding of the consequences of their radical change to campaign finance laws. Continue Reading They apparently decided they could do better than Congress at writing these laws. But they were dead wrong.
Their decision was based on a series of fundamental mistakes. The court in Citizens United emphasized the essential role of disclosure in the new campaign finance system it created. But the court majority never understood that the disclosure it said is “needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters,” does not exist under today’s campaign finance laws. Secret political money is a formula for corruption and the court’s uninformed assumption put this formula into play. Clarence Thomas Should Be Investigated For Nondisclosure, Democratic Lawmakers Say. WASHINGTON -- Democratic lawmakers on Thursday called for a federal investigation into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' failure to report hundreds of thousands of dollars on annual financial disclosure forms. Led by House Rules Committee ranking member Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), 20 House Democrats sent a letter to the Judicial Conference of the United States -- the entity that frames guidelines for the administration of federal courts -- requesting that the conference refer the matter of Thomas' non-compliance with the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 to the Department of Justice.
The letter outlines how, throughout his 20-year tenure on the Supreme Court, Thomas routinely checked a box titled "none" on his annual financial disclosure forms, indicating that his wife had received no income. But in reality, the letter states, she earned nearly $700,000 from the Heritage Foundation from 2003 to 2007 alone. Other members of Congress on the letter include Reps. John Dean discusses Clarence Thomas, 'retroactive recusal' and the Citizens United decision - Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
To Our Faithful Current.com Users: Current's run has ended after eight exciting years on air and online. The Current TV staff has appreciated your interest, support, participation and unflagging loyalty over the years. Your contributions helped make Current.com a vibrant place for discussing thousands of interesting stories, and your continued viewership motivated us to keep innovating and find new ways to reflect the voice of the people. We now welcome the on-air and digital presence of Al Jazeera America, a new news network committed to reporting on and investigating real stories affecting the lives of everyday Americans in every corner of the country. You can keep up with what's new on Al Jazeera America and see this new brand of journalism for yourself at Thank you for inspiring and challenging us. . – The Current TV Staff. Supreme Court Justices Attended Koch Brothers Party When They Were Deciding Citizens United Case.
TDPS: Supreme Court Corruption Growing Exponentially, First Alito, Now Clarence Thomas & Wife. Louis: Well, let's discuss what's happening. David: Yeah. Thank you, Louis, for getting me back on track. Virginia Thomas works at Liberty Consulting, and the income that she earned there... this is just such an absurd story. Clarence Thomas is not declaring that income, OK? So the idea is that Justice Thomas should be including his wife's source of income on his financial disclosures. He has not reported his wife's politically involved income for two decades. And this is not just... if it were just the IRS you were defrauding, fine, that we're used to.
Now, when this was brought to light, Common Cause brought this to light, and Thomas amended the reports very quickly. And that is true. Louis: It's that it's allowed to happen. David: That's right. Louis: So if these things are just allowed to keep happening, eventually, the Supreme Court will, it'll just be no holds barred. David: It'll be corrupt the way it increasingly is now. Announcer: The David Pakman Show at www.DavidPakman.com. Scalia and Thomas May Have Conflict of Interest, Common Cause Says. Supreme Court Justice's Wife Embraces Tea Party.
U.S. Supreme Court rules manual vote recounts unconstitutional. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is out of order for hiding payout to wife: House Democrats. Tim Sloan/Getty US Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas is under fire for failing to disclose a large payout his wife received from a conservative think tank. Congressional Democrats demanded an ethics investigation Thursday into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for allegedly failing to disclose that his wife was paid $700,000 by a conservative think tank.
They say Thomas marked off the "none" box on his annual financial disclosure form while his wife, Virginia, was raking in the dough working for the Heritage Foundation. Between 2003 and 2007, she was paid $700,000, they claim. "To believe that Justice Thomas didn't know how to fill out a basic disclosure form is absurd," said Rep. Louise Slaughter, a Democrat from Rochester, N.Y. Slaughter has asked the Judicial Conference of the United States to decide whether Thomas' disclosure mess should be passed on to the Justice Department for review.
