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Why it rings hollow to me is there wasn’t the same concern over Sotomayor taking millions in advances from a publisher while not recusing on a case that they directly were involved in. That is, the complaint about Thomas seems politically motivated. The ones about Alito are just silly (and we did learn that you should find someone who loves you the way Mrs Alito loves flags).
According to Fix The Court which has a nice list of missed recusals and seems to be pretty evenhanded, this happens a fair amount, more than I'd like. An earlier case, according to details I see from them (but opinions and speculation my own), possibly was missed due to the publisher being Knopf by name at the time, which in reality was a subsidiary of Penguin who was named. Beyond that, it appears many justices simply make long sheets of specific companies, and don't always update them correctly nor properly do their due diligence in looking deeper. For example, in the more recent publisher example, Gorsuch also failed to recuse for the same reason, and Breyer accidentally recused because his list was out of date!
I feel strongly about reform but am pretty clear eyed about the recent stuff being dramatized. I thought it was in this thread, but I guess not -- the Alito stuff as I've said is garbage and that was clear pretty early on. While you could say "maybe they are picking on Thomas specifically" they have found enough unrelated and significant ethical lapses I'm convinced, and think it's pretty clear to those who have investigated, that there's an actual pattern there.
What I’m saying is if I thought most of the criticisms were actually concerned about the integrity of the court, then I wouldn’t have as much an issue. But as it is, I think the vast majority of the criticism is simply people who don’t like the court’s rulings looking for ways to undermine the court.
I see the left do this all of the time. When they controlled the court, it was sacrosanct. The moment it switches hands, we start hearing about its legitimacy. Republican attacks on the court historically were about theory of law; democrats aren’t talking about theory of law. Democrats did the same thing with Twitter and Elon. Once he unlocked a major communication platform from their grip, Elon became a far right racist. Funny how that works.
That's fine. I've observed that I'm more likely than most to be willing to examine arguments made in bad faith in spite of them being made in bad faith. Partly because I don't think bad faith is as common as popularly perceived, but also because I'm skeptical that most people can safely and accurately enough tell the difference. It's through this lens that I'm sympathetic to current court criticisms. Related: persecution complexes. Doesn't mean the persecution isn't real, but it does tend to distort perception. I genuinely believe that the right has a persecution complex far beyond anyone on the left, except for maybe Marxists.
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It's so obviously grasping at Straws. Thomas has been over of the most ideologically consistent justices in modern history, there is just no good evidence of him throwing cases in any way. It's this weird mistake theory belief that no one can believe anything different than what you believe, so if anyone acts like they believe it there must be corruption involved.
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