volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@CarlG314

If I didn't say it above, Justices are subject to the same rules as the rest of us. If a justice in his private life is caught speeding, he still gets a fine. It's between him and cops, but has nothing to do with Congress.

YES, as long as a justice's work product is good, then he's OK to remain in the job. That's what the US government hired him to do, so he's fulfilling his side of that employment obligations.

You bring up the problem of work quality being subjective, but we've solved that problem: Congress is free to judge, subjectively, work quality as they represent all of us and remove justices who fail. Legislative processes are all about sorting out subjective judgments.

So yep, so long as the justice is doing good work, I have zero care about anything in his personal life. Why should I?

Good work for the US is good work.

@copter_chief

Yeah, Congress can pass whatever laws they want, but unconstitutional laws are unenforcable.

Congress cannot legally exert power over the judicial branch as the US Constitution demands a firewall to enforce judicial independence.

Congress cannot expect to enforce unconstitutional laws, whether to deprive you of your rights or to breach judicial independence for the exact same reason:

If Congress had power over the courts then they'd be able to exact rulings that take away your rights as they see fit.

@Alexandrad1

You do know the job of a Supreme Court justice is not to report on the GOP... right?

Like, you know those are different career paths that do completely different jobs in different institutions with different rules and different checks on their roles in society?

But most directly, journalists appeal to the public. Justices appeal to the legal institution and to Congress. Completely different interests involved.

I can go on and on about how illogical that comparison is, about how those apples and oranges are worlds apart.

@staidwinnow

I expected it.

The problem is that the FDA made such a mess of things with their 20 year delay that courts would feel the need to break the glass, ignore the law, and just put judges'/justices' notions of common sense above the rules.

Sometimes the court system just bails out and says, no, this is too stupid, obviously we need to just ignore the rules.

@copter_chief

It's already been pointed out that the accusations of Thomas breaking the law are false for multiple reasons, not the least being that judicial independence limits the ability of Congress to interfere with the coequal branch of government.

If Congress wants to impeach a justice, they're welcome to do so. But that's really their only way of policing the Court.

Any other effort to influence the Court threatens judicial independence.

We have to take the bad along with the good of having an independent judiciary.

@CarlG314

But again, Supreme Court justices publish their opinions in the open so we have an especially clear view of their work, that we can judge them based on.

Hell, if a justice is being bribed to do a good job, then for goodness sake, let's have more bribery!

It is the quality of the work that matters here, not whatever is going on in the official's private life.

It's a problem that these threats to their privacy threaten to interfere with their ability to do good work for the country.

@Alexandrad1

When Musk sets up a press agency that takes government money without labeling it, then you'd have a point.

But the conflicts of interest being labeled here just aren't the same between a press agency and a car company.

@jupiter_rowland

I never questioned your cred.

But I do remember once being told that the #ActivityPub protocol might be open to cross-service identity just because of how it handles account addressing and certificates.

With id, WebFinger, and other things already baked into ActivityPub and/or implementations, ids can be separated from instances.

So supposedly support for the functionality is already in there, whether intentionally or not. It just takes implementers figuring out the best way to make it work.

@J12t@social.coop

@CarlG314

It's not so simple as disclosure good, concealment bad. There are a ton of areas where disclosure is not particularly warranted, ranging from appropriate state secrets through simple matters of privacy.

I actually think we need to value the idea that public officials deserve respect for their privacy in part as emphasizing government for the people.

These are still mere citizens serving the country. And heck, if we value their privacy that helps them have skin in the game should they start itching to compromise ours.

So sure, hold public officials to high standards *based on their job performance* not based on looking for dirt in their private lives.

And for goodness sake, let's maintain the independence of the judiciary. Congress should not be crossing that line.

@CarlG314

For me part of this situation is, as you put it, sleaze surrounding Thomas.

The thing is, I don't know why we should care. The guy wasn't hired to be an angel, and it seems pretty problematic for Congress to be snooping into people's personal lives as it threatens the independent judiciary.

I really don't think Congress should be threatening to start digging into justices' personal lives, particularly politicians who don't like how the Justice might be ruling on cases they have a stake in. It really just sounds corrupt.

Judge the guy based on how he does his job. If Congress has a problem with his rulings, then they should hold him accountable for his rulings.

But to attack the guy based on accusations of "sleaze" in his personal life, that's dangerous territory.

ProPublica is pretty awful, with that long track record of misleading and biased and sensationalized stories; I would hope that Congress would not be sucked down to their level here.

@Nonilex

Well can you be specific as to what parts of the argument they got wrong?

@Bullix

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.

@ceoln

No I think it's particularly appropriate for the press that is reporting on the government.

SpaceX isn't claiming to be a watchdog on the government. NPR is. The conflict of interest is particularly salient with the press, not so much with companies that are providing services to the government.

But I don't think "some government funding" is particularly more accurate than "government funded"

It's just harder to stick on the disclosure label.

@Bullix

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.

@ceoln

Again, do you have a terse label that would easily convey "we accept money from the government we report on, just not very much"?

I'm seriously looking for a more effective way that the account could be labeled. I can't think of one.

@Alexandrad1

SpaceX is also government funded. I don't know what that bit of whataboutism really contributes to the debate.

One issue is that SpaceX is not positioning itself as an independent group with reporting that would be holding government accountable. That's the conflict of interest that the press has when it accepts money from the organization it reports on.

Like SpaceX, NPR accepts government funding. Like SpaceX NPR is literally government-funded. There's nothing weird about owning that choice.

@ceoln

No, I think you've been about as clear as possible 🙂

The news organizations accepting state funding don't like to be called state-funded, and that really is the long and short of it.

There's nothing to clarify there. It's just what's happening.

@Alexandrad1

I absolutely would!

Hell just today I was hearing an ad from a liberal arts college in the US that is very proud of not being funded by the US government at all, including indirectly through students taking out subsidized loans.

Funding is funding. NPR accepts funding from the federal government, so it is federally funded, and there's nothing wrong with pointing that out. They are welcome to stop taking that money, in which case they would no longer be federally funded, but apparently it's worth it for them to take it. And there's nothing strange about that.

It's like, NPR often runs little disclaimers that they accept money from other organizations that they report on, so why not embrace this one too?

And again, it's always this weird thing where they keep trying to say it's such an insignificant amount of money... which fine, then if it is so little, maybe they should stop taking it so that they can have total independence from a government that they would be reporting on.

But so long as NPR and PBS accept government funding, they are main government funded. Again, not there's anything wrong with that.

@IrwinFletcher0

I bet one time the guy had dinner with his friends, and they agreed to take turns buying rounds, and the Thomases left without buying the last round!

I can only clutch these pearls so tightly!

@shansterable@c.im

Thanks for the suggestions, but all three of those clearly don't stand up to the lightest scrutiny here.

Nobody has a right to break the rules they agreed to and impede a democratic assembly, so there is no first amendment issue, and in breaking rules these representatives voluntarily stepped down, which is between them and their constituents. They effectively chose to stop representing their constituents. That is a big deal, IMO, but it's a problem that solves itself.

Meanwhile the legislative record shows that clearly it was not a racial issue, so there is no 14th Amendment issue to apply.

Those three charges are just so obviously baseless that it would be silly for the article even to bring them up.

@GJGreenlea