Republicans encourage political violence (again), the Supreme Court is super corrupt and Trumpy (still), and more
Yesterday was a lot
I’ll be on Michelangelo Signorile’s SiriusXM radio show today, talking about the New York Times, among other things. Check it out if you’re so inclined. Mike’s newsletter is good. You should subscribe.
Yesterday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott pardoned a convicted murderer who, after writing to a friend about killing an anti-police-violence protester and getting away with it by claiming self-defense, killed a protester then tried to get away with it by claiming self defense. The jury saw through Daniel Perry’s not-so-clever ruse, but Greg Abbott didn’t care. Nor did he care that Perry is a virulent racist. In fact, that was probably part of the appeal to Abbott. See, the point of this pardon isn’t to right a past injustice (there was none) it was to incentivize future behavior. Greg Abbott, like Donald Trump, wants his supporters to think that if they commit acts of violence against the right people — basically, anyone who isn’t a supporter of Republicans like Greg Abbott and Donald Trump — they’ll get away with it. I wrote about Abbott and Perry in this space a year ago, and re-posted it yesterday when the news broke. I hope you’ll check it out if you haven’t already done so. This is a chilling and sickening reality of the modern conservative movement the news media doesn’t focus on nearly enough. There are few questions more important in this election than whether we empower this violent gang of thugs.
Also yesterday, the New York Times reported that Sam Alito flew an upside-down American flag over his home just days after the failed January 6 insurrection Clarence Thomas’s wife helped incite, and just days before Joe Biden was sworn in as president. The insurrectionists had adopted the upside-down flag, historically a symbol of distress, as part of their efforts to overturn the 2020 election by force and keep Donald Trump in power. At the same time, Alito — like Thomas — sided with an unsuccessful pro-Trump legal gambit. Soon, Alito — like Thomas — will help the Court decide two more cases stemming from the aftermath of the 2020 election, including the question of whether Trump has immunity from prosecution for his crimes.
Also yesterday, The New Republic’s Greg Sargent broke some news on the story of Clarence Thomas’s quarter-million-dollar luxury RV:
Thomas is still refusing to reveal whether he repaid the principal on the $267,000 loan that he received from Anthony Welters, a wealthy health care executive and personal friend, to purchase his R.V. in 1999, according to a letter that Senators Ron Wyden and Sheldon Whitehouse have sent to an attorney for Thomas.
Thomas also has yet to say whether the loan’s principal was forgiven by the lender, the Democrats argue in the letter, which was obtained by The New Republic. If it was forgiven all or in part, the senators say, it could constitute “a significant amount of taxable income” that should be reported on federal tax returns.
“Your client’s refusal to clarify how the loan was resolved raises serious concerns regarding violations of federal tax laws,” the senators write.
In short: Clarence Thomas and his millionaire benefactor have been really cagey about whether Thomas repaid the “loan.” They both will say only that the loan agreement has been “satisfied,” which might sound like the same thing — they’re hoping it does — but it sure isn’t the same thing. And while I don’t know Thomas didn’t pay the loan, I do know that when you ask someone if they repaid a loan and they’ll only say, through their lawyer, that “the terms of the agreement were satisfied in full,” instead of simply saying “yes, I repaid one hundred percent of the principle, plus interest” it’s pretty hard not to come to the conclusion that Clarence Thomas didn’t pay for this RV any more than he paid for those luxury vacations with Harlan Crow or his nephew’s private school tuition.
All of this reminds me: the folks at United for Democracy recently invited me to write. a piece for their newsletter arguing that Democrats should campaign against the Supreme Court. I’d been meaning to write such a piece in this space for … a year and a half? So I was happy to take them up on the offer:
The court as an institution is deeply unpopular among a broad swath of the electorate: Disapproval of the Supreme Court exceeds 60 percent among Democrats, Independents, liberals, and moderates – everyone except Republicans, more than 60 percent of whom approve of the court. Individual justices – particularly Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Samuel Alito – make for classic campaign villains, issuing cruel and unpopular decisions while hobnobbing with billionaires on all-expenses-paid luxury vacations. All of that adds up to a rare opportunity for Democrats to appeal to the left and the center simultaneously with an aggressive campaign critique of the Supreme Court. It can be both a persuasion and a turnout message – and because Republican candidates and voters like the court and revere justices like Clarence Thomas, GOP candidates can’t easily co-opt or duck such a critique.
There’s more. I hope you’ll check it out — particularly those of you in position to act on the suggestion.1
One more Supreme Court item: The American Prospect recently published a piece I co-wrote about an obscure mechanism by which organizations funded by the right-wing billionaires who have been doing all kinds of financial favors for conservative Supreme Court justices lobby the justices to rule their way on all kinds of cases:
The flagrant corruption of the Court has received a great deal of media attention and public scrutiny in recent years. But that scrutiny has been largely siloed away from coverage of the Court’s substantive deliberations and decisions. It’s time to break out of those silos. The story of the justices’ lucrative relationships with right-wing billionaires is inseparable from those billionaires’ judicial shadow-lobbying via amicus briefs.
Also yesterday,2 The New Republic published a package of pieces on “What American Fascism Would Look Like.” I haven’t read them all yet,3 but I’m extremely glad to see it. As I wrote in this space two weeks ago, the question of what life would be like if Trump and the Republicans successfully transform America into an autocracy might be the single most under-covered aspect of the 2024 campaign. At quick skim, the TNR package doesn’t seem to be precisely what I was asking for, but it’s important and valuable and I hope you’ll check it out — and that other news companies follow TNR’s lead.
You know who you are, and how to find me if you’d like to discuss in more detail.
Like I said, yesterday was a lot.
Yesterday, a lot, etc.
That’s the most infuriating part of our corporate media’s complete failure over the past nine years*—the failure/refusal to draw the very simple line between the abstractions and the results. The Supreme Court’s rampant corruption is a perfect example, and voter suppression is another. They might cover the passage of laws making it harder to vote, but this November if Biden gets a million fewer votes in Georgia and virtually none in Atlanta, the coverage will 100 percent be “Gosh, what could Biden have done better?”
*(They’ve been failing for a lot longer than that, but the last nine years is the exact situation where they’ve spent decades bragging that they’ll stand up and come through, they did the opposite.)
😤 Abbott and the conservative SCOTUS justices.