Sunday, October 24, 2010

High Corruption

How corrupt is the Republican side of our current U.S. Supreme Court? For starters, there's Justices Scalia and Thomas attending seminars put on by the hard-right wing energy corporation that's behind almost all of the the anti-climate change astroturf as well as organizing Republicans and their Tea Party subset while filling them with donations -- the very same donations allowed to flow unfettered and undisclosed per the "Citizens United" decision that Scalia and Thomas voted for.

And Thomas gets extra points for the decision opening up funding to his crazy wife's rightwing teabagging nut-causes. This is on top of the new revelation corroborating that Anita Hill was right, as an ex-girlfriend of Thomas' came forward regarding his obsession with pornography, large breasts and hunting for women at work. Depending on his denials in Senate testimony, would that be perjury?

But the most significant and potentially actionable accusation is that Chief Justice John Roberts is in the pocket of these corporate Republican interests, having called for review of the Citizens United case without having been asked by a lower court or plaintiffs -- taking it upon himself to open up our precious democratic election system to an endless flood of unchecked corporate special interest money:

"I mean, the Supreme Court has done a tremendous disservice to the United States of America," Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) told The Huffington Post on Tuesday. "They have done more to undermine our democracy with their Citizens United decision than all of the Republican operatives in the world in this campaign. They've opened the floodgates, and personally, I'm investigating articles of impeachment against Justice Roberts for perjuring during his Senate hearings, where he said he wouldn't be a judicial activist, and he wouldn't overturn precedents."

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According to DeFazio, Roberts hasn't stood by his own doctrine. He pointed to former Justice John Paul Stevens's dissent in the case, in which he said the Citizens United case was not properly brought before the Supreme Court. "This procedure is unusual and inadvisable for a court," Stevens said of the process. "Our colleagues' suggestion that 'we are asked to reconsider Austin and, in effect, McConnell," ante, at 1, would be more accurate if rephrased to state that 'we have asked ourselves' to reconsider those cases."

"Justice Stevens makes the point that Roberts decided a case that wasn't even before the Court, and invited the issue before the Court," said DeFazio. "It was the most extraordinary condemnation I've ever read of a perverted majority on the Supreme Court, at least in recent years."


This is exactly the kind of low boil scandal that can surprise a nation before they know it. If some intrepid reporter finds some direct evidence of collusion, written or testimony, that Roberts was a defacto plant, forged during the Reagan Administration by Federalist Club funders, we could have an Allen Drury novel on our hands.

Will Chief Justice Roberts have his Richard Nixon moment?Link

2 comments:

Master Fu said...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/25/jon-stewart-rally-animated_n_773410.html

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no official comment on your post, just that...

Mark Netter said...

Hilarious -- great animations - how do they do that?