Senate Judiciary findings on SCOTUS ethics deficiencies. When will America declare it will no longer tolerate this hideous reality?

The full report is linked at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ze1Xu95W-NCafPNP-mWhyeX3rENdkyM9/view?usp=sharing

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

A. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Investigation

On April 6, 2023, ProPublica published the first of several major exposés revealing extensive allegations of apparent ethical misconduct by sitting and former justices of the Supreme Court of the United States.1

Following the publication of this article, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, again renewed his call for the Supreme Court to adopt an enforceable code of conduct2—a step he first advocated over 12 years ago on February 13, 2012, with then-Chairman Patrick Leahy and Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, Al Franken, and Richard Blumenthal.3

Chair Durbin also directed his staff to begin this investigation. This investigation has involved Committee oversight requests, open-source research, and other investigative methods. The Committee made oversight requests to the following individuals, holding companies, and organizations:

Harlan Crow: May 8, 2023 Holding companies controlled by Mr. Crow that own his private jet, his superyacht (the Michaela Rose), and Topridge Camp (a 105-acre property located on Upper St. Regis Lake, New York)

• o HRZNAR LLC: May 8, 2023
• o Rochelle Marine LTD: May 8, 2023
• o Topridge Holdings, LLC: May 8: 2023
• Leonard Leo: July 11, 2023
• Paul Singer: July 11, 2023
• Robin Arkley, II: July 11, 2023
• The Supreme Court Historical Society: July 11, 2023
•  David Sokol: September 13, 2023
•  Paul Anthony Novelly: September 13, 2023

The Supreme Court Historical Society complied with the Committee’s requests4 and subsequently updated its productions.5 Mr. Novelly substantially complied with the Committee’s requests.6 Mr. Singer and Mr. Sokol made baseless arguments objecting to the Committee’s legitimate oversight authority, but nevertheless partially complied with the Committee’s requests.7 Mr. Leo and Mr. Arkley rejected the Committee’s requests in their entirety, relying on baseless arguments objecting to the Committee’s legitimate oversight authority.8 Mr. Crow, on behalf of himself and his holding companies, also rejected the Committee’s requests and publicly made similar objections, but privately proposed a limited production to the Committee, which the Committee found insufficient.9

Due to the noncompliance of Mr. Leo, Mr. Arkley, Mr. Crow, and Mr. Crow’s holding companies, Chair Durbin requested that the Committee provide him subpoena authority to compel their responses.10 The day before the Committee’s consideration of this subpoena authorization, Mr. Arkley complied with the Committee’s request and made a production Chair Durbin deemed sufficient.11 On November 30, the Senate Judiciary Committee authorized Chair Durbin to issue subpoenas to Mr. Leo, Mr. Crow, and Mr. Crow’s holding companies.12 On January 4, 2024, Chair Durbin provided Mr. Leo, Mr. Crow, and Mr. Crow’s holding companies a final opportunity to comply with the Committee’s requests before utilizing compulsory process.13 Following negotiations with representatives for Mr. Crow, Mr. Crow and his holding companies obliged and, following negotiation, made a production to the Committee on June 6, 2024, which Chair Durbin deemed sufficient.14 Mr. Leo continued to reject the Committee’s requests, prompting Chair Durbin to subpoena Mr. Leo for the requested documents and records on April 11, 2024.15 Mr. Leo failed to comply with the subpoena.

This report summarizes the findings of the Senate Judiciary Committee Majority Staff to date, including the information produced by the individuals, holding companies, and organizations detailed above. It also provides historical context for alleged misconduct by Supreme Court justices over the last several decades and explains the lack of adequate guardrails to prevent and police this misconduct.

This report does not include any direct testimony from Chief Justice John Roberts, whose Court has been embroiled in an ethical crisis of its own making for well over a decade. The impetus for the February 13, 2012 letter referenced above was the 2011 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary, which declared that “the Court has had no reason to adopt the [Judicial Conference’s] Code of Conduct through a formal resolution,”16 despite “[t]he ethical conduct of the Supreme Court [being] under growing scrutiny” in 2011 due to “[q]uestions[] raised over Justice Clarence Thomas’s appearances before Republican-backed groups and his acceptance of favors from a contributor in Texas, Harlan Crow.”17

Twelve years have passed, and the same problem persists with some of the same offenders. But the public is now far more aware of the extent of the largesse certain justices have received and how these justices and their billionaire benefactors continue to act with impunity. On April 10, 2023, every Senate Judiciary Committee Democrat joined Chair Durbin to request that Chief Justice Roberts begin an investigation into this ethical misconduct on behalf of the Court.18 On April 20, Chair Durbin asked Chief Justice Roberts to appear before the Committee to examine ways the Court could address this persistent problem.19 Chief Justice Roberts refused to appear before the Committee, and, rather than investigate the misconduct consuming the Court, produced a nonbinding “Statement on Ethics Principles and Practices” that the justices purported to follow.20 Over a year and several additional exposés later, Chief Justice Roberts continues to refuse to act or to appear before Congress to take any responsibility for the impropriety he has let persist in the highest court in the land.

