Justice with Benefits: Justice Clarence Thomas’ Luxe Lifestyle

Friendly Grift or Pay to Play?

There has been a steady drumbeat of news published in recent months about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ unreported grift enabled by business titans over the past 20 years. 

Until 2004, Thomas actually did report gratis travel and accommodations. A Los Angeles Times story including those disclosures and noting the difference in declared value with other justices’ reports was apparently the trigger for discontinuing documenting benefits derived from Thomas’ wealthy associations. 

When asked about his lack of disclosure, Thomas said that “colleagues and others in the judiciary” had advised him that he did not need to report the hospitality of good friends. 

Investigative teams from Propublica, Business Insider, The New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post have shed light on the Justice’s leisurely lifestyle.

The latest reporting on Thomas’ rewards is an expansion of earlier accounts, published by Propublica this morning.

• During his three decades on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas has enjoyed steady access to a lifestyle most Americans can only imagine. A cadre of industry titans and ultrawealthy executives have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into the premium suites at sporting events and sent their private jets to fetch him — including, on more than one occasion, an entire 737. It’s a stream of luxury that is both more extensive and from a wider circle than has been previously understood.

• Like clockwork, Thomas’ leisure activities have been underwritten by benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence. Their gifts include:

• At least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.

A month ago, the New York Times disclosed the connections between Justice Thomas and the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans. The charitable organization, which awards college scholarships to underprivileged students, is also a meeting ground for the rich and famous.

• When he joined the Horatio Alger Association, Justice Thomas entered a world whose defining ethos of meritocratic success — that anyone can achieve the American dream with hard work, pluck and a little luck — was the embodiment of his own life philosophy, and a foundation of his jurisprudence. As he argued from the bench in his concurrence to the recent decision striking down affirmative action, the court should be “focusing on individuals as individuals,” rather than on the view that Americans are “all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society.”

• At Horatio Alger, he moved into the inner circle, a cluster of extraordinarily wealthy, largely conservative members who lionized him and all that he had achieved. While he has never held an official leadership position, in some ways he has become the association’s leading light. 

• He has granted it unusual access to the Supreme Court, where every year he presides over the group’s signature event: a ceremony in the courtroom at which he places Horatio Alger medals around the necks of new lifetime members. One entrepreneur called it “the closest thing to being knighted in the United States.” At the same time, Justice Thomas has served as the group’s best messenger, meeting with and mentoring the recipients of millions of dollars a year in Horatio Alger college scholarships, many of whom come from backgrounds that mirror his own.

The organization’s name comes from an 19th century children’s literature author whose only apparent plot line in his books aimed at boys was about a hard working but downtrodden young man who impresses a wealthy businessman and is rewarded with a hand up into the upper class.

This overworked “bootstraps” scenario fits right in with the libertarian-type views favored by wealthy conservatives who consider themselves self-made. 

The Business Insider’s contribution to this story revealed the Horatio Alger Association had been given unusual access to the Supreme Court’s courtroom by Justice Clarence Thomas. It serves as the platform for the annual induction ceremonies of new Association members,

Roughly a dozen celebrities, politicians, and wealthy business people receive an award annually, giving the group visibility and a platform for fundraising.

From the Washington Post:

• In the years since its founding, the group has presented the Horatio Alger Award to a new class of about 10 to 12 people annually, inducting them into the association as lifelong members. The awards are given during three days of festivities in Washington, which, according to the Times, typically include dinner at the National Portrait Gallery and receptions at the Ritz-Carlton. More than 750 people have been given the designation, according to the organization’s website, and there are more than 300 living members of the Horatio Alger Association.

There is a dark side of the rags-to-riches premise of the group.  Nowadays, Horatio Alger might find his works included in the book-banning lists of the network of so-called grassroots groups. His books would likely be declared to be associated with the “groomers” alleged to be lurking in the back rooms of drag show venues and public libraries.

From Wikipedia:

• Early in 1866, a church committee of men was formed to investigate reports that Alger had sexually molested boys. Church officials reported to the hierarchy in Boston that Alger had been charged with "the abominable and revolting crime of gross familiarity with boys." Alger denied nothing, admitted he had been imprudent, considered his association with the church dissolved, and left town. 