It requires all federal judges to disclose their spouse's employer. Bush v. Gore. Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), is the United States Supreme Court decision that effectively resolved the dispute surrounding the 2000 presidential election. Three days earlier, the Court had preliminarily halted a recount that was occurring. Eight days earlier, the Court unanimously decided the closely related case of Bush v.
Palm Beach County Canvassing Board, 531 U.S. 70 (2000). In a per curiam decision, the Court, by a 5-4 vote,[1][2] ruled that no alternative method could be established within the time limit set by Title 3 of the United States Code (3 U.S.C.), § 5 ("Determination of controversy as to appointment of electors"), which was December 12. Background[edit] On November 8, 2000, the Florida Division of Elections reported that Bush won with 48.8% of the vote in Florida, a margin of victory of 1,784 votes.[4] The margin of victory was less than 0.5% of the votes cast, so a statutorily-mandated[5] automatic machine recount occurred.
Stay of the Florida recount[edit] Dems want probe of Justice Thomas as health law ruling looms. Twenty House Democrats are demanding a judicial ethics investigation into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas just as the high court is poised to issue a ruling on the healthcare law that could make or break President Obama’s reelection. The lawmakers on Thursday asked the U.S. Judicial Conference to formally request that the Department of Justice look into Thomas’s failure to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars his wife has received from groups that want the healthcare law repealed. Their letter comes after 75 House Democrats in February asked Thomas to recuse himself from the case following reports that he’d failed to report his wife Virginia’s income since he joined the bench in 1991. The letter comes just a day after the Obama administration and 26 states challenging the Democrats’ healthcare reform law asked the Supreme Court to take up the case, all but assuring that the high court will render a decision by next summer.
“What’s your phone number?” The Supreme Court and the 2000 Election (8) - By Alan M. Dershowitz and Richard A. Posner. Dear Professor Dershowitz: We've wandered pretty far from Bush v. Gore. The focus has shifted to your modus operandi as muckraking legal journalist, and let me comment briefly on that before turning back to the case. Judges vary in the degree of confidentiality they demand of their law clerks. I don't pretend to know the motives of Supreme Court justices. Which is not to say that the justices covered themselves with glory.
The Article II ground has been criticized as implying that state courts have no power to interpret the state's election statute, so far as bears on presidential elections, no matter how ambiguous or riddled with gaps the statute is; or to declare it unconstitutional, no matter how blatantly its terms violate settled constitutional principles, whether federal or state. The principles that I have outlined so far actually commanded the support of all nine justices in the first opinion in the election litigation, that of Dec. 4. The Thomases vs. Obama’s Health-Care Plan. It has been, in certain respects, a difficult year for Clarence Thomas. In January, he was compelled to amend several years of the financial-disclosure forms that Supreme Court Justices must file each year. The document requires the Justices to disclose the source of all income earned by their spouses, and Thomas had failed to note that his wife, Virginia, who is known as Ginni, worked as a representative for a Michigan college and at the Heritage Foundation.
The following month, seventy-four members of Congress called on Thomas to recuse himself from any legal challenges to President Obama’s health-care reform, because his wife has been an outspoken opponent of the law. At around the same time, Court observers noted the fifth anniversary of the last time that Thomas had asked a question during an oral argument. These tempests obscure a larger truth about Thomas: that this year has also been, for him, a moment of triumph. Tea time for Antonin Scalia - Jennifer Epstein. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia will speak on Monday on the separation of powers at an event organized by Rep.
Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and her Tea Party Caucus. Though the Tea Party Caucus is a conservative group, Bachmann’s office confirmed to POLITICO that it invited all members of Congress to attend the lecture and that some Democrats indicated plans to be on hand. Continue Reading “It is a special privilege to have him address the first of what will be regular seminars featuring constitutional scholars,” Bachmann said of Scalia in December when the event was first announced. “In his 24 years of service on the high court, Justice Scalia has distinguished himself by his ‘originalist’ approach to constitutional interpretation,” she added. The lecture is going on despite the objections of some observers. The New York Times editorial board called for Scalia to cancel his commitment. Bipartisan caucuses occasionally host members of the judiciary. Corporations Are Not People. A movement builds to fight corporate rule and amend the Constitution.
