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GOP billionaire who funded Clarence Thomas's vacations has also given thousands of dollars to Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin

A Republican megadonor has been secretly funding lavish vacations for Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, according to a new ProPublica report.

But Texas billionaire Harlan Crow's largesse goes far beyond yacht trips and resort stays with the top conservative jurist. It also includes thousands of dollars in contributions to congressional Democrats known for bucking their party.

According to an Insider review of federal campaign finance data, Crow has given a total $5,800 to Democratic-turned-Independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema's campaign account and $5,000 in May 2022 to Getting Stuff Done PAC, a leadership PAC tied to the Arizona senator.

Crow first contributed $2,900 to Sinema's campaign in June 2021 before giving another $5,800 in November 2021 — prompting the campaign to refund half of it after Crow apparently exceeded federal contribution limits.

Crow contributed $2,800 in March 2021 to Sen. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia moderate who's opposed several of President Joe Biden's nominees and has left the door open to running against Biden for president in 2024.

Together, Sinema and Manchin have caused significant headaches for Democrats over the last two years — first by opposing much of the "Build Back Better" social spending and climate bill and then by opposing Democrats' plans of weakening the Senate's 60-vote filibuster to pass voting rights legislation.

Crow has also made significant contributions to moderate-to-conservative House Democrats.

According to federal campaign finance data, the Texas billionaire has given $16,800 to Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey since 2018, contributing thousands as recently as October 2022.

Gottheimer, a member of the so-called "Unbreakable Nine" of moderate Democrats who insisted on de-linking Build Back Better from the infrastructure bill, has at times been a thorn in the side of his party as well.

And Crow has contributed $12,500 to Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas since 2006. Cuellar, a conservative opponent of abortion rights, faced a strong primary challenge from progressive activist Jessica Cisneros in 2022.

Crow's relationship and lavish vacations with Justice Thomas have raised significant ethics concerns — Thomas never disclosed the flights and yacht trips financed by the GOP megadonor, apparently violating a post-Watergate federal law that requires justices to report gifts.

It also raises questions over what influence, if any, Crow has been able to exert over Thomas's decisions as a Justice.

For his part, Crow told ProPublica in a statement that he and his wife "have never sought to influence Justice Thomas on any legal or political issue."

Insider has reached out to representatives for Manchin, Sinema, Gottheimer, and Cuellar, asking them if they plan to return the contributions and whether they have concerns about Crow's relationship with Justice Thomas. We will update this story if we receive a response.

“No one should assume that the Fed can really protect the economy and the financial system and our reputation globally from the damage that [a U.S. default] might inflict,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said today. “We shouldn’t even be talking about a world in which the U.S. doesn’t pay its bills. It just shouldn’t be a thing,” he added.

Powell commented on the debt ceiling crisis when he was in front of the press to announce an interest rate hike of a quarter of a percentage point intended to reduce inflation further. Interest rate hikes make it more expensive to borrow money, which should cool the economy. At the same time, more expensive borrowing upsets the stock market, which tends to fall after a rate hike, as it did today.

Interestingly, while Republicans are blaming Democrats for creating inflation by pumping too much money into the economy through social welfare programs, The Wall Street Journal yesterday embraced the argument that a key factor in inflation has been price gouging by corporations. A piece by Paul Hannon noted that businesses are boosting their profit margins, confident that consumers will blame supply chain issues and higher energy prices rather than the companies padding their profits.

Oil giant Shell just announced almost $9.6 billion in profits in the first three months of 2023.

But Powell’s management of inflation is a smaller story right now than the debt ceiling. Today, the White House Council of Economic Advisers explained three different scenarios. If the debt ceiling crisis runs right up to the edge of default and is resolved before that default, unemployment would rise by 0.1% and 200,000 jobs would be at risk. A default lasting less than a week would cost 500,000 jobs, creating a 0.3% rise in unemployment. And if the U.S. goes into a longer default, the Council of Economic Advisers says, 8.3 million people will lose their jobs and the stock market will fall by 45%.

In every case, economic growth will turn negative.

The White House yesterday released a fact sheet outlining the cuts Republicans are demanding before they will agree to raise the debt ceiling. In addition to costing jobs and throwing the nation into a recession, their demands will cut nearly 7,500 rail inspection days, shut down at least 375 air traffic control towers, and cut $5.2 billion from highway infrastructure projects. The cuts will eliminate nearly 200,000 child care slots, cut 1.7 million people from food security programs, and remove rental assistance from nearly 600,000 families.

