Payments to Rajan Vasisht, an aide from 2019-21, underscore ties between the justice and lawyers who argue cases in front of him
The supreme court is illegitimate.
They gave themselves the power of judicial review with Marbury v. Madison. They were never legitimate.
I’d love to hear the batshit opinion of your downvotes!
SCOTUS is corrupt!
Hopefully it’s $10 for “pizza contribution” and not $10,000 for “wink wink”
It was for him to vote in their favor 1000% bribery here and yet nothing gets to happen to him. He could all give us the finger take away all our rights. While the GOP cheers and the Democrats wring their hands. Fucking pathetic.
Hell Biden administration doesn’t even acknowledge it. They hope we will ignore it. But goddammit I won’t. Neither should anyone else.
Jfc I am underestimating how dumb these people are. Guess Monero is still extremely underpriced.
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I’m no lawyer, but this seems to be pretty clear textbook bribery. I’d be interested in what a lawyer would say about this and if there are any grounds for criminal charges. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/201
There’s no mention of bribery being illegal in the Constitution so the Supreme Court won’t have a problem with this
It does mention they have to have good behavior and Congress can remove them from office. That said the senate would never remove him
Congress won’t do that. If you remove a Justice for bad behavior, it opens up the door for Representatives and Senators to be removed on bad behavior.
They don’t want to be held accountable for anything.
Well of course. There are people in congress who saw what happened to Nixon and made it their life mission to ensure that it wouldn’t happen again
Painter said he would possibly make an exception if recent law clerks were paying their own way for a party. But almost all of the lawyers who made the payments are senior litigators at big law firms. Kedric Payne, the general counsel and senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, said that – based on available information – it was possible that the former clerks were paying their own party expenses, and not expenses for Thomas, which he believed was different than random lawyers in effect paying admission to an exclusive event to influence the judge. He added: “But the point remains that the public is owed an explanation so they don’t have to speculate.”
This is a tough one. While I have great disdain for the abuses of the court recently, there’s no telling of this was money to split a bottle of booze or something more nefarious. These men all used to work together, so it would be perfectly normal to contribute to a party.
The fact that there is no easy, public explanation from a public figure is why it’s worrying.
As a former executive branch employee, the required ethics training is clear: the appearance of a conflict of interest is just as severe as an actual conflict of interest and we were counselled to avoid both at all cost. If that means it is inconvenient for you or a contractor, that’s too bad because impropriety in government dealings is unacceptable.
This is codified in many areas, such as any employee - up to and including the president iirc - not being allowed to accept gives or honoraria above a fairly low financial threshold.
Yeah, I worked in government and they hammered us about how fucked we could be for even taking too much swag above a certain dollar limit. He’s so far across every ethics line I was ever taught that it’s just laughable.
Good to know, and solves my floating on this one. Thank you.
That’s not the government approved avenue for bribes.
I mean the payment descriptions are probably something like “Def not a bribe.” There’s nothing that can be done.
To be honest, I bet the descriptions are all set to Public and say “For Case #AXK-20100427PartB”.
Cause “🥒🥒 $$$ for that underage girl” didn’t sink Matt.
Yeah. Clearly, it’s “not even the apperence of corruption”
Does anyone know how much money these “Christmas Party” payments were?
It’s crazy how all these institutions lost all their prestige and respects.
