The "Justice" Thomas Thread

Yeah, if anything it's Alito who is the other vengeful cunt on the court besides Thomas.

Increasingly obvious he leaked his own draft opinion on Roe V Wade to do an end run around Roberts. And will keep pushing the "revisiting" of previously "settled laws" he doesn't like, such as gay marriage.

https://bsky.app/profile/notalawyer.bsky.social/post/3khakgomjpx2e

But poor people are the entitled ones.

I would be perfectly happy with raising the salary to $1m a year but no gifts, no speaking fees, no book deals, etc while in office.

There is something to the salary argument though. DC is one of the most expensive regions in the world. $285k is enough to live on basically, but not enough to live fully engaged and at par with the rich ruling class surrounding you. This is where the bad incentives factor. It's even more relevant for Congress people.

Simply put, if you're expected to serve the United States and not special interests, then the United States should offer you the most money. That's unprincipled, but pragmatic.

‘Government should be run like a business!*’

*But pay an order of magnitude less. It is perfectly sane that after bonuses the CEO of 7-Eleven should make 10x POTUS.

Businesses are little dictatorships, so anyone who says that is a fascist.
Whether their little walnut brains understand that....I no longer fucking care.

Maybe part of the malfunction is we expect our public servants to life on par with elon and less on par with the lowest income people who they set the standard for. Perhaps if they shared more in common with the lowest paid workers rather than the highest the lowest might get paid well, and the highest who work the least might get paid appropriately too.

We’ve seen what happens when it’s tried. It doesn’t end well…

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zachev...ice-clarence-thomas-is-worth/?sh=d9721f2139cd

I hate to defend the people who say this sort of thing, but fair is fair.

When people are arguing that governments should be run like businesses, they are addressing a few specific alleged flaws of government/differences between government and private industry generally.

Someone who runs a government doesn't generally have to worry about the government going bankrupt, unless they egregiously mismanage things for years. Governments (at least in the U.S.) can fairly easily get decent loans/grants from the private sector or other branches of government or the private sector, and in the case of the federal government can print money and carry enormous debt with no plan in sight for paying it back completely.

Similarly, the argument goes, those in government have little incentive to innovate or to hold people accountable in the way a business does.

Now there are all sorts of flows with this logic and reasons why we shouldn't want government run like a business in these or any other respects.

But it is unfair to call the majority of people who might agree with these sentiments "fascists" and it trivializes this concept.

It hurts their fee-fees, but it's fair.

BTW, powers that be, can we reverse the ability to edit one's posts or at least extend it longer than it is? I hate not being able to correct typos, and the current situation serves no one. It's not like FF is ever going to believe that people aren't somehow stealth-editing posts anyway.

https://x.com/brettmmurphy/status/1755693404208378357?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

Wow.

John Oliver offers to pay Clarence Thomas $1m a year if he resigns from supreme court

And before anyone accuses Oliver of making a threat, I need to point out that his wife is a Republican, so it's okay that he said this.

In a dissent today Alito (joined by Thomas naturally) argued that Obergefell needs to be overturned because bigots aren’t getting invited to enough parties.



How dare society treat bigots like bigots!!!1!

@Uncle Albert and @Steal Your Face will not stand for such attacks on their bigotry.

You know, I just realized how bad John Oliver has fucked Thomas with his stunt. If Thomas tries to use it to up his payments from billionaires, the media will be all over it (and possibly the IRS). They’ll also be sniffing around to see what kind of money he’s still getting from billionaires.

And he can’t take Oliver’s offer since not only will that show the world just how big of a whore he is, but the only people who’ll have any interest in him are ones who just want to beat his ass.



Not bad for a stand up comedian!

Right, but shouldn’t Oliver be charged with bribery? Or is that only reserved for Republicans?

I’m sure that HBO’s lawyers made sure that Oliver’s offer was legal. If you poke around, you can find me complaining about the liberal justices also being on the take.

They’re all on the take in one way or another. I actually watched the episode and generally like Last Week Tonight, but John Oliver told the audience that the lawyers “mostly” assured him it was legal. Find the right judge and prosecutor and he might be in trouble.

Google says Newsweek says it’s unclear whether resigning counts as an official act for the bribery statute and its case law.

I’m inclined to say it’s not bribery or else anyone offering any government officer a job in the private sector would also be committing it.

Not to mention it would result in a huge outcry from the very people the Biden team wants to vote for them in the election.

"Mostly" could mean "boy I hope people try to find some way to charge me and learn about the Streisand Effect firsthand".

You'd like that, wouldn't you? Don't address the problem, just prosecute the guy who had the audacity to point it out.

Ethical hackers thank you, and wish you would remind the UK government that the Computer Misuse Act (1990) is woefully outdated.

I imagine Alito would’ve said the same thing about desegregation.

I would assume (without doing any legal research and without it being my field) that Oliver would have a number of defenses if someone seriously tried to prosecute him for bribery:
1. It was all a joke, Oliver didn't have the intent to actually follow through with the offer, I knew that Thomas wasn't going to accept it, and therefore I can't be prosecuted.
2. Oliver has a First Amendment right to point out Thomas's hypocrisy in actually accepting gifts worth as much or more from his "friends" who happen to have cases in front of him, to point out that there are no ethical standards to which the Supreme Court justices are actually held, the problem with there being a glaring loophole in the bribery statute that Oliver is being prosecuting me under. This is a matter of the utmost political concern, and therefore is entitled to the highest First Amendment protection. Prosecuting me for exercising that First Amendment right is something the government can't do under the Constitution.
3. If you look at the letter of the law, Oliver does not fit neatly within any of the potential terms of the federal bribery statute
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/201

The main section that might apply basically says:

The first question would be if it could be argued that Oliver acted "corruptly." I again don't know how previous cases might have interpreted this element of the statute. From a common sense standpoint, he was not.

But it also seems dubious that it could be plausibly argued -- let alone proved beyond a reasonable doubt -- that Oliver intended to influence Thomas to defraud etc. anyone with his offer, or that he wanted to induce Thomas to do anything that would be in violation of his lawful duty. Thomas is entitled to resign whenever he wants.

So that leaves the potential argument that he did this to influence an official act. The statute defines an official act as "any decision or action on any question, matter, cause, suit, proceeding or controversy, which may at any time be pending, or which may by law be brought before any public official, in such official’s official capacity, or in such official’s place of trust or profit." I suppose one could make the argument that Oliver made the offer because, say, he wanted Thomas off the Court to increase the chance of the Court not overturning gay rights or pick-your-case. But that's sort of a weak argument against the notion that he (or his lawyers) would get to argue that he wants Thomas to retire because he thinks Thomas is ethically compromised, and he had no hope or expectation that Thomas's resignation would cause the Court to reach a different decision on fill-in-the-blank case, because the conservatives still would have at least a 5-4 majority assuming Biden gets to fill the seat, and a 5-3 majority if the Republicans indefinitely stall.
4. A prosecutor has an ethical duty to not bring charges that they do not reasonably think that they could get a conviction on, and realistically, if someone tried to prosecute John Oliver, between his celebrity, the above issues, and the possibility of jury nullification, there can't be a reasonable expectation to prove any case beyond a reasonable doubt.

I'm not saying that any of these are airtight defenses, but they all seem reasonable ones on the face of them to me (without again any research).