Mob Justice at the Supreme Court - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
Friendship? This, not the bureaucratic payment-for-service model that Bonasera expects, is the basis for how Corleone’s world functions. The Godfather agrees to deal with Bonasera’s enemies, but in return for an unspecified future obligation. “Some day, and that day may never come,” he tells Bonasera, “I’ll call upon you to do a service for me.” This is understood to be more ominous and weighty than any monetary debt could be. But as the powerful know, the right to call in a future favor is priceless.
-
Thomas himself has echoed Crow’s just-friends line, maintaining that nothing is nefarious about his relationship with his benefactor. This is despite Thomas failing to mention any of this expensive largesse in his official financial disclosures over the years.
-
s much as Americans like to complain about bureaucracies, they operate by a set of published rules, and compliance with those rules is supposed to be transparent to the public. Disclosure promotes public confidence. The consent of the governed is obtained through trust that the system is fair and subject to meaningful oversight.
- ...9 more annotations...
-
One sign of a failed state is that networks of favors and obligations among friends begin to subsume the formal institutional pathways of power in governmen
-
When rich businesspeople shower lavish favors on powerful jurists—at a moment when questions of economic inequality, business regulation, and corporate power are among the most divisive matters before the courts—can those jurists credibly say they do no service in return?
-
Crow’s firm did have business before the Supreme Court in 2004—a case from which Thomas did not recuse himself. This brings the Thomas-Crow relationship into a gray area in which no overt crime has occurred, but over which hangs a cloud of suggestive obscurity incompatible with democratic legitimacy.
-
when elites—both corporate and political—conduct their affairs through “friendly” exchanges of favors and gifts, the result is corruption that can render democracy nonfunctional.
-
As Gambetta has pointed out, even people who might seem insignificant can play a vital role in a Mafia-style system. They “may be short of cash but capable of returning valuable favors,” he writes. “Services not for sale elsewhere gain common currency here: votes, … bureaucratic dispensations, … selective privileges of all sorts.”
-
These favors are the great leveler between the rich and powerful and the network of people who “owe” them.
-
When Neil Gorsuch was nominated to the Supreme Court, he was part owner of a Colorado property that had languished on the market for two years. Shortly after his confirmation, Gorsuch and his co-owners sold it to the chief executive of a law firm with frequent business before the Court. Although Gorsuch declared the amount he earned from the sale on his ethics disclosure form (between $250,001 and $500,000), he notably left blank the name of the buyer. Since then, the law firm has argued at least 22 cases before Gorsuch and his colleagues; in the 12 cases where Gorsuch’s decision is recorded, he decided in favor of the firm’s clients eight times. A coincidence, perhaps. But if it was in any way a “bureaucratic dispensation” in return for taking a justice’s share of a white-elephant property off his hands, the public would never know. That’s the problem. Legitimacy has always been mostly a matter of appearances.
-
According to whistleblower documents obtained by Insider, Jane Roberts earned more than $10 million in commissions as a legal recruiter from 2007 to 2014, with clients including at least one firm that later appeared before her husband. The Supreme Court operates mostly on an honor system—which becomes untenable if lawyers appear to be seeking favor before the high court by enriching its members’ households, and if justices’ spouses can be plausibly accused of monetizing their proximity to official power.
-
“Friends of John were mostly friends of Jane, and while it certainly did not harm her access to top people to have John as her spouse, I never saw her ‘use’ that inappropriately,” one of Jane Roberts’s former colleagues told Insider. But another colleague saw her actions as corrupt and filed a whistleblower complaint. As part of her sworn testimony in that case, Jane summed up the modus operandi of the Supreme Court and its circle with a line that could have come straight from the Godfather’s lips: “Successful people have successful friends.”