• Alger sent Unitarian officials in Boston a letter of remorse, and his father assured them his son would never seek another post in the church. The officials were satisfied and decided no further action would be taken.

Propublica’s latest investigation goes beyond its original reporting about the relationship between Thomas and Texas businessman Harlan Crow. 

Three additional rich guys are now known to be in the ranks of those who enabled the Justice’s lavish lifestyle: former Berkshire Hathaway executive David Sokol, H. Wayne Huizenga, a billionaire (now deceased), and oil baron Paul “Tony” Novelly.

• Each of these men — Novelly, Huizenga, Sokol and Crow — appears to have first met Thomas after he ascended to the Supreme Court. With the exception of Crow, their names are nowhere in Thomas’ financial disclosures, where justices are required by law to publicly report most gifts.

The same apologists who would have us believe the former president’s transgressions aren’t true are saying these relationships between Thomas and the uber wealthy are not “pay for play.” It’s unlikely there will be any sort of investigation or hearing on the justice’s abuses. What’s been done is not against the law in any strict sense. And the political capital necessary to tackle any aspect of the Supreme Court isn’t there, given a divided Congress and partisan divisions.

We can only hope that someday the Court will be asked to provide accountability for its justices. In the meantime, let’s keep reminding voters of the horrific decisions it’s issued in the last few years.

***

Thursday News Stories You Might Want to Read

***

First American City to Tame Inflation Owes Its Success to Affordable Housing Via Bloomberg News (Psst– They did it by eliminating Single Family Zoning)

• In May, the Twin Cities became the first major metropolitan area to see annual inflation fall below the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. Its 1.8% pace of price increases was the lowest of any region that month.

• That’s largely due to a region-wide push to address one of the most intractable issues for both the Fed and American consumers: rising housing costs. Well before pandemic-related supply-chain snarls and labor shortages roiled the economy, the city of Minneapolis eliminated zoning that allowed only single-family homes and since 2018 has invested $320 million for rental assistance and subsidies.

• That helped unleash a boom in construction of apartments and condos in the region that proved to be a powerful antidote against inflation, given that the cost of shelter accounts for more than a third of the overall US consumer-price index. Minneapolis shelter prices were up at half the nation’s annual pace in May.

***

Red states are threatening to criminalize out-of-state abortions. These blue states are fighting back Via Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times

• Blue states, however, are fighting back. Nineteen attorneys general of blue states (including Rob Bonta of California) have signed onto a friend-of-the-court brief in a lawsuit filed in July by abortion advocates in Boise federal court seeking to overturn the law as an unconstitutional infringement on the right to interstate travel. (The attorney general of Washington, D.C., has also signed on.)

• The blue states assert that the Idaho law’s reach extends far beyond the state’s borders. The law, their brief says, “threatens to punish, and will chill, the ability of healthcare providers, counselors, and trusted adults” to provide their Idaho patients with “vital information and support about lawful healthcare” in their states.

• They raise an important point. The Idaho law is an example of how anti-abortion fanatics aren’t inclined to stop at merely throwing the healthcare systems of their own states into chaos. They want to create the same anarchy nationwide. Travel restrictions are a tool in their arsenal.

***

How Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii Into a Tinderbox Via The New York Times

• The fires in Hawaii would be shocking anywhere — killing at least 36 people, in one of the deadliest wildfires in the United States in modern history. But the devastation is especially striking because of where it happened: In a state defined by its lush vegetation, a far cry from the dry landscape normally associated with fire threats.

• The explanation is as straightforward as it is sobering: as the planet heats up, no place is protected from disasters.

• The story of this week’s blaze arguably began decades ago, when Hawaii started experiencing a long-term decline in average annual rainfall. Since 1990, rainfall at selected monitoring sites has been 31 percent lower in the wet season, and 6 percent lower in the dry season, according to work published in 2015 by researchers at the University of Hawaii and the University of Colorado.

***

Lead image: The Floridian Golf Club, an invitation only resort frequented by Justice Thomas