Elie Mystal’s latest piece in The Nation is a must read. I agree with his title and his premise:
The Supreme Court Must Me Stopped.
My question is “So how do we stop them?” There IS a way, and we need to act. Before you go into the, “Yeah, but…” read the whole piece, he lays out several steps to take, starting with changing our attitudes. We have to stop treating them as they want to be treated, as 9 law shamans. We need to treat them as “politicians in robes.”
This court has proven with its actions—through one politically motivated decision after another—that it is unfit to wield the power that it does.”
The Supreme Court Must Be Stopped, Elie Mystal in the Nation. March 1, 2024
I’m an activist so I know that there are multiple steps to make something happen. Elie starts out with changing how we in the public perceive the court.
Mystal, “The first step toward stopping the Supreme Court’s political actions is to treat the justices as political actors and subject them to all of the scrutiny, pressure, and protest normal political actors face every day. ” I like the way my friend Lisa Graves referred to them, “Politicians in robes.”
Elie points out that how we treat politicians in American is very different than how we treat Supreme Court Justices. We questions them, we have processes for getting rid of them when they do a bad job. We need to do the same with Supreme Court Justices. Part of our perception comes from how the media treats them. That needs to change. When our perception of the court changes, so should our response to them.
I LOVE the work that has been done by ProPublica on the corruption in the court, but the history of Thomas’ corruption has been known for a LONG time. What I’ve seen happen is that when corruption in the court is reveale, all the excuses pop up. “Sorry, nothing can be done!” I’ll ask a question like “Why can’t someone force Thomas to recuse?” and I’ll get a history lesson and answers about the separation of powers, so then I ask, “What do we have to do to change that, so that there are mandatory ethical rules and consequences for violating them?”
Lisa Graves is going to be on the Nicole Sandler show again on, Feb 5, 2024 if you want to listen live & ask a question it’s at 5ET/2PT. I’d like her to walk through the reasons given for no action. What steps need to be taken? Who needs to take them? Who does the public put pressure on? What do we demand? What are the excuses that will be used? What are our responses to the excuses?
Clarence Thomas should recuse and resign. He should impeached for his corruption. He should hang up his robe and cry.
The song is from The Parody Project & is called, “Hang Up Your Robe Judge Thomas,” It’s based on the song Tom Dooley. This is a short, speeded up version.
Listen to the whole song & show on the Nicole Sandler Show last week Lisa Graves talked about corruption in the Supreme Court. (Graves was Chief Counsel for Nominations for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee for Sen Leahy) She recently wrote about how Thomas should have recused in the Colorado case. She then explained that when Clarence Thomas did NOT recuse on the Bush V. Gore case, Ginni Thomas got more than a million dollars from the Heritage Foundation after Clarence voted in that 5-4 decision. Ginni was promoted at the Heritage Foundation and began advising the Bush White House on appointments.
Read Grave’s whole article here: Clarence Thomas Has No Shame. But You Knew That.
Not recusing in a case such as this is unprecedented. It’s wrong. And it’s an appalling testament to how corrupted, how political, and how morally bankrupt the Roberts Court really is.
I’m all for FORCING Thomas off the bench. It might take impeachment, an indictment of Ginni Thomas, new stories about Clarence Thomas’s corruption, or Congress passing ethics laws for the Supreme Court. We really can’t let things continue as they have been. I like how Elie put it. “We must demand that our political leaders share with us their plans for stopping the court, in just the same way we demand to hear their plans to fix infrastructure or lower taxes.” YES! And, if they give mealy mouth answers, start the drum beat for real solutions.
Finally, Elie said, “all of us need to recognize how dangerous the court is. We are ruled by this court because we are too disunified and distracted to resist it. That has to end, because these nine people will not stop devouring democracy until there is none left to eat.”
