Newsflash: Justice Clarence Thomas finally learns how to recuse himself at age 75.
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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Don’t give him too much credit… Eastmans check didn’t clear
Seems like the bigger piece here is that he clerked for Thomas. Nothing to do with the Trump stuff
I think an even bigger headline is that Thomas actually seems to be aware of the concept "conflict of interest in the supreme court"
I think it's still surprising he recused himself regardless of why, he's never cared about ethics before and his attitude has always been "so? What are you going to do about it?" every other time there was a conflict of interest.
More info on John Eastman from a 2022 NPR article.
Eastman has a long background in conservative law, having clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in the late 1990s and was a chairman in the Federalist Society. He worked at a law firm in California before leaving to teach at Chapman University, where he also served as dean, but left shortly after addressing the "Save America" rally before the attack on the Capitol.
Still, I picture him looking in the mirror, saying "ThERe LIbEraLs, I rECused mySeLF!"
I'm not willing to give Thomas credit for even this. Eastman's appeal was never going anywhere, with or without Thomas. He recused himself on what is fundamentally an uncontroversial case. He gets a little political reprieve for pretending to have suddenly discovered ethics, but nothing was on the line. There's not a chance he'd recuse himself if his vote had any chance of undermining democracy or human rights.
My thoughts exactly. This is the same as the Supreme Court making two small sane rulings before tossing out decades of precedent based on "they weren't conservative enough to count" and claiming that this makes them centrist.
More like shamed and pressured into doing the right thing. If this was a month ago he would not have recused.
I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a sense of shame, and does not care at all about external pressure. He is a Supreme Court justice for the rest of his life. Nobody, not even the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, can do anything to him in a punitive sense. The USSC will never do anything to limit its own power or those of its justices.
Congress could impeach him and throw him out of office. Will it happen? Probably not since you would need 67 senators to vote to convict and that chamber is evenly divided at the moment. But they do have the power.
One of our two political parties has fully abandoned any semblance of good faith negotiation, objectivity, or bipartisanship. As a result:
- if a shitty judge is Democratic, there’s a chance they could actually be impeached and removed from office, as the impeachment mechanism is intended to allow.
- if a shitty judge is Republican, there is zero chance that they could actually be impeached and removed from office, because absolutely zero republicans would vote for the judge’s removal.
This is the game we’re forced to play. I’m getting pretty fucking sick of the blatant double standards.
Clearly true. It's blatantly apparent in the Legislative branch too. When a Republican is accused or charged with a crime (Gym Jordan, Matt Gaetz, George Santos) They just keep chugging along clinging to their power. When a Democrat is accused or charged with a crime, everyone gets together and calls for them to step down. Look at Al Franklen, for example, and now Bob Menendez.
At this point, I'm hoping Menendez doesn't step down. I'm tired of Democrats taking the high road and policing itself. We're losing the nation because of it.
I think we need to go after Menendez, if only to confirm that yes, there actually is a contrast between the parties. It’s something that will help in the long run.
If someone hasn't realized it by now, this won't change their mind.
Regardless, this does have an effect on policy so fuck this guy, get him out of office and preferably into prison.
No, it won’t.
But if the Democrats start being exactly as scummy as the Republicans, we are well and truly completely fucked, because that means the most viable solution becomes “we gotta channel France and make the Second American Republic, because the first one is pretty much done”.
It’s something that will help in the long run
it ought to, but I'm not confident it will
I'd like to see Menendez out because his corruption has had concrete effects on policy. Franken's case was pointless though, I'd agree.
I’m just surprised he proactively recused himself from literally anything.
Did Thomas actually do the right thing? It must have been unintentional.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Eastman's case also involved the now-defunct Jan. 6 committee, centering on the former law professor's efforts to prevent his former employer, Chapman University, from handing over emails.
Eastman had pushed the discredited argument that then-Vice President Mike Pence had the power to refuse to certify the 2020 presidential election results.
Castro argued in his appeal that Trump is ineligible to be on the ballot under the Constitution's 14th Amendment because of his "aid and comfort to the convicted criminals and insurrectionists that violently attacked our United States Capitol on January 6, 2021."
Although some legal scholars have backed the argument, others have dismissed it, pointing out the difficulty of enforcing the constitutional provision and questioning whether Trump's actions rose to the level of "insurrection or rebellion."
Trump is facing criminal charges for his role in events leading up to Jan. 6 and was also impeached by the then-Democratic controlled House of Representatives in the days after the episode.
Even before the Supreme Court rejected Castro's appeal, it had signaled a lack of interest in the case by not even asking Trump's legal team to file a response.
The original article contains 592 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Is Thomas ill or something?