Sunday, February 20, 2011

JUSTICES THOMAS AND SCALIA'S ETHICS PROBLEM

From
the Daily Kos:

It is, however, deeply problematic that he failed to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars to his wife from right-wing interest groups, even though disclosure of such payments is required by law.

And it is also problematic that he, along with Justice Antonin Scalia, attended a secretive meeting of wealthy right-wing activists and power brokers funded by the Koch brothers. Now we've learned that he was actually compensated for attending by the Federalist Society, another right-wing organization.

In a slower news cycle (or if Justice Thomas were the target of the right-wing machine), these ethical question marks would be a national scandal. Calls for Thomas to recuse himself from political cases like health care reform are well-intentioned, but by all appearances, Thomas is so deeply compromised that the question shouldn't be about recusal, it should be about impeachment.


Click
here for more, including links to relevant sources, and a Stephen Colbert video clip.

Well, I guess it's safe to say that these bozos will most decidedly not be impeached. I mean, if they were Democrats, sure, they'd be brought up on charges faster than you can say "Lewinsky," but never mind the fact that the House of Representatives, the federal body that does all the impeaching, is currently owned by the GOP: this is how things generally work these days--impeachment is for Democrats, not Republicans.

And Scalia and Thomas, with the same arrogant attitude they had when they intervened in Florida's election back in 2000, inexplicably handing over the Oval Office to the the guy from their party, refuse to pull themselves from deliberating over affected cases, like, you know, Citizens United, because they assert that they can still be impartial in spite of the clear conflict of interest. Remember, this is the same party that went nuts over Clinton people using the wrong phones to solicit campaign donations.

Nope. Not gonna happen.

This is, of course, yet more evidence that not only has our democracy been hijacked by oligarchs, but that the very institutions administering the law in our nation are broken beyond repair. Torturers and war criminals go scot free. Election theft not only goes unpunished, but is aggressively pursued as campaign strategy. Billionaire bankers steal billions more from tax payers and live it up at multi-million dollar "retreats." Politicians apologize to environment-destroying oil companies instead of calling for indicting their CEOs.

Barbarians run roughshod over us all. We are now officially a banana republic.

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