For years, Clarence Thomas has been showered with gifts. Flights on a billionaire’s private jet, lavish vacations cruising on his superyacht, summer stays at his Adirondacks compound, tuition for a child Thomas was raising, a quarter-million-dollar motorhome a wealthy friend paid for.
Those gifts were income, and income belongs on a tax return. Thomas treated them as nothing, and no public record shows he ever reported a dollar of it. Under Virginia law, leaving income that size off a return, if it was done to cheat the state, is a felony. The evidence is already public, and he could be charged on Monday.
Virginia law makes it a felony to file a state income tax return with a false statement on it, made with intent to defraud the Commonwealth. The statute is Virginia Code section 58.1-348, it carries up to five years in prison per count, and the clock has not run out on the returns Thomas filed for tax years 2020 through 2024. That is the whole case, and unlike everything else, it is a case a county prosecutor in Virginia has the plain authority to bring.
The worst part of this is that even if he is convicted and removed from the judiciary, Trump gets to pick his replacement, so it will not only not fix anything but will very likely make it worse.
The least reliable members of the facist block of SCOTUS are those appointed by Mr. Trump.
He’s really, really bad at the job.
thats a pretty astute observation. still, narrowly missing a “state-level charlie kirk” because the fascists are just fucking bad at the job is not the type of comfort I hope for.
Well, it’s all we’ve got right now.
Not really a new thing for fascists. Hitler screwed the German army so hard with dumb projects that had no chance of going anywhere, poor decision making, poor management of the government, etc. For example, the V-2 program is widely seen as a net loss for Germany - it cost too much, consumed too many resources, and never proved to do meaningful damage. Then there’s Germany’s obsession with giant tanks that were never going to be practical, even if they somehow made them reliable.
I mean the trial will take time and if Democrats get to control Congress after midterms they could just not confirm any of Trump’s picks. Who am I joking, the Democrats would never.
It needs to be delayed till January of next year, when the next Congress comes in session. If Thomas has any sense he’d resign if this looks like it’s going somewhere so Trump can sneak an appointment in. My best guess for what the Democrats would do, if they were able to block a Supreme Court pick, is come up with some sort of compromise. Maybe appoint somebody who’s a moderate, not a Trump acolyte. I doubt they’d want the optics of not confirming a justice for 2 years.
Are memories really that short? If you keep giving them help while they spit on you every chance they get then you’re just helping them. They blocked Obama and then had their candidates straight up lie to congress. There is a very strong case for not giving them the time of day much less a hearing in the Senate.
I agree they shouldn’t even give them the time of day. But I don’t know if they’d be willing to take the pressure of putting off a hearing for 2 years. I suspect they’d eventually buckle. Probably the best course of action is to just drag the whole thing out. You get hearings, but we’ll schedule it a ways out, turn down anyone where there’s even a hint that they’re lying, etc. That way they can claim they’re taking action, but Trump keeps sending them bad candidates, candidates who go against the clear expressed will of the American people, candidates who lie to Congress, candidates who have conflicts of interest, etc.