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US Supreme Court
It took Wisconsin a decade and a half to win elections with reform candidates to rid itself of a corrupt rightwing state supreme court. On Aug. 1, the state will once again have a supreme court upholding the law and protecting constitutional rights.
But it’s going to take a lot longer to clean up the corruption of the U.S. Supreme Court by rightwing billionaires who have been rewarding rightwing Republican justices with hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts for decades.
The forces behind the extreme rightwing takeover of the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2008 and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Trump supermajority in 2020 were exactly the same.
Wealthy Republican donors provided the big bucks and Leonard Leo, the chair of the rightwing Federalist Society, screened judicial candidates and appointees willing to roll back civil rights era laws protecting the constitutional rights of every American regardless of race or gender.
Shamelessly Corrupt
Those forces were at work in Wisconsin in 2008 when Michael Gableman, a shamelessly corrupt rightwing judge, won a narrow victory over African American Justice Louis Butler by running vile, racist TV ads fraudulently claiming as a public defender Butler freed a child rapist. It never happened. The Wisconsin Judicial Commission charged Gableman with judicial misconduct for his brazen lies.
What happened next shows how quickly courts can go bad. Gableman’s election created a new rightwing court majority that refused to punish him for his unethical campaign. Even worse, the new court adopted a brand-new code of ethics proposed by Gableman of all people. It sounds like a joke because it was. The ethics-free ethics code allowed justices to sit on cases benefiting their wealthy donors who contributed millions of dollars to their elections without recusing themselves.
One of first cases before the reformed court in August will be a challenge to the old court’s decade and a half of dishonest gerrymandering that magically creates two-thirds Republican majorities in the legislature even when Wisconsinites cast more votes for Democrats than Republicans.
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Record Voter Turnout
One reason for the record voter turnout this year to restore judicial integrity to the Wisconsin Supreme Court was public outrage over the total lack of judicial integrity displayed by the Trumped-Up supermajority on the US Supreme Court.
The attention the court drew with its decision wiping out a half century of constitutional rights for women to make decisions about their own lives was just the beginning. That’s been followed by a flood of revelations about Supreme Court justices and their families receiving mind-boggling sums of money, luxurious vacations on private jets and luxurious yachts and lucrative real estate deals that seem unreal. Every day is Christmas when you’re a Supreme Court justice with Republican friends.
Many of the scandals involve Clarence Thomas, the longest serving radical, rightwing justice. It was an insult to African Americans when President George H.W. Bush appointed him to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall. For three decades Thomas, the only Black justice, voted with the far right to roll back civil rights progress in America.
Now there appears to be very little Clarence and Ginni Thomas need to pay for in their personal lives. A billionaire friend Harlan Crow hosts their annual vacations valued up to a half-million dollars aboard private jets and luxurious yachts. Crow tossed in several hundred thousand more to pay private school tuition for their grandnephew they’re raising as a son. Crow bought and expanded Clarence’s mother’s house where she now lives rent-free.
Thomas hasn’t reported those enormous gifts as required by law. Many illegal payments to Ginni Thomas related to her husband’s work may never be known. That old court corruptor Leonard Leo advised Republicans a decade ago to hide payments made to Supreme Court justices. Leo sent a memo to Trump’s communications assistant Kellyanne Conway telling her to bill a friendly nonprofit group to pay Ginni “another 25K,” emphasizing records should show “No mention of Ginni, of course.”
Of course. We wouldn’t want anyone to think Supreme Court justices and their families were receiving payoffs for destroying our constitutional rights. Somehow Chief Justice John Roberts gets away with refusing to appear before Congress to discuss creating a code of ethics for the nation’s highest court. It’s the only federal court that doesn’t have one.
It’s not just other justices Roberts is protecting. There’s also Jane Roberts, John’s wife, who was paid more than $10 million dollars in commissions as a legal recruiter for elite law firms practicing before the Supreme Court after he became chief justice.
Roberts has no problem with his court’s destruction of constitutional rights. He voted with them to abolish abortion. Roberts wrote equally appalling decisions supporting corrupt partisan gerrymandering and gutting the voting rights act.
But Roberts wishes Thomas and Justice Alito wouldn’t make the court’s destruction of democracy sound so scary. It’s going to give his court a bad reputation.
