President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Clarence Thomas was the "deciding" vote. Not Scalia, not Kennedy, not Roberts or Alito. It was Clarence Thomas, because clearly he was actually inclined to vote with Sotomayor, Ginsberg, Breyer and Stevens, but the expectation that Harlan Crow's family were going to start giving a lot of money to political candidates two years later got him to vote differently.

Why isn't enough to just say that it's seedy and slimey and at least vaguely corrupt-looking for a Supreme Court Justice to be taking gifts that large (and then not reporting them on financial disclosure forms)? Because that kind of connecting the dots is a bit silly. Clarence Thomas was voting very predictably for about 2 decades before Harlan Crow's family's political donations picked up in 2012. That vote was Thomas being the same Thomas he had been in 1992. It clearly wasn't a quid pro quo.

 

My guess is that it's a lot more nuanced than that. ... not purely transactional. I think Crow and Thomas are birds of a feather, and Thomas would be being Thomas if Harlan Crow didn't exist and didn't take care of him. At the same time, I also think that for Crow, he wouldn't be that close to Thomas if they weren't already part of the same cabal, and then it becomes "I have the ability to give my good buddy Clarence nice things, and he doesn't earn so much with that kind of job, so why shouldn't I be generous with him?"

It's obviously incumbent on Thomas to not take those things -- that is what he signed up for -- but he's got the moral compass of a hyena. And it rightlfully opens him up for what he is getting. I really feel safe in guessing, though, that these are not outright quid pro quos. In the case of that tweet I was responding to, it was kind of ridiculous. The same 5 justices at the time were voting as a block in one particular way. There was nothing unusual about the Citizen's United ruling from that standpoint. Do you really think that Harlan Crow thinks has to buy Clarence Thomas to keep him pissing out of the tent?