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Tag: left wing
Clarence Thomas

Thomas Discloses Three More Trips Funded By His GOP Billionaire 'Friend'

On Thursday, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas released his long-delayed 2022 financial disclosure statement, revealing three more previously unknown trips Thomas took last year courtesy of his billionaire “friend,” Harlan Crow. That includes one trip where Thomas says Crow provided a private plane due to “increased security risks following the Dobbs decision leak.”

Thomas doesn’t explain why those concerns about facing the public after a ruling was leaked in which he helped strip a fundamental right away from half the population also required that Crow cover the cost of Thomas’ meals on that trip. But then, Thomas also says Crow paid for transportation following an ice storm, so apparently even an inconvenience is a sufficient excuse to line up a private plane. It’s good to have friends.

Thomas' disclosure also contains a section in which he explains that he never listed these trips in previous years because past rules didn’t explicitly state that he had to report “transportation that substitutes for commercial transportation.” That “explicitly state” is doing a serious amount of heavy lifting for a guy whose entire job is to determine how laws apply to situations not explicitly detailed in those laws.

In addition to Thomas’ disclosure, his attorney had a statement in defense of his client. Anyone concerned that Thomas’ statement didn’t have enough complaints about liberals just coming after Thomas because of his “judicial philosophy” can find plenty of such complaints courtesy of attorney Elliot Berke.

According to Berke, Thomas has always tried for “full transparency.” It’s just that no one told him explicitly that reporting gifts covered private plane trips, housing, meals, or … gifts. “After reviewing Justice Thomas’s records,” writes Berke, “I am confident there has been no willful ethics transgression, and any prior reporting errors were strictly inadvertent.” Berke seems to think this puts any issues to bed.

Again, this is a Supreme Court justice saying he didn’t have to comply with the rules because they did not explicitly include the situation in which he accepted a gift, and that justice’s attorney following up by saying anything the justice did wrong is forgivable because it was “inadvertent.” These are standards every criminal defendant in the nation should applaud.

Hitting a big right-wing checkbox, Berke’s statement twice accuses left-wing critics of Thomas of “weaponizing” ethics rules, which is another way of saying investigators at ProPublica uncovered Thomas’ long list of unreported transactions and exposed at least a portion of the acts he was hiding. But Berke has an excuse for why Thomas didn’t have to explain any of this.

For several months now, left wing “watchdog” groups have been attacking Justice Thomas for alleged ethical violations largely stemming from his relationships with personal friends who happen to be wealthy.

What Berke doesn’t mention is that Thomas met those “personal friends” after he joined the Supreme Court. And the reason they “happen to be wealthy” is that they first met when Thomas joined Crow on his private jet. Thomas accepting gifts of flight, lodging, and meals from Crow isn’t something that developed because they were old school chums. It was Crow's wealth that brought them together to begin with.

In fact, that first meeting came when Crow provided Thomas with free transportation to a conservative speaking gig, which is exactly what Crow did again last year. Twice.

The third trip in 2022 was another incident in which Thomas apparently took a vacation on Crow’s dime—as one does when one’s “friend” just happens to be a billionaire. The first time Thomas accepted such a trip was just months after he and Crow first met. The exact nature of the third 2022 trip wasn’t detailed in the disclosure statement, which only shows that Crow covered “transportation, meals, and lodging” while Thomas and his wife were “guests of source.” However, past trips have included international flights and lengthy stays on a private 162-foot yacht, with one such trip valued at over $500,000.

Despite multiple lavish trips, this is how Thomas described his own thoughts about travel.

“I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States. I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it. I come from regular stock, and I prefer that — I prefer being around that.”

That statement comes from a documentary about Thomas’ life. A documentary funded in large part by … Harlan Crow. Odds are pretty good that wherever the undescribed trip Crow funded last year took place, it was not a Walmart parking lot.

In addition to the new trips, the biggest addition to Thomas’ disclosure is the word “inadvertently.” According to the form, Thomas inadvertently overlooked no fewer than 12 instances in which bank accounts or insurance policies should have been reported on past forms.

“Inadvertently” is also used to explain how Thomas left off the fact that Crow purchased his real estate property in Savannah, Georgia, in 2014. But then Thomas claims that the deal, which included Crow fixing up Thomas’ childhood home while allowing Thomas’ mother to continue living there, then buying Thomas out for an amount well above fair market value, actually represented a capital loss. So that’s no big deal.

