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John,
It seems this steady drip, drip, drip of outrageous Supreme Court scandals is never ending.
Now it’s yet another undisclosed luxury trip by Justice Clarence Thomas, on billionaire Harlan Crow’s private jet in 2010, from Hawaii to New Zealand and back. Justice Thomas has a long history of receiving such extravagant unreported gifts, but this is just one of multiple scandals affecting today’s Court.
Justice Samuel Alito’s conflicts of interest are just as serious. Both Thomas and Alito and their wives showed public support for the breaching of the Capitol on January 6 in which five Capitol Police officers lost their lives, but both justices failed to recuse themselves from cases involving violent insurrectionists, attempts to throw out millions of real votes and deliver fake votes in 2020, and presidential immunity from prosecution.
Based on this repeated failure to recuse themselves, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has now filed articles of impeachment against both justices. Now we are calling on the House to follow through with the next step: impeachment.
In her filing, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez noted both justices’ “pattern of refusal to recuse” from cases in which they hold “widely documented financial and personal entanglements” -- failures which, she writes, “constitute a grave threat to American rule of law, the integrity of our democracy, and one of the clearest cases for which the tool of impeachment was designed.”
This unchecked corruption, a cancer on the Supreme Court, has metastasized into a constitutional crisis threatening American democracy. Congress should not wait another day to take action.
Tell the House of Representatives: Open impeachment investigations into Justices Alito and Thomas, and follow through with impeachment as needed, based on their failure to recuse themselves from cases in which they held significant entanglements.
Inserting themselves and their families into the political activities of the “Stop the Steal” movement gave both Justices Thomas and Alito significant personal stakes in Donald Trump’s claims of immunity, affecting the fate of multiple cases against Trump, regarding election interference in Georgia, stolen documents stacked up in Mar-a-Lago bathrooms and bedrooms, and the Washington DC insurrection.
Justice Alito tipped his hand in favor of rioters seeking to prevent the peaceful transition of power on January 6, when he and his wife flew two insurrectionist flags outside their homes. The upside-down American flag and the White Christian Nationalist “Appeal to Heaven” flag both waved over Alito family homes -- an unsubtle gesture of solidarity with the violent mob.
Meanwhile, Justice Thomas too has lost any claims to impartiality, due to the actions of his wife, Ginni Thomas, urging state lawmakers in Arizona and Wisconsin to appoint fake electors after Trump lost those states in 2020. She also texted Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to “help this Great President stand firm” on January 6 as the mob assaulted Capitol Police with bear spray, stolen police shields, and sharpened flagpoles.
Justices Alito and Thomas have deeply eroded public confidence in the judiciary, shattering the integrity of the Supreme Court. Now the Court has twisted the Constitution into forms the Framers could never have intended, making the president, in the words of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent, a “king above the law.”
If allowed to go unchecked, the actions of Alito and Thomas set a highly dangerous precedent, paving the way for an autocratic executive branch that acts broadly outside of the law with the support of the Supreme Court and its ultra-rich oligarch pals.
These actions by Justices Alito and Thomas are reckless and indefensible. Call on Congress to start impeachment investigations now.
Thank you for challenging the validity of these rogue justices who do not belong on a Supreme Court responsible for maintaining the rule of law in the United States.
- Amanda
Amanda Ford, Director
Democracy for America
Advocacy Fund
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