An attack on the Supreme Court’s legitimacy
Washington Examiner
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Left-liberal media are running a sustained campaign to undermine the Supreme Court.
Their cynical ploy to gain power by delegitimizing a constitutionally mandated branch of government that they no longer control has been going on since three staunch originalist and textualist justices were confirmed during the last administration, creating a 6-3 conservative majority.
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It is fair to ask whether justices should have a hard set of requirements for recusing themselves from cases. Currently, they operate on the honor system. It is also fair to ask whether they should be obliged to report gifts more fully. But what we have instead has been a series of apparently coordinated news stories making tendentious claims about the integrity of justices who all have one thing in common: They belong to the court’s new majority.
This could incite even more violence and threat than has already been visited on these public servants by the leftist militants.
The latest insinuations of corruption began with a story about Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife accepting hospitality from a long-standing, rich, personal friend who had no business before the Supreme Court. That they were flown to this friend’s yacht was not the best look, perhaps, but Supreme Court rules did not require it to be disclosed. It is also implausible to anyone who knows Thomas to believe it changed any of his opinions, which, again, had nothing to do with his host’s interests. Thomas was advised upon his 1991 confirmation that he was not required to disclose such gifts.
Next, the Washington Post attacked Thomas, insinuating that he was hiding rental income by attributing it to a “defunct” company. In fact, he had reported it using the old, pre-2006 name of the LLC from which the income came. He had listed “Ginger Holdings LLC” instead of “Ginger Limited Partnership” — ooh, scandalous!
Thomas is not the Left’s only target. Business Insider reported last week that Chief Justice John Roberts’s wife, as part of her career in a recruiting firm, made $10 million in commissions over eight years recruiting lawyers for major law firms. The three legal recruiters contacted by the publication told it that this was a reasonable level of compensation for her level of legal experience.
Around the same time, Politico reported that a company partly owned by Justice Neil Gorsuch had, shortly after his confirmation, sold a parcel of property in Colorado to the CEO of a large Colorado law firm, Greenberg Traurig, whose attorneys have argued cases before the Supreme Court in the time since. Contrary to the report, Gorsuch disclosed the sale. He did not name the buyer. That makes him just like every other justice to report such income that year, as has been pointed out. The CEO in question, Brian Duffy, is a major Democratic donor who has never met Gorsuch or argued a case before him. Justices’ connections to firms that bring cases before them were, unsurprisingly, never regarded as a problem when the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg participated in cases in which her husband’s law firm was directly involved. But suddenly, it’s corrupt.
What a coincidence! But these stories and at least one complaint behind a story don’t seem to be merely coincidental. This is a Democratic and media crusade, a pile-on. Under the hypocritical guise of disinterested reform, this is an effort to besmirch the reputations of justices who hew to the law and the Constitution rather than twisting them so they fit the prevailing values and goals of the leftist media and its political arm, the Democratic Party.
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These reports target conservative justices only — and almost always for practices common to all justices. The Left is insinuating that the court is corrupt. It is doing so because it is angry that it no longer has the pliable justices it wants.
After the Dobbs decision, prominent leftist activists incited an assassination plot against Justice Brett Kavanaugh, against whom they had already launched vile smears during his confirmation hearings. Now media are actively involved in a disingenuous campaign to undermine the court’s legitimacy.