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What follows is an additional 900+ pages detailing 14 Key Findings, the report itself, appendices, Key Documents provided in response to committee demands/subpoenas, and financial disclosures submitted by the Justices themselves or their agents.

As to note numbers from the Executive Summary, they correspond to footnotes provided in said ES. 

Uncharted territory in stormy US political waters

What will Trump 2.0 do or bring to the United States and the world?

Traditional news outlets (i.e. Corporate Media, print and broadcast) have been following the well-worn path of expounding what they think is going to happen. But how often do those predictions fail to materialize.

Case in point: the US Congress, now in this last month of the lame duck presidency of Joe Biden, last night faced a deadline to keep the federal government funded/open by passing either a comprehensive budget or a short term CR (continuing resolution). Pundits got all freaky when those who control massive social media ("pseudo-president-elect" Elon Musk and for all intents and purposes, Musk's underling, Trump, threatened all Republicans in both chambers of Congress with being PRIMARIED in 2022 if they didn't do what Musk wanted done about funding the federal government. 

From the Washington Post (gift article):    

Congress narrowly avoided a government shutdown, approving a last-gasp federal funding bill to cap a week whose events could reverberate throughout 2025 and Donald Trump’s second presidency.

    The House on Friday agreed to a bipartisan deal to punt a funding deadline to March 14, send $110.4 billion to struggling farmers and natural disaster victims, and renew the massive agriculture and anti-poverty law known as the farm bill. The Senate quickly followed suit to pass it early Saturday, and President Joe Biden signed the bill into law late Saturday morning.

    But the days it took to reach that agreement severely damaged the standing of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and forced GOP leadership in the lower chamber into a handshake debt agreement that could restrain Trump’s legislative ambitions. [Let's talk about those ambitions when they become more concrete]

    Johnson on Tuesday unveiled a bipartisan bill to put off a shutdown that also included provisions to lower prescription drug costs and curtail private-sector investment to China. But House Republicans — egged on by Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk — walked away from a deal on Wednesday.

    That risked not only a government shutdown, but called into question Johnson’s standing within his party; he must run to retain his speakership on Jan. 3, when a new Congress is seated. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) earlier in the week declared he would not support Johnson to retain that office. Another lawmaker, Rep. Andy Harris (R-Maryland), chair of the archconservative Freedom Caucus, said late Friday that he was “undecided” on the future of the House’s GOP leadership.

AS IF pundits, at this juncture, can predict anything with precision. Good grief. 

And then there's the other corporate media freak out situation of December 2024: murder of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson. Corporate media, apparently because it fancies itself as the voice of the people (it isn't), played up the hunt for the shooter, later identified by various law enforcement entities as Luigi Mangione. A social media frenzy followed the hunt and lionized Mangione. Because the for-profit nature of health care insurance coverage underlies the sinister nature of access to health care and pervasive tragedies caused by denials of care understood to be enacted to save the health of stockholders' stakes in those massive corporations. Nevertheless, this quote is salient to our political times and the attendant polarization.

Violence often springs from a sense of injustice, inequality, and insecurity—and a sense that those grievances and fears will not be addressed by the current system. But systems can change.

Walter, Barbara F.. How Civil Wars Start (p. 197). Crown. Kindle Edition.

So, where will we go and what will we see happen in the US in 2025? Besides rampant corruption and kleptocracy we have come to expect because of Trump 1.0, we don't know with any degree of specificity. 

Yet I'm less freaked out than I was in the days just after the November election.

American institutions held in the wake of our country's first less than peaceful transfer of power in 2020. They didn't work as quickly or smoothly as many of us had hoped. But we're not yet an authoritarian dictatorship. Maybe closer than we should be to Anocracy, 

Anocracy, or semi-democracy, is a form of government that is loosely defined as part democracy and part dictatorship, or as a "regime that mixes democratic with autocratic features". Another definition classifies anocracy as "a regime that permits some means of participation through opposition group behavior but that has incomplete development of mechanisms to redress grievances." The term "semi-democratic" is reserved for stable regimes that combine democratic and authoritarian elements. Scholars distinguish anocracies from autocracies and democracies in their capability to maintain authority, political dynamics, and policy agendas. Anocratic regimes have democratic institutions that allow for nominal amounts of competition. Such regimes are particularly susceptible to outbreaks of armed conflict and unexpected or adverse changes in leadership.

We'll have to figure it out as we go. However, as former AUSA Joyce White Vance signs off on her nightly Civil Discourse Substack posts, "We're in this together."

 

And speaking about United Health Care, I just found this on YT:

And here's the ProPublica news story about this UHC "cost cutting" effort:

UnitedHealth Limits Access to Critical Treatment for Kids with Autism

Bluster Buster... OR, US Federal government as sexual predator?

"Republicans have never been interested in governing, they just want to hold and exercise power. -- Anthony Vincent Gallo

Resist!

 PERSIST!