In short, the Republicans’ demands are a way to force the country to accept their vision of the country, one that relies on the markets and private enterprise and slashes government action to provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, regulate business, and protect civil rights.

So far, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has stayed out of the fight over raising the debt ceiling, both because he was out of the Senate recovering from a fall, and because he has apparently wanted to let House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) deal with the far-right extremists in the conference while appearing to give establishment Republicans plausible deniability from the extremists’ demands. But Biden is trying to pull McConnell into the negotiations to emphasize that the fight over the debt ceiling is not about him and McCarthy, but a struggle that involves the whole government.

While McConnell seems to be trying to hold Senate Republicans apart from the House extremists, a story that has fallen under the radar is that Senator Steve Daines (R-MT), chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the man responsible for the fundraising to get Republicans elected to the U.S. Senate, has endorsed Donald Trump. Daines is in close touch both with Trump and with the wealthiest Republican donors. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) made it clear to Jonathan Swan and Carl Hulse of The New York Times that all the Republicans care about is winning back the majority. “I really don't care what the tactics are,“ he said.

Not caring about tactics so long as you are in power might well be a problem for another Republican, former Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker. Senior political reporter for The Daily Beast Roger Sollenberger dropped a story tonight alleging that Walker solicited hundreds of thousands of dollars from a billionaire industrialist who believed he was donating to Walker’s Senate campaign, only to have Walker take the money personally. If this story pans out, it suggests Walker will be in legal trouble for election finance issues.

Today began with another story about yet more ties between Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and Republican billionaire Harlan Crow. Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica reported that Crow paid the private school tuition for Thomas’s grandnephew, to the tune of more than $6,000 a month, ultimately adding up to an amount that may have been more than $150,000. Thomas did not report the payments.

Then news broke that a jury in Washington, D.C., found four members of the far-right extremist group the Proud Boys—Enrique Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Zachary Rehl—guilty of seditious conspiracy for their participation in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. A fifth defendant, Dominic Pezzola, was found not guilty of seditious conspiracy but, like the others, was found guilty of other serious charges including obstructing Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election results and conspiring to prevent Congress and federal officers from discharging their duties.

In a statement, Attorney General Merrick Garland noted that the Department of Justice has secured more than 600 convictions for criminal conduct surrounding the events of January 6, including fourteen “leaders of both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers for seditious conspiracy—specifically conspiring to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power. Our work will continue,” he said.

It is unlikely that Garland’s statement about ongoing work was casual.

Defense attorneys for the Proud Boys emphasized that their clients believed then-president Trump—who, after all, had told them in September 2020 to “stand back and stand by”—had called them to Washington to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Although there were no explicit orders to attack the Capitol, members of the Proud Boys testified that they believed there was an implicit agreement to prevent Biden from becoming president.

Tarrio, convicted today, was not at the Capitol during the attack, but a jury convicted him of seditious conspiracy nonetheless, suggesting that leaders who incited the violence can be found guilty, even if they weren’t present.

Today attorneys for E. Jean Carroll, who is suing the former president in a civil trial for battery and defamation connected with his alleged rape of her, rested their case. So did Trump’s lawyers, but District Judge Lewis Kaplan gave Trump the weekend to rethink testifying. “He has a right to testify which has been waived but if he has second thoughts, I’ll at least consider it and maybe we’ll see what happens,” Kaplan said.

Other investigations of the former president continue. The New York Times today broke the story that prosecutors in the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith investigating the storage of classified documents are talking to a confidential witness who worked for Trump at Mar-a-Lago. There are questions about whether Trump deliberately moved boxes containing documents in order to hide them from the Justice Department.

Meanwhile, the debt ceiling crisis has not gone away. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines today told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on global threats that a U.S. default on our debts would enable both Russia and China to say “such an event [demonstrates] the chaos within the United States, that we’re not capable of functioning as a democracy, and the governance issues associated with it." She explained: “It would be…almost a certainty that they would look to take advantage of the opportunity.”

Moody’s Analytics has weighed in on the economic effects of House speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) plan, noting that with a clean debt limit increase, real gross domestic product is expected to grow 2.25% this year. Under McCarthy's plan, that growth will be 1.6%. “The significant government spending cuts in the [plan] are substantial headwinds to near-term economic growth,” it wrote. “Adding to the economic headwinds created by the legislation is the considerable uncertainty created by having to address the debt limit again a year from now.”

