Imagine you have just become the proud owner of a Lamborghini Testarossa. It happens. Now imagine six months later, with no warning, it turns into an Aston Martin DB11. Not a bad car, but not quite what you had purchased. Unfortunately, you’re stuck with it for the rest of its life. Since we’re getting good at imagining, lets take the next step: six months after that, your car turns into a Honda Accord. A good mid-sized sedan, no doubt, but definitely not the car you had bought. Since our imagination gland is getting a good workout, let us finally imagine that, a year after that, the car finds its final form: a Volkswagen bug. It would be completely understandable if you had an emotional meltdown: you’ve just paid a lot of money for an ugly monstrosity you’re embarrassed to hide in your garage, much less drive on an actual street.
Buying a Supreme Court judge can be something like that. You think you’re getting somebody who agrees with, and will therefore support, your far right values, but, when they actually get on the bench, over time they decide that they would rather adjudicate the law fairly than rule in favour of your interests. We’re beyond buyer’s remorse, here, and into buyer’s despair! But what can a poor, oppressed billionaire do?
Open up a pipeline of gifts to constantly remind the justice of where their allegiance lies, that’s what.
Do you hear that shushing sound? That’s the sound of nearly annual trips Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas made to exotic places around the world coming down the pipeline. Some of those trips cost as much as half a million dollars, almost twice Thomas’ annual salary. How could he afford them? He couldn’t. Fortunately, billionaire Harlan Crow was happy to feed the trips into the pipeline for him. As well as a $19,000 Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass. And don’t forget buying the house that Thomas’ mother lived in, and allowing her to continue to live in it rent-free.
The Supreme Court Justice Pipeline can carry a lot of different decision fuels: it’s versatile that way.
All of these gifts should have been listed on Thomas’ annual gift form; alas, they were not. That shushing sound from the pipeline? You didn’t think it was just from moving gifts, did you? Billionaires are shy creatures who would rather their good works not be fawned over by the public. Yeah. That’s it. Shy creatures. Fawned over.
Crow insists that he has never directly been involved in a case that came before the Supreme Court, so what’s the big whup? The big whup, Harl – may I call you Harl – thanks, but, now that I think of it, that’s a harsh, ugly syllable – the big whup, Harlan, is that many cases others have brought to the Supreme Court have had a potential effect on your business, so you didn’t have to be a plaintiff to be rewarded for your gifts to Thomas.
I know you would rather not get public credit for Thomas’ positions, being a shy billionaire and all. Still, you have to be at least a little proud of the success of the pipeline, don’t you?
The Supreme Court Justice Pipeline has more than one branch. For example, conservative shill for causes that only a billionaire could love Leonard Leo puts a luxury fishing trip in one end and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito accepts it on the other end. Also on the trip was billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who had subsequent cases before the Supreme Court.
As you might have guessed, Alito did not report the trip. The pipeline shushing is strong in this one.
Would Thomas and Alito have made the same decisions if they hadn’t received all those perks from Crow and Leo? Quite possibly. You don’t have to be on the receiving end of lavish gifts to be a right-wing idiotologue. Still, if they were tempted to stray, the threat of shutting off the pipeline would give them something to think about, boy.
The Supreme Court Justice Pipeline doesn’t end with Thomas and Alito. Exactly. The billionaires who fund the pipeline system are…concerned that Chief Justice John Roberts is one of the judges on the Supreme Court who cannot be trusted to make the right(-wing) decisions, being concerned with such trivialities as precedents and rational arguments and the Supreme Court’s standing with the publicz. Thomas and Alito’s role is to insulate other right-wing justices on the court (Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Comy Barrett, you know who you are) from Robert’s evil influence.
Do you hear that soft shushing? That’s the sound of justice dying.