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Comment by archildress | Hacker News Reader

Headline ought to be re-written as "Supreme Court forced to codify once-unwritten rules due to rampant abuse by Justice Thomas."

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Don't forget Robert's Wife, Alito, and (because we must cover our bases) Sotomayor's Children's books.

You may want to read the article since others have issues as well.

>Many of those stories focused on Justice Clarence Thomas and his failure to disclose travel and other financial ties with wealthy conservative donors including Harlan Crow and the Koch brothers. But Justices Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor also have been under scrutiny.

Roughly equivalent to "all news networks are biased", overlooking the "but not to equivalent degrees."

Frankly you are making a massive assumption. We don't know how deep this behavior goes with the other justices. In 2018, Ginsburg had more trips paid for by others than any other justice for example. Since 2004, Bryer had more trips than any other justice.

The fact that people are only calling out one person seems very telling to me. This problem is far deeper than one guy or one side.

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/06/scotus-justices-rac...

Frankly those are trips that were disclosed and Thomas’s trips weren’t. That’s one of the biggest problems with what Thomas did (and shows that he knew what he did wouldn’t pass muster).

Of course, that’s assuming you’re not one of the people who believes that he truly thought a trip on a private plane does not need to be disclosed because the seat would have otherwise been taken by someone else so it wasn’t actually a benefit.

I think you're confusing Thomas and Alito.

https://www.axios.com/2023/06/21/alito-propublica-alaska-fis...

That may be true, but the extent of the reporting suggests that The Honorable Justice Thomas might be a bit more ethically lapsed.

I think it is due to the reporting. This is from 2019, but it shows both Ginsburg and Breyer were amongst the worst.

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/06/scotus-justices-rac...

The worst at what? You’d have a point if they didn’t disclose their travel, but they did.

Clarence Thomas did not.

They received significantly more trips paid by others than Thomas. That is what I meant by worse.

Also, as far as I can tell it looks like Thomas may have disclosed some of his trips. I'm not clear on that though. It is not clear how many trips the other justices took and didn't disclose.

under scrutiny doing a lot of work in that sentence. What does that mean in practice?

It means they have done the exact same thing, but it hasn't broken. This has been going on for decades now. Take a look at this report

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/06/scotus-justices-rac...

Good! Let's bring it all into the open. At a minimum it will show that these supposedly ethical people are basically just playthings paid for by billionaires. It's pretty crazy that low level government employees have way stricter ethical requirements than the higher ups.

I suspect there’s a lot of gray areas and I suspect justices of all stripes have tripped over the gray area multiple times.

But I think all the justices can see what Thomas was doing was pretty awful and I doubt any of the other justices, even those whose views I find abhorrent, would have gone that far.

And we’re only talking about justices’ actions themselves. This ethics code very clearly brings in consideration of the judge’s spouse’s activities as well, something which, once again is a major problem with Thomas, and none of the other judges as far as I can tell.

>But I think all the justices can see what Thomas was doing was pretty awful and I doubt any of the other justices, even those whose views I find abhorrent, would have gone that far.

I'm not sure that is the case. Ginsburg got a trip from a person and then the court declined to take up a case against said person.[1] The whole article is quite good so I would recommend reading the whole thing.

>This ethics code very clearly brings in consideration of the judge’s spouse’s activities as well, something which, once again is a major problem with Thomas, and none of the other judges as far as I can tell.

If his wife had wanted to give a speech and Thomas told her no, how many articles would there have been about the mean, misogynist, conservative man controlling his wife? It was a lose lose for Thomas on this so long as his wife wanted to do it.

I think this is on his wife, not him. Justice Breyer defended Thomas on this [2] as well.

There are examples of other justices' spouses doing similar things. Roberts' wife for example [3]. I'm sure there are more cases as well.

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/06/scotus-justices-rac...

[2] https://www.newsweek.com/stephen-breyer-defends-ginni-thomas...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/us/john-roberts-jane-sull...

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