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Judicial Corruption is Rampant Across the Courts [1]

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Date: 2023-12-19

Around 2000, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, complained to a Republican congressman that his salary was too low, and suggested that if it were not raised, he and other justices would be forced to quit. Given that a Democratic, President Bill Clinton, was in the White House at the time, Republicans were sent into panic at the possibility that his slot would be filled by a Democrat. These revelations by ProPublica are part of a series of revelations that not only place Thomas’ ethics into question, but suggest that the entire judicial system has been corrupted by Republican billionaires funding the lifestyles of justices.

When Thomas spoke to that Republican congressman, Cliff Stearns, it was on a flight after he had given a speech at Awakening, a “conservative thought weekend” on Sea Island, Georgia, featuring panel discussions between businessmen and elected officials, punctuated with golf, aromatherapy, and shooting lessons. Thomas’ expenses were fully paid for by Awakening’s organizers. Typically, of the 11 free trips that Thomas disclosed that year, he left out Awakening, in violation of federal disclosure law. This is, of course, not the first time that Thomas’ ethical shortcomings have come to light. He has a history of not disclosing the many gifts he has received from Republican donors, including school fees, property purchases, resort stays and luxury travel.

However, media reporting has been pretty shoddy, because it has focused on Thomas as if he is singularly corrupt. The truth is that Thomas’ behavior is typical of conservative justices. He is not even the only Supreme Court justice to have engaged in such behavior: Samuel Alito took at least one undisclosed luxury trip paid for by a Republican billionaire who later went on to have business before the court. The Supreme Court is not conservative purely because conservative justices are deeply committed to their beliefs, but also because Republican billionaires have paid for their allegiance . Reporting by Jacobin shows that billionaire-backed conservative legal groups have dished out luxury travel and resort stays for lower- court justices, “which effectively function as a reward system for judges who espouse and maintain hard-line conservative legal views”. In 2021 and 2022, George Mason University, a conservative university in Virginia, and the Federalist Society, the conservative lawyers network, paid for one hundred federal judges to go on 251 all-expenses-paid trips to conferences and seminars in luxury resorts in the United States and abroad. These two groups were responsible for 40% of travel-related payments made to federal judges in that two-year period. Thomas, it turns out, is just the tip of the iceberg. Republican donors have corrupted not just the Supreme Court, but the lower courts as well. There were 1,300 federal judges whose financial disclosure forms were analyzed, and from that, 595 instances of judges disclosing reimbursements for travel-related expenses were found.

Source: Jacobin

What we are waking up to is the realization that court decisions, at least when they involve billionaire interests and conservative philosophy, are likely adulterated. The courts are not objective, sacrosanct institutions, they are, rather, another front in the Republican assault on democracy in America. They are, perhaps, the most important front for Republicans, who are a minority in America, and know that the only way to reshape America in their image is to use the courts. This is a tyranny of the minority, a minority who are unashamed in their use of money to force through changes that they know the majority of Americans are opposed to. From Dobbs to economic policy, Republicans have been hugely successful in achieving their aims, and their influence is likely to remain strong within the courts unless the influence of billionaires on our judicial system is stopped. America has to decide whether it is an oligarchy or a democracy.

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