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.
Supreme court justices are appointed for life.
what can go wrong…
NOBODY should be appointed for life. That shit stinks of dictatorship real bad.
What bad could come of letting someone make important decisions, someone who has become deranged as their brain atrophies and also desperate as death looms large, someone with no future and no stake in the consequences of their decisions?