#USPol #SCOTUS #ClarenceThomas #UncleClarence
ProPublica has now published that Harlan Crow has purchased property from Uncle Clarence. Yet another thing he "forgot" to disclose.
For your edification, I had to take anti-money laundering classes to retain my license to sell life insurance.
One of the most common ways to bribe officials is to "buy" some property from them at far more than they paid to acquire it. Often involves some shell company horse shit.
Uncle Clarence is a criminal.
Yes, but where is the specific benefit that Crow traded for the scheme you're imagining?
All of these claims come across as nutty conspiracy theory without that part filled in.
I notice that you did not reply with a specific benefit.
I mean there are so many things wrong with your comment, but I want to keep focus on that one particular request.
1) Clarence Thomas was the 5th vote to remove the pre-clearance requirements of the 1965 Civil Rights Act. As a result, Crow's home state of Texas no longer needed to prove its voting law changes wouldn't adversely effect its minority population.
2) He was the 5th vote on the Citizens United ruling that made untraceable, anonymous donations in any amount legal when given to a Super PAC. It also made it legal for political super PACs to avoid taxes by claiming to be community service organizations. Crow donates heavily to such groups as a partisan mega-donor.
3) He is a devoted ideologue. The benefit is that he gets to use his fortune to exert an outsize influence on national politics that the rest of us cannot possibly match. And since he is an ideologue, shifting politics to where he wants it to go is a benefit for which he has paid. He receives personal, unfettered access to a SC Justice whose opinions cannot be appealed to a higher court, because there isn't one.
Number one, no, that's not what Citizens United did. In fact, Kennedy's opinion pretty much said the opposite, embracing regulation of donations, rejecting the idea of approving untraceable donations. It's right there in the ruling for us all to read.
But I'm still waiting for something specific. You're still hand waving about vague notions that don't specifically benefit the guy.
Vague accusations about cases going the way the guy would have preferred are not particularly helpful, especially when we have the reasoning in the opinions themselves to stack up against those vague theories.
To this particular reply, it seems that the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan affiliate of the NYU Law School, says the exact opposite of your assertion that Citizens United rejected the idea of approving untraceable donations.
You state that Kennedy's opinion proves that the ruling had the effect you claim. No, it proves what Kennedy's rationale was and the precedents upon which he drew from to come to his conclusion.
Brennan Center link I post below gives statistical data about how that decision has played out in practical terms.
1) Dark Money expenditures rose from under $5 million in 2006 to over $300 million in the 2012 cycle. And $174 million for the 2014 midterm.
The ruling was in 2010. Dark money use increased by a factor of SIXTY in only 8 years.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained
Open Secrets disagrees, too.
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/01/dark-money-10years-citizens-united/
The Center for Public Integrity also disagrees with your assertion that Citizens United somehow clamped down on dark money and unaccountable spending.
https://publicintegrity.org/politics/the-citizens-united-decision-and-why-it-matters/
I mean, I don't care who it is that is wrong. There are a lot of wrong outfits out there, a lot of special interest groups misleading the public with false information, often enough as it is in their interests to do so.
Fortunately we can see for ourselves when they are wrong. We don't need to appeal to biased authorities when we can just look for ourselves and call out those putting out sensationalist misinformation.
When CPI wants to join that category, well, more power to them.
To speak further to Kennedy's opinion, that was the one in which he stated that limiting "independent political spending" from corporations, unions, interest groups and the like violates the First Amendment.
Furthermore, he made some absurd statement that independent spending CANNOT be corrupt and that it would be transparent. Without an enforcement mechanism, that assumption is naive in the extreme. And the statistical data in the Brennan piece I linked you proves that assumption was naive.
In what way can accepting millions of dollars from a partisan megadonor *not* have even the appearance of corruption?
You don't even need to agree that it IS corruption. But the response to these revelations proves that it definitely has the appearance of corruption.
And how is it a stretch to think that a billionaire who spends huge amounts of money on political causes wouldn't consider guaranteeing that his pet causes succeed not count as a benefit?
Now, are you seriously suggesting there is an innocent reason to accept millions of dollars from a partisan ideologue AND let him buy land from you that you just don't report?
Did you think it was also ethical and above board for Scalia to go on hunting trips with Dick Cheney while reviewing cases in which that Vice President and his party were litigants?
@volkris
What part is a conspiracy theory?
There is no question he accepted 6 figure gifts every year for over 2 decades. There is now no question he was making land sales to the same guy without disclosing them on forms in which he disclosed other gifts.
As to your question, are you seriously asking me what benefit an ideologue billionaire might derive from bribing a Supreme Court Justice?
He was the deciding vote in Citizens United. He was a deciding vote to gut the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Section 4.