Thread by @MaryLTrump

In 2018, John Roberts appointed a federal panel of judges to investigate 83 ethics complaints against Brett Kavanaugh. Although considered “serious,” the complaints were dismissed because the panel determined it had no authority to discipline a SCOTUS justice.
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Three years later, we learned that the FBI had received over 4,500 tips about Kavanaugh during the hearings. In 2019, Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Chris Coons (D-DE) wrote a letter to FBI Director Chris Wray asking why none of these tips was pursued.


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Wray's response came 2 years later and provided no useful information. Whitehouse and Coons wrote Wray again in 2021 “If the FBI did not follow up on any of the tips that it received from the tip line, it is difficult to understand the point of having a tip line at all.”

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Kavanaugh’s pre-SCOTUS behavior dropped out of the public consciousness. His on-Court behavior, while egregious, pales in comparison to that of his senior colleagues, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

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Still, I find Kavanaugh’s sneer paradigmatic of the attitude the illegitimate SCOTUS super-majority has towards the other two branches of government, the American people, and, indeed, anybody who isn’t a billionaire willing to foot their bills.


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This attitude is exemplified by Clarence Thomas’ amended financial disclosures, filed yesterday. These are supposed to account for all of the “inadvertent omissions” (otherwise known as failures to disclose) uncovered back in May by ProPublica.

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The Thomases make a lot more money than the vast number of Americans. They don’t, however, make nearly as much as those billionaire benefactors.

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marytrump.substack.com/p/the-lowest-c…

ProPublica uncovered more than illicit gifts, though: Harlan Crowe, Thomas’ primary ATM, also paid off his mother’s mortgage, financed extensive upgrades to her house, and paid $6,200-a-month boarding school tuition for Thomas’ grand-nephew whom he’s “raising like a son.”

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It's a bitter irony that the institution created to rule objectively on legal matters related to our founding documents has become so partisan that it is no longer worthy of our trust. And the partisanship can be laid directly at the feet of the six justices on the right.

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There is no more important reason to vote Democratic than the composition of the Supreme Court. Subscribe to my newsletter “The Good in Us” (it’s free!) to stay on top of how Democrats need to strategize in the run-up to 2024.

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