Overall, Thomas' statement seems more like something an attorney would provide a petty criminal trying to escape charges for kiting checks than a document appropriate to a Supreme Court justice. Only most of those petty criminals would actually have to pay for their transgressions. Thomas will not.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Cartoon: Mr. Zuckerberg Explains Facebook Is Not Favoring The Left

Cartoon: Mr. Zuckerberg Explains Facebook Is Not Favoring The Left

Liberals Rise, But At A Cost To Democratic Party

Liberals Rise, But At A Cost To Democratic Party

By David Lightman, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — The Democratic left is rising, and it’s unclear whether that will help the embattled party prosper or sink.

Ideology-driven movements and candidates tend to seize the spotlight in party presidential nomination contests, and so far, the left has the momentum. Its anointed candidates, though, have a problem: Being too closely identified with a party’s ideological wing usually means general election trouble.

A preview of the good and bad times ahead surfaced in recent weeks.

The Democrats’ progressive wing this month led a strong but ultimately unsuccessful push to strip from the congressional budget bill provisions easing restrictions on financial institutions.

Activists have launched an energetic effort to boost Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts for president, but Warren says she isn’t running.

Polls show significant disenchantment with mainstream Democrats, but mainstream icon Hillary Clinton retains a huge lead among Democrats for the 2016 presidential nomination.

Progressives interpret all this differently, saying it helps create awareness of their mission. “We want to unrig the playing field. We want people to not feel the fix is in on every level,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

They paint even the recent setbacks as detours on their path to progress. The December McClatchy-Marist poll found that in the 2016 Democratic nomination contest, Clinton won 62 percent support from Democrats, while Warren got 9 percent. Among liberals, Warren rose to only 11 percent, while Clinton’s number doesn’t move.

Liberals read the poll differently. They see 38 percent of voters who are considering an alternative to Clinton.

They also note that liberals are uneasy — 48 percent said they disapproved of the job congressional Democrats are doing, compared with 45 percent who approved.

MoveOn.org Political Action launched a petition drive Dec. 10 promoting a Warren candidacy and has more than 100,000 signatures. “This moment was made for Senator Warren,” said Ilya Sheyman, the group’s director.

Democracy for America, a progressive Democratic political action committee, donated $250,000 to the draft-Warren effort. Warren is “Democrats’ most powerful voice in the fight against income inequality,” said Charles Chamberlain, the group’s executive director.

Warren first gained public notice while a Harvard University law professor advocating a consumer financial protection bureau. The Dodd-Frank financial regulatory overhaul of 2010 established the agency, and Warren won a Senate seat two years later.

The 2014 budget bill eased some of the restrictions imposed on financial institutions in the Dodd-Frank measure. Warren was outraged and helped rally congressional Democrats against the change.

But the outcome was also a cautionary tale, because the budget measure passed with a bipartisan majority and the provision intact. Nor are liberal initiatives likely to get much legislative traction next year.

The liberals’ Social Security expansion, for example, would be funded by lifting income caps on taxes. Currently, once one’s income tops $113,700, he or she pays no more Social Security taxes this year.

Such measures have little chance in a House of Representatives where Republicans will control 247 of the 435 seats, the party’s biggest majority since 1931. In the Senate, where it usually takes 60 votes to get much done, Republicans will control 54 of the 100 seats.

Democrats also face the kind of civil war between liberals and center-left stalwarts likely to rage not only in Congress but also throughout the 2016 presidential primary season. Centrists want the party to provide economic incentives for people to succeed, relying less on wealth redistribution through higher taxes or guaranteed incomes. Nor do they see mobilizing voter outrage as a useful general election strategy.

“Americans don’t want angry, defensive figures running for president,” said Will Marshall, president of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute.

In more conservative states, Democrats don’t share the liberal views. The more the left defines the party, say centrists, the more Democrats will suffer in the South and perhaps elsewhere.

Party officials are taking a hard look at the future. A Democratic National Committee panel is undertaking a top-to-bottom analysis of the party, with a preliminary report due in February. “We’re not presupposing or pre-concluding what is wrong,” said party Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Centrists and liberals do agree on this much: The key to Democratic success is convincing middle-class voters that the party understands them and wants to help.

“The first thing the party has to do is stand for something, and the primary focus needs to be an economic agenda,” said Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, a liberal group.

That could be tough, said Republican pollster Ed Goeas. The middle class agrees “the rich are getting richer,” he said, “but they think the poor get all the (government) benefits.”

The party’s image is already tainted, moderates argue. They point to Democratic losses across the South this year, as former South Carolina Gov. James Hodges, a Democrat, warned that the party needs to break away from its reputation as liberal-driven.

“If Democratic candidates in the South had the coattails of JFK and FDR today, we’d still have lost,” he said.

Photo: Senate Democrats via Flickr