Today, the most corrupt Supreme Court justice in the history of the country agreed to amend his disclosures for 2013 to disclose the sale of his mother's house and surrounding lots to billionaire Harlan Crow.
This is a non-gesture, given that the sale of his mother's house has been disclosed by ProPublica in great detail already. Amending a form to include that disclosure is the equivalent of waving the whole thing off.
Keep in mind, when Thomas "forgot" to disclose Ginni Thomas' payments from Harlan Crow for her lobbying business aimed at dismantling the Affordable Care Act, stirring up populist anger with lies, and forming a "Groundswell" of crap messaging on social media, his solution was to go back and amend his disclosures to include that income. He should have been impeached then, but he wasn't.
It isn't enough. Not nearly enough. In any other world but the crazy one we live in now, Clarence Thomas would be made to resign by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. But because John Roberts is at heart an ideologue whose own disclosures and conflicts need some hard examination, he's not going to force Thomas to do diddly squat.
And that's before we get to the question of who paid off Brett Kavanaugh's debt, also undisclosed. Mother Jones reported that just before he was nominated to the Supreme Court, he reported owing between $60,004 and $200,000 on three credit cards and a loan against his retirement account. At the time of his nomination, those debts no longer existed. Given that the salary of an appellate court judge is not really enough to sustain a payoff of that kind of debt, we have no option but to ask how it was paid.
Overall, his reported income and assets didn’t seem sufficient to pay off all that debt while maintaining his upper-class lifestyle: an expensive house in an exclusive suburban neighborhood, two kids in a $10,500-a-year private school, and a membership in a posh country club reported to charge $92,000 in initiation fees.
Imagine a conversation between Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow that goes something like this:
"Harlan, Brett's coming up for nomination to the Supreme Court, but his debt will raise eyebrows with the Senators," says Leo.
Crow replies, "No problem, Len. Consider it done."
It's not unimaginable. Not in the least. It seems that Harlan Crow has been a fixer for Leonard Leo for awhile. It would be wildly ironic to discover somewhere down the line that he fixed Kavanaugh's debt, too, thus making him not only a fixer, but the man responsible for putting two sexual harassing males on the U.S. Supreme Court to decide women's health decisions for them.
Ironic and infuriating. But in the meantime, a disclosure of a transaction disclosed and reported by independent reporting is no disclosure at all.