Media corporations have no motive to publicize that their bloodless pursuit of political control, and the resulting profits, have now been canonized in law. Corporations, in the Supreme Court-sanctioned guise of people, hold our democracy in thrall. Their vast wealth underwrites the campaigns of federal and state legislators. Dependent for their political survival on corporate largess, most politicians are pushed into becoming servile apologists or eager shills. The Supreme Court began endowing corporations with the rights of people in 1886 with Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. The contorted logic culminated on January 21, 2010, when the conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v.
Would you let your sister marry a corporation? • Since the 2006 midterm elections, the percentage of spending from undisclosed donors has risen from 1 to 47 percent. Reforming elections. Supreme Ethics Problem? At the historic swearing-in of John Roberts as the 17th chief justice of the United States last September, every member of the Supreme Court, except Antonin Scalia, was in attendance.
ABC News has learned that Scalia instead was on the tennis court at one of the country's top resorts, the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Bachelor Gulch, Colo., during a trip to a legal seminar sponsored by the Federalist Society. Not only did Scalia's absence appear to be a snub of the new chief justice, but according to some legal ethics experts, it also raised questions about the propriety of what critics call judicial junkets.
"It's unfortunate of course that what kept him from the swearing-in was an activity that is itself of dubious ethical propriety," said Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor, who is a recognized scholar on legal ethics. Scalia Mum At a press conference, almost two weeks later, Scalia was not inclined to tell reporters his whereabouts during Roberts' swearing-in. Justices Scalia And Thomas's Attendance At Koch Event Sparks Judicial Ethics Debate. Reports that two Supreme Court Justices have attended seminars sponsored by the energy giant and conservative bankroller Koch Industries has sparked a mild debate over judicial ethics.
On Tuesday evening, the New York Times reported that an upcoming meeting in Palm Springs of "a secretive network of Republican donors" that was being organized by Koch Industries, "the longtime underwriter of libertarian causes. " Buried in the third to last graph was a note that previous guests at such meetings included Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, two of the more conservative members of the bench. It's not rare for a Justice to attend a seminar sponsored by a group with judicial or political interests.
Members of the court, for instances, often speak at academic institutions or think tanks. Virtually all companies, meanwhile, are affected by the judicial branch. But the Koch event appears more political than, say, the Aspen Ideas festival. Supreme Court Corruption. Jan 28, 2010 Justice Samuel Alito should be disbarred and thrown out of the court system. The reason Justice Alito was shaking his head at President Obama’s State of the Union Address yesterday was because he was in denial of his own corruption even in the highest court of the United States. The very gall of this so called judge snickering like a child behind someone’s back shows you the disrespect this individual has for his own President. We have to shake our heads at the corrupt judge who has the nerve to call himself a judge when he has no idea what justice is in a courtroom. It turns out that Justice Alito if you can call him that is a very well connected Judge and with ties to an investment firm he has been guilty of a conflict of interest.
A story that was published by the Associated Press November 10, 2005 almost 5 years ago indicated that Alito promised to not have input on cases involving Vanguard, or Smith Barney which was a savings bank and his sister’s law firm. The Koch brothers are buying the Supreme Court | Dirt & Seeds. Tribune Washington bureau WASHINGTON — A government watchdog group alleges that two of the Supreme Court’s most conservative members had a conflict of interest when they considered a controversial case last year that permitted corporate funds to be used directly in political campaigns.
Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are the subject of an unusual letter delivered Wednesday by Common Cause asking the U.S. Justice Department to look into whether the jurists should have disqualified themselves from hearing the campaign finance case if they had attended a private meeting sponsored by Charles and David Koch, billionaire philanthropists who fund conservative causes. A Supreme Court spokesman said late Thursday that the two justices did not participate in the Koch brothers’ private meetings, though Thomas did “drop by.”
If it believes there is a conflict, the Justice Department, as a party to the case, should ask the court to reconsider its decision, Common Cause said. Rise of the Corporate Court: How the Supreme Court is Putting Businesses First. Justice Thomas, Who Thinks Federal Child Labor Laws Are Unconstitutional, Complains About Judicial Activism. How Rich Are The Supreme Court Justices? - Brendan Coffey - Loaded.