Rot at the Top

Who knew the Supreme Court came with perks?

Jim: What do you make of this Justice Clarence Thomas issue, Charlie? I thought things were bad enough when ProPublica, the non-profit investigative news site, exposed trips and luxurious gifts larded on the Supreme Court justice by Harlan Crow, the Texas conservative billionaire whose family made a fortune in real estate. Crow's generosity to Thomas and his wife, conservative activist Ginnie, who was paid a $120,000 a year salary by a political group that Crow helped finance, staggers the imagination. Crow hosted Thomas and some members of his family for luxury trips on his super yacht, the 162-foot Michaela Rose, and on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 private jet that can fly non-stop from New York to Tokyo.

photo by Red Charlie

Now it turns out that Crow's largess didn't stop with globe-trotting to far-flung places like Indonesia and New Zealand. The Texas billionaire, who is active in conservative political circles, also paid private school tuition so Mark Martin, the Thomas grandnephew whom the high court justice said he “raised as a son,” could attend the Hidden Lake Academy in northern Georgia, and the Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. The ProPublica report said Hidden Lake’s tuition ran to $6,200 a month. A lawyer and friend of Thomas told ProPublica that Crow has picked up $100,000 in tuition for Thomas’ grandnephew.

The gifts don’t stop with tuition at the pricey private schools that are a fixture of Washington’s disgraceful educational landscape. Crow gave Thomas the bible of anti-slavery icon Frederick Douglas valued at $19,000. Various newspapers and media outlets reported other individual gifts that accrued to Thomas’s benefits. We don’t truly know how many gifts or how much money was involved in Thomas’s multi-year gift-a-thon, though. Justice Thomas, the intellectual leader of the high court’s six to three conservative majority and the court's longest serving justice, didn’t report much of this largess in his annual financial disclosures. He said he didn’t think he had to. Really! This is rot at the top. What do you think, Charlie?

Charlie::  It’s time to take a walk down scandal memory lane to the event that made even typically grubby state legislators and campaign financiers clean up their acts: Watergate. Richard Nixon’s disastrous effort to short circuit democracy and shut up people who were bothering him led, of course, to his resignation. But the aftermath fueled an era of reform aimed at cleaning up the messes in campaign finance and making the process of politics at least a little more pristine. Of course, no one wanted to go all the way with this, but one of the most important legacies was transparency. That didn’t mean lawmakers could no longer be bought, but it did mean you would know who was doing the buying if they obeyed the law and met disclosure rules. Of course, Supreme Court Justices are different. Or are they? Here’s some interesting numbers. A justice is paid $274,200 a year, which is far beyond what most American’s make, but apparently not if you are one of the Supremes. Want to write a book about your judicial thoughts? It’s not unusual for a publisher to put $600,000 or so on the table and provide a ghost writer to complete the actual work. Then there are the connections. Apparently, Republican fat cats feel much happier if there is a justice on the yacht, or at the villa...wherever. Big gifts are not uncommon. Tuition for a beloved nephew? No problem there, either. And then there are the spouses. Thomas’s wife rakes in buckets of money from her work with conservative political groups. It all adds up, you know. Still, even justices are people, sometimes with their hand out, obviously. They travel in pricey circles, and no one wants them to dress in something out of fashion. I worked in Washington, and you did, too. I understand that. But it’s not too much to expect the Supremes to practice full disclosure. And they shouldn’t be out there chumming like hookers for big dollars. It all just seems so, so.... seamy!

Jim: I really don’t get this. You’d think someone would be happy with a salary of $274,200, which is about five to six times as high as the Labor Department’s latest figure for U.S. median income. That is clearly not enough for Thomas and his wife. The couple’s reported net worth is $24 million, a figure that is almost 200 times the $121,700 median for American families. She’s a well-connected political operative in Washington, and in fairness she deserves to earn money, although not by trying to help overturn an election for former President Donald Trump. Her fingerprints were all over that effort. His responsibilities as a Supreme Court Justice dwarf those of a corporate CEO with salaries that make Thomas’ look like my dry-cleaning bill. But why the secret gifts and special favors? They degrade the reputation of a court that should credibly set aside politics as they grapple with the nation’s most challenging legal, social and moral problems. If he’s unhappy with his salary, there’s plenty of opportunities with the Crows of the world.

High court justices shouldn’t come off as just another bunch of money-grubbing, partisan political operatives obsessed with self-aggrandizement. The New York Times Maureen Dowd had a great column Sunday on how court led by Chief Justice John Roberts is drifting towards more partisan politics, further undermining its’ credibility. The high court needs clear and strict rules of transparency about personal finances and politics. If the justices continue to resist disclosing more about their incomes and politics, then Congress should do it for them. America has many good, moral justices who play by the rules. This court, with Thomas leading the charge, makes them all look bad. We need more transparency on every level.

Charlie:  I think all the way back to my days covering county court in a little place in Pennsylvania and the feeling you got when a harsh penalty was imposed, even in cases where people were undeniably guilty of crimes. Judges have generally all been diligent to my mind about their responsibility to administer justice. Since most of them came to the court after successful law careers, they already had money. But I think the Thomas case, like many an ethics case before it, underlines the glaring weakness in ethics and disclosure laws. I would hope the Senate can address those problems, but one never knows about these things. In my experience, many law makers view themselves as part of an elite, particularly in Washington. Something tells me that despite the noise of the Thomas embarrassment, lawmakers will keep looking away from a problem so serious that whenever it is revealed, it makes one question the wisdom of lifetime appointments.

—James O’Shea and Charles Madigan

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune.

Charles Madigan is a writer and veteran foreign and national correspondent for UPI and the Chicago Tribune, where he also served as a senior writer and editor. He examines news reporting, politics and world events.