And another law prof, Jonathan Turley, similarly opines on the Supreme Court Justice's lawlessness and 'dangerous conceit,' comparing him to Louis XIV
March 7, 2011- In Friday's Daily Beast, University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos called for the removal of Justice Clarence Thomas from the U.S. Supreme Court bench, as based on 20 years of scofflaw, criminal behavior in withholding disclosure information on his wife Virginia "Ginni" Thomas' hundreds of thousands of dollars of income from Rightwing organizations which also happened to benefit from Thomas' votes on a number of SCOTUS opinions, including last year's infamous Citizens United decision.
Several weeks ago, The BRAD BLOG was among the first to specifically detail Thomas' years of "knowing and willful" violations of the U.S. criminal code, even as the mainstream corporate media largely ignored or downplayed those violations of the Rule of Law in their limited coverage.
In his column, Campos speaks to those crimes specifically, echoing our own analysis that they "certainly constitute a misdemeanor, and quite probably a felony, under federal law."
The law professor gives voice to the same questions so many of us have been asking about all of this: "Why is it likely that no consequences will be visited on a Supreme Court justice who has committed a series of criminal offenses? Why is this story not a full-blown scandal? And why did Clarence Thomas do what he did?"
He then goes on to offer the troubling answer to some of those questions by explaining…
Thomas is very unlikely to be prosecuted or otherwise sanctioned for the simple reason that, in the United States in 2011, we have a two-tiered system of laws. … despite living in a country with an unusually harsh criminal code that has created by far the biggest prison population in the world, our political and financial elites operate with something approaching complete impunity, safe in the knowledge that demands they be subjected to the same laws as everybody else will be ignored.
The entire column is a must-read, as it speaks to the heart of the outrage — and the double-standards — for which the privileged elite in this country, such as the Thomases, and their criminal brethren at, for example, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are no longer subject to the same Rule of Law that you and I and the majority of U.S. citizens are subject to. As Campos observes:
This in turn helps explain why a Supreme Court justice's egregious flouting of the law doesn't rise to the level of a significant public scandal: Because nothing is going to happen to Thomas, the fact that he has spent the last several years repeatedly flipping off the very same legal system that has made him one of the most powerful people in the country doesn't qualify as significant news. In America today, after all, the president orders American citizens to be assassinated with no trial, investment bankers steal billions, prisoners are tortured in flagrant violation of both U.S. and international law, and the legal system simply looks the other way
In Sunday's Los Angeles Times, another law professor, Jonathan Turley of Georgetown University, also takes an op-ed run at Thomas' "dangerous conceit" in flaunting the Rule of Law, by comparing his speech to the Federalist Society last month, in which he "defended" himself against the well-documented charges by playing the victim and claiming that those who felt he should be subject to the same system of justice as the rest of us were, in fact, "undermining" the court itself while he and his wife Ginni were simply devoting their lives to "defending liberty."