Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire | Hacker News Reader

Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire

propublica.org

122 pointsdonohoe43 comments

Anyone wondering if laws were broken, keep reading:

“If Justice Thomas received free travel on private planes and yachts, failure to report the gifts is a violation of the disclosure law,” said Kedric Payne, senior director for ethics at the nonprofit government watchdog Campaign Legal Center. (Thomas himself once reported receiving a private jet trip from Crow, on his disclosure for 1997.)

Mostly, laws and regulations make sense and you can't evade consequences by claiming gifts are "hospitality." And you don't have to be impeached to be prosecuted.

This has been flagged dead already here from few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35466973

edit: Ok, this got flagged dead again and I've vouched. What is the problem with the piece?

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This, to me, falls clearly in the off-topic category. HN isn't a general news discussion board, and I'd prefer it to stay that way.

I get your point, although:

> unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon

And I do think it gratifies intellectual curiosity to see how the behavior is defended. But I will readily admit that the discussions don't always pan out.

I agree it's a fuzzy line. I'm explaining the position of those who flagged it, since you asked :)

Thanks :)

But this gratified my intellectual curiosity.

> But this gratified my intellectual curiosity.

How so, exactly?

Also, what's your definition of "intellectual curiosity"?

Why does it matter? It gratified my intellectual curiosity so I gave it an updoot.

Because I suspect that phrase doesn't mean what you think it means.

Why's that?

I answered your question. How about you answer mine?

Why would I do that?

It might gratify their intellectual curiosity.

Ugh. Between this and Gini Thomas activism, there really needs to be judicial reform at the SCOTUS level. As it stands today, there is effectively no recourse for Justices who misbehave. They aren't bound by the ethics rules that apply to lower courts. And impeachment is effectively a non-starter in today's political climate (requires supermajority of Senate to remove from office). So Thomas can take all the bribes he wants without fear of penalty.

He broke the law. It's not complicated. Impeachment is not the only recourse. Nothing prevents a DoJ or IRS investigation. It is not uncommon for journalists to be the first to uncover corruption.

You don't impeach him as a judge ... you just jail him like any other crook.

Stunning levels of corruption.

This is not very surprising. The only thing surprising is this information made it out to the public.

The super-rich (billionaires and multi-millionaires) have been working on slowly eroding and corrupting any government institution that stands in the way of them making more money. Their success rate has been pretty good I think.

https://fixthecourt.com/2021disclosures/

for those who will dare check the link and see which SCOTUS has investments in Black Rock etc....

Sotomayor owns shares of a BlackRock investment fund (MDLOX), which itself is boring AF and invests in domestic and foreign bonds and it looks like large cap global companies. Her whole portfolio is deeply boring and looks like someone wealthy enough to just park their money in safe dividend-earning instruments and broad-market ETFs along with having one rental property. There's actually nothing to see there, although the substring search for "BlackRock" will cause some 20 year olds who don't understand investment to freak out on reddit.

(I just wildly guessed that you were making insinuations about Sotomayor and haven't checked the other ones out)

Kavanaugh only lists 2 investments (highly suspect), while Amy Coney Barrett lists 136 (8 pages!!!) of investments, including Black Rock Strategic Income Opportunities.

The photos at the beginning look sensational.

The actual photos look like a slightly fancier version of me and my buddies going fishing and having a cook out.

It's not relevant or insightful unless you and your buddies have a shared conflict of interest, and are influential in public life. This is corruption at the highest level.

You and your buddies fish from a multimillion dollar yacht and cook out at private islands?

This _should_ result in impeachment, but I doubt it will. The right tends to close ranks, dissemble, engage in whataboutism, or just simply ignore ethics violations on their side.

I'm sure if there was an impeachment proceeding it'd be a straight party vote.

s/the right/both sides/g

Every time Trump blatantly violates the law and brags about it, Republicans rally and say that pursuit of justice is "political." While it's true that there are criminals on both sides of the aisle, they should all be under scrutiny. But the Republican party is especially blatant in their disregard for the rule of law, to the point of censuring members in favor of investigating and prosecuting obvious and well-documented violations. Will we see anything different for Thomas here? I seriously doubt it.

I was thinking about Bill Clinton's impeachment trial.

Whataboutism in judicial matters is just called precedent, and it has always been a valid principle in common law.

clarence thomas is a national treasure

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