Weirdly, Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) at a Senate Budget Committee hearing today blamed Democrats for not raising the debt ceiling themselves last year without help from the Republicans. Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo broke down this argument. If the Democrats had raised the debt ceiling through reconciliation, without Republican votes, Republicans would have insisted that it was the Democrats, not them, who had burdened the country with debt when, in fact, the Republicans added almost $8 trillion to the debt under Trump.

Romney’s complaint amounts to berating the responsible Democrats for not protecting the country against the Republicans, who are willing to burn down the country. As Riga put it: “Darn you Democrats for not taking care of the debt ceiling then, because you knew we’d refuse to raise the limit unless you conceded to our demands, and look what a sticky spot we’re in now.”

Meanwhile, the editorial board of the Fresno Bee, from McCarthy’s district, today called out the speaker for approving the huge increases of the Trump years and, now that a Democrat is in the White House, insisting on drastic cuts. The board reiterated that the debt ceiling and the budget are separate issues. “McCarthy is pandering to the hard-right members who only backed him for House speaker on the 15th vote in exchange for concessions on the issues like the debt,” it said. “Speaker McCarthy, don’t take America to the brink of default. Stop the posturing, raise the debt ceiling, then have the honest budget debate the nation needs.”

Finally, the day ended where it began, with another scandal involving Justice Clarence Thomas.

This evening, Emma Brown, Shawn Boburg, and Jonathan O'Connell of the Washington Post broke the story that right-wing judicial activist Leonard Leo, who as a leader of the Federalist Society that backs originalist judges has been key to transforming the federal judiciary, a decade ago arranged for payments of tens of thousands of dollars to Thomas’s wife Ginni. Leo and Thomas are close friends.

In January 2012, Leo told Kellyanne Conway, who was then a Republican pollster, to bill the Judicial Education Project, a nonprofit organization with which he was associated, and then pass the money on to Ginni Thomas. He told Conway to “give” Thomas “another $25K,” and emphasized that she should include “No mention of Ginni, of course,” in the paperwork. She did so. Later that year, the Judicial Education Project filed a brief before the court in the landmark Shelby County v. Holder case, in which the court, by a vote of 5–4, gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Thomas voted on the side of the Judicial Education Project.

And this is the profound national crisis at the heart of the stories emerging about Thomas. His votes were decisive not only in Shelby County v. Holder, but also in the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, also decided by a vote of 5–4, which opened the floodgates for dark money in political campaigns. Those decisions dramatically undermined our democracy. It now seems imperative to grapple with the fact it appears a key vote on the court that decided those cases was compromised.

And this is the profound national crisis at the heart of the stories emerging about Thomas. His votes were decisive not only in Shelby County v. Holder, but also in the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, also decided by a vote of 5–4, which opened the floodgates for dark money in political campaigns. Those decisions dramatically undermined our democracy. It now seems imperative to grapple with the fact it appears a key vote on the court that decided those cases was compromised.

Are there enough democrats in the senate to impeach Clarence Thomas? Is there any hope it would ever happen?

the answer -- probably not...

Yeah who woulda ever guessed that there'd be any problems after the country found out that the wife of a supreme court justice is full-on MagAnon?

Region Philbis wrote:

the answer -- probably not...

Almost certainly not!

Today’s job numbers came in higher than expected, with the U.S. adding 253,000 nonfarm jobs in April. Unemployment fell yet again, to 3.4%, matching a rate not seen since 1969. Black unemployment is at an all-time low of 4.7%. For Hispanics it’s 4.4%, and for Asian Americans, 2.8%. The rate for adult women is 3.1%. Average hourly wages rose 0.5%.

This good economic news didn’t come from nowhere. The Biden administration has focused on building infrastructure, bringing supply chains home, and bolstering new manufacturing. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act have invested in workers.

At the same time, the administration has taken measures to claw back some of the power the country has ceded to business leaders over the past decades. It has taken steps to promote competition, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s negotiation of a global minimum corporate tax to stop nations from racing to attract investment by cutting taxes, and the Justice Department’s enforcement of antitrust laws, which has led to a number of directors resigning from interlocking boards.

The Federal Trade Commission has proposed a ban on noncompete agreements, which prevent people from moving from job to job. The FTC estimates that getting rid of the agreements would increase wages by nearly $300 billion per year and enable about 30 million Americans to move to better jobs.

Biden’s approach to governance is not just a change in policy from the past forty years. It is a demonstration of the tedious, hard, incremental work of moving the ball forward in a modern democracy.

The extraordinary work that goes into governance showed last night in a keynote address National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan gave on the administration's approach to Middle East affairs at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Moving away from the nation's previous tight focus on terrorism, Sullivan emphasized a theme that the Biden administration has highlighted since the president took office: “the integration of foreign policy and domestic policy.”

Sullivan emphasized that the administration's template for foreign affairs is “realistic and pragmatic” but also “ambitious and optimistic about [what] the United States and our allies can achieve together over time.” The administration's new framework for U.S. engagement in the Middle East, he said, “is built on five basic elements: partnerships, deterrence, diplomacy and de-escalation, integration, and values.”

Over the past two years, the U.S. has strengthened partnerships in the Middle East with “strategic dialogues, high-level visits—including two presidential visits—exchanges, and over 200 military exercises,” and it continues to strengthen ties between allies. It has deterred violence through counterstrikes but prefers to rely on diplomacy and de-escalation of tensions. “[E]very day, we are plugging away at proactive and creative diplomacy across the Middle East region,” Sullivan said.

Most notably, the administration helped to end the war in Yemen by setting the terms for a truce mediated by the United Nations. That truce has held—so far—for fourteen months. “Humanitarian aid and fuel are flowing through Yemen’s ports, the civilian airport in Sanaa has reopened, and the parties are actively in discussions on a roadmap to ultimately bring this war to an end.”

Sullivan said that the administration is working to help countries in the Middle East integrate into an interconnected region, and finally, he talked about values. “Just as we always strive to perfect our own democracy at home, we will always raise concerns regarding human rights and fundamental freedoms in our engagements around the world, including in the Middle East,” he said.

Sullivan noted that U.S. values include women's rights and the ability to criticize leaders without fear. Enabling populations to unleash their full potential means religious tolerance and protection of minorities. It means pressure on other countries to acknowledge freedom, and it means remaining a key source of humanitarian aid.

As if in illustration of regional partnerships, today Saudi Arabia and the United States issued a joint statement on the start of talks between the warring parties in Sudan. The statement emphasized regional alliances, noting: “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States…would like to stress the efforts of the countries and organizations which supported these talks, including Quad countries (The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, The United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States), the League of Arab States, and partners from the Trilateral Mechanism (UNITAMS [U.N. Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan], the African Union, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development).”

The careful cultivation of allies and complicated pressures enabled Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to pull together an international coalition to stand against Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine. The pressure of that coalition appears to be helping Ukrainian forces undermine Russia: today, in one of a series of videos, the leader of the mercenary Wagner Group that has been fighting for Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, expressed fury at the Kremlin for leaving his men without supplies and vowed to leave the key city of Bakhmut on May 10. Standing surrounded by corpses, he raged: “Those are soldiers we lost today. Their blood is still fresh…. They were someone’s sons or fathers. You, f*ckers, who don’t give us ammo, will burn in hell.”

Prigozhin could simply be jockeying for power, but a less ambiguous sign that Russia is in trouble is that Belarus has set up new border controls for Russians trying to enter their borders.

The slow, careful work of governance undertaken by the Biden administration is a very different thing than what is offered by members of a party whose goal for forty years was to slash government and to use the military to make the world conform to U.S. goals, and whose goal now seems to be to ram through minority rule without bothering to follow the laws.

When asked about Iran’s attempt to develop a nuclear weapon, Sullivan implicitly criticized the impulsivity of the previous president, who abruptly pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear capabilities. “[T]he best way to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is an effective agreement that stops them from getting a nuclear weapon,” he said. He continued: “I regard the decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, without anything to replace it or any strategy to deal with it other than the imposition of sanctions—which we have continued and added to actually,” with concern.

Today, Mississippi governor Tate Reeves illustrated the Republicans’ simplistic approach to governance when he announced his reelection campaign with a 12-second campaign video of his face superimposed on cowboy actor Clint Eastwood, shooting at Mexican “bandits.” The imagery tied directly into the history of the modern-day Republican Party, which rose on the image of the cowboy who would cut through the “socialism” of a government that used tax money to keep the playing field level and restore individual men to power.

But that was always just an image, and now, shown up against the reality of the complicated and hard work of governance, it has become cartoonish.

Frank Apisa wrote:

Region Philbis wrote:

the answer -- probably not...

Almost certainly not!

You would have to have republicans with moral conviction - I don't think you could find 2, much less 10.

But there will be a bunch more Republicans just plain convicted.