South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham made a complete jackass out of himself at the second day of confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Tuesday.
What caused Graham to pitch a full-scale hissy fit? The fact that Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) dared to fact-check some of the absurd things Graham said about detainees at Guantanamo.
When Durbin began reading facts to refute what Graham had just said, Graham shouted:
“The system failed miserably and advocates to change this system like [the nominee] was advocating would destroy our ability to protect this country!”
His voice getting more shrill as he spoke, Graham then continued:
“We’re at war, we’re not fighting crime! This is not some passage of time event. As long as they’re dangerous, I hope they all die in jail if they’re going to go back to kill Americans. It won’t bother me one bit if 39 of them die in prison. That’s a better outcome than letting them go and if it cost $500 million to keep them in jail, keep them in jail because they’ll go back to the fight. Look at the freaking Afghan government made up of former detainees at Gitmo. This whole thing by the left about this war ain’t working.”
Durbin again began to respond with facts, which led Graham to leave the hearing in a huff like a spoiled child who didn’t get what he wanted at the grocery store.
Here’s what we know about Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO): He’s an apologist for the Capitol insurrection and attempted coup that took place on January 6, 2021.
Hawley is also trying to make a name for himself because he plans to run for president one day and doesn’t care how many people he has to slag or destroy in order to get his name in the headlines and pretend that he’s a decent, moral person.
The perfect example of Hawley’s ambition and cutthroat tactics can be found in his attempt to smear Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has been nominated by President Joe Biden to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
Hawley fired off a series of tweets accusing Jackson of being soft on people caught with child porn:
Judge Jackson has yet to address her alarming record on child porn offenders. But rather than ask her questions, the Washington Post is regurgitating White House talking points. Their “fact check” questions & my answers below. Now go ask the person nominated for the Supreme Court pic.twitter.com/jNLt6CArIT
So other than these juvenile histrionics, the White House has no substantive answers for the judicial record of a person they nominated https://t.co/PEE0eB0XNt
When White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked about the disgusting insinuation made by Hawley, it quickly became clear that the administration stands behind Judge Jackson and also that Psaki has some questions of her own for the senator:
“What I would say, though — because there are others in the Senate who have made faulty accusations about Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record and specifically about her record on child sex crimes, so let me just take the opportunity to clear that up — not that most people have confusion about it.
“But in the vast majority of cases involving child sex crimes, the sentences Judge Jackson imposed were consistent with or above what the government or U.S. probation recommended. For example, there are — there are arguments that have been made out there by Senator Hawley and others that — where he took a snippet of a transcript out of context, when, in fact, Judge Jackson was repeating something a witness said in order to ask a question about their testimony.”
When another reporter asked about Hawley’s tweets, Psaki put the niceties aside and took a verbal tire iron to the Missouri senator, remarking:
“Well, I’m not sure that someone who refused to tell people whether or not he would vote for Roy Moore is an effective and credible messenger on this.”
Remember Roy Moore? He’s the Alabama GOP Senate candidate who was accused of propositioning and having sex with underage girls on several occasions, as the Washington Post reported:
Leigh Corfman says she was 14 years old when an older man approached her outside a courtroom in Etowah County, Ala. She was sitting on a wooden bench with her mother, they both recall, when the man introduced himself as Roy Moore.
Days later, she says, he picked her up around the corner from her house in Gadsden, drove her about 30 minutes to his home in the woods, told her how pretty she was and kissed her. On a second visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.
Josh Hawley refused to condemn Moore for that behavior, so maybe it’s time the FBI had a long look at the senator’s computer and cell phone, too.
Has there ever been a more useless member of the United States Supreme Court than Clarence Thomas? After all, this is the same man who allegedly engaged in blatant sexual harassment and yet still got a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land simply because he whined about being subjected to a “high-tech lynching” when the evidence certainly supported what Anita Hill told the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding years of improper remarks and actions by Thomas when the two were working at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
And now Justice Thomas wants to lecture us all on the possibility of making changes to the highest court in the land (such as adding more justices or putting term limits on SCOTUS members), suggesting that such moves would result in the court being “compromised.”
Speaking on Friday at a foundation started by former right-wing Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Thomas declared:
“You can cavalierly talk about packing or stacking the court. You can cavalierly talk about doing this or doing that. At some point the institution is going to be compromised. By doing this, you continue to chip away at the respect of the institutions that the next generation is going to need if they’re going to have civil society.”
Compromised? That’s rich coming from the most compromised member of the Supreme Court in the history of the United States.
Consider that Thomas’s wife, Ginni, has worked on behalf of groups and issues that have come before the court over the years her husband has been a SCOTUS justice.
Last month, The New York Times reported that the Thomases have “defied” the ethical norms of the Supreme Court, detailing, most notably, Ginni Thomas’ role in a failed scheme to illegitimately reinstall Donald Trump as president in the 2020 election. In her work with the conservative Council for National Policy, the outlet reported, Ginni Thomas helped draft and circulate “action steps” pressuring Republican state lawmakers to replace their state electors with partisan pro-Trump appointees.
Or how about this blatant conflict of interest that Justice Thomas engaged in when it came to one of the most important cases the Supreme Court has heard since the Nixon tapes:
In January, Clarence Thomas stood firm as the lone dissenter in Trump v. Thompson, voting against allowing the January 6 selection committee to access president records from the Trump White House in their investigation of the Capitol riot. That decision came just a month after the panel was attacked in an open letter by Ginni Thomas, who in December called on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., to expel Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., from the House Republican Caucus over their roles in the probe.
And now Clarence Thomas wants to lecture us on how liberals and others he disagrees with could leave the court “compromised”? That was all it took for Twitter users to tell Justice Thomas to take a seat and shut his damn mouth.
Why call Thomas justice Thomas, he like his wife are partisan HACKS! From the very beginning he was disqualified, a sexual predator on our highest court, ABSURD! pic.twitter.com/511EE1mSRB
“U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said he’s concerned efforts to politicize the court or add additional justices may erode the institution’s credibility.”
Somebody needs to consult with basic ethics / recusal principles. (I know, technically Justices aren’t bound by anything but these concepts still matter, especially to somebody like Justice Thomas who is preaching about politicization of the court).
When he nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday, President Joe Biden not only picked an eminently qualified jurist to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, he also chose someone who has a prior legal skirmish with former President Donald Trump which didn’t go the way the ex-president was hoping.
Josh Gerstein of Politico notes that a ruling Jackson issued against Trump in 2019 made it clear she doesn’t have a problem speaking her mind, even when she’s doing so in response to the president of the United States:
When the House’s lawsuit seeking to enforce a subpoena against former Trump White House Counsel Donald McGahn was randomly assigned to Jackson in 2019, the consensus among court watchers was that Trump was likely to be fileted. What emerged from Jackson was an 118-page jeremiad that did not mince words in dissecting Trump’s claim that his advisers had an absolute right to ignore Congressional subpoenas at his direction.
“Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings,” Jackson wrote, dismissing the longstanding argument as “a fiction” and “a proposition that cannot be squared with core constitutional values.”
Such a ruling will likely lead some Republicans (i.e. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who claimed the choice had been made by Biden after pressure from the “radical left” ) to brand Jackson as a liberal, activist judge who will try to legislate from the bench, but her record doesn’t support such a ludicrous allegation:
“There’s very little there that can legitimately be characterized as radical. She’s a judge who takes pains to find and apply the law in an evenhanded manner with a balanced tone,” said Tomiko Brown-Nagin a constitutional law scholar and dean of the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute.
Judge Jackson is a former public defender, which gives her a unique perspective on the legal process that most Supreme Court justices (the majority of whom are former prosecutors) don’t possess. That experience alone will make her a welcome addition to the highest court in the land.
Also, knowing how Trump likely feels about Jackson makes her appointment even sweeter. She’s exactly the sort of jurist he would never have given a second look, if only because of the color of her skin.
For years now, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been a lightning rod for criticism, in part for his right-wing rulings and controversial past which nearly derailed his nomination when he was accused of sexually harassing Anita Hill while both worked at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Now Thomas is once again in hot water thanks to two blatant conflicts of interest that have some legal experts saying the justice could well face impeachment.
The first controversy stems from a dissent made by Thomas regarding documents sought by the House Select Committee on the January 6 Capitol insurrection. He was the only member of the high court to rule that former President Donald Trump could keep documents hidden from the committee.
At the same time Thomas made his ruling, his wife, Ginni, was actively engaged in activism against the Jan. 6 investigation, which led University of Texas Law Professor Steve Vladeck to note during an appearance on CNN:
“There are surely substantive reasons, consistent with his jurisprudence, why Justice Thomas dissented from the Court’s decision to not help President Trump in that case. But for folks who are already skeptical of the Court, for folks who already view it as a deeply partisan, political institution, the fact that he is the sole dissenter, given what we know about Ginni Thomas’s involvement, sets off alarm bells.”
Pamela Brown of CNN fleshed out exactly how deeply involved Justice Thomas’ wife has been in trying to derail a full investigation of the Jan. 6 riots:
“The debate has continued because of Ginni Thomas’s ties to another issue before the court she sits on the advisory board of a conservative group, the National Association of Scholars. They submitted two legal briefs to the Supreme Court in favor of plaintiffs challenging affirmative action and admissions at two universities. Peter Wood is president of the organization, and said that she played no role in the legal briefs.”
The other conflict for Thomas is the revelation that he’s been in “regular contact” with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) via email, which was reported by Politico on Friday:
Emails handed over to American Oversight, a group that bills itself as a government watchdog, suggest that DeSantis is in regular contact with Justice Clarence Thomas. In June 2021, Thomas’ wife, Ginni, who runs her own consulting firm, worked with the DeSantis administration to have the governor talk to a coalition of groups, including people affiliated with Judicial Watch, the conservative organization that uses information requests and lawsuits to investigate public officials.
Why is a potential 2024 Republican presidential contender communicating with a sitting Supreme Court justice? Even if they’re only discussing the weather or the Super Bowl, the appearance suggests something less than kosher. And that alone could lead to calls for Thomas to be impeached.
Are there enough Republican senators willing to cross the aisle and remove Justice Thomas from the court? Probably not, but an impeachment trial might convince Thomas that the time has come for him to step down.
Clarence Thomas has always been an illegitimate member of the highest court in the land. And his actions since he joined the Supreme Court are proof that he doesn’t belong there.