News bits: Analysis: Corrupting the Supreme Court is a political goal?; Etc.

Lever News proposes interesting rationale for why the modern Supreme Court is so resistant to ethics and transparency:  

Here’s The Real Goal Of Supreme Court Corruption

The prospect of luxury gifts and outside cash is designed to halt the historical trend of GOP appointees becoming more liberal

As the Founders noted, judges are given lifetime appointments for the explicit purpose of preserving an “independent spirit” that allows them to change their views without fear of consequences. And in fact, data suggests that in the past, many conservative justices have become more liberal as they age.

In light of that, the money and gifts flowing to conservative justices can be seen not merely as cheap influence-peddling schemes to secure specific rulings in individual cases. It can also be seen as a grand plan to deter the ideological freedom that lifetime appointments afford.

In short, the largesse from billionaires and Leo — who helped assemble the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative supermajority as President Donald Trump’s judicial adviser — creates personal financial incentives for justices to remain doctrinaire ideologues and resist any deviation from the conservative line, even if they might once in a while have an inkling to dissent.

No doubt, preventing this so-called “ideological drift” is exactly the point, as Five To Four’s Michael Liroff noted in a recent episode of Lever Live. From Earl Warren to William Brennan to John Paul Stevens to David Souter, the Republican Supreme Court appointees who ended up becoming liberals haunt the psyche of the right’s judicial activists. It is this dynamic that conservative puppet masters most want to prevent, because it has not been an anomaly. 

In 2015, FiveThirtyEight parsed the data and quantified a big trend in its headline: “Supreme Court Justices Get More Liberal As They Get Older.”

As you can see in the chart documenting the trend over nearly a century, many Republican nominees given the political freedom of a lifetime appointment have become more liberal in their rulings as they age.

That is an interesting, plausible explanation for why it is now so important to corrupt Supreme Court justices. It could explain why the justices themselves resist transparency and adopting any ethics rules at all. If they are properly groomed and play the radical right game well enough, they know they will probably be amply rewarded. 

Clarence Thomas has publicly stated that the pay for that Supreme Court justices get isn't worth it. He claims to be staying there for reasons of principle. Corruption can be seen as a principle that is worth staying for, at least for him. And, Sotomayor has also recently been caught in conflicts she refused to recuse herself from. At least $1 million  was involved in that little embarrassment, assuming she or any of them can be embarrassed by any level of corruption.

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The jury finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation probably won't faze him personally financially (he has to pay only $5 million), or politically, at least in the short run. The NYT comments: "After an indictment in Manhattan, Donald Trump’s supporters fell in line behind him."

Will there be serious political ramifications over time? My guess is no, but that remains to be seen. After all, now he gets to play the innocent, falsely accused, wrongly found liable, patriotic pussy grabbing, fornicating martyr. His base will eat that red meat up with gusto. 

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A post I put up a couple of days ago about reframing the federal debt issue in terms of seeing the 14th Amendment as controlling, About the federal debt time bomb: Reframing the issue. According to the NYT, Biden appears to be seriously considering it. He should. If he is right, then the debt ceiling goes away as an increasingly contentious issue. If not, the can just got kicked down the road for a year or maybe two as the case goes to the Supreme Court for a final decision.

The constitutional language of the 14th Amendment, Sec. 4 at issue is simple and clear. It reads in relevant part: The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. 

Because the radical right Republicans hate government and domestic spending programs, the authoritarian Republican court would desperately like to decide against Biden if he chooses this path. The question is what reasonable rationale could they possibly dream up in the face of such constitutional clarity and simplicity? They would have to make up a whopper of nonsense or somehow apply one of their existing bogus legal theories to arrive at their preferred destination of gutting government and civil liberties and calling it "constitutional."

But fear not, this radical right court with it's extreme lack of principle and morality, is fully up to the daunting task of shafting democracy and civil liberties, even if it commits unspeakable travesty on the constitution.

Radical right legal "reasoning"

It gets 'em wherever they want to go, 

just like "reasoning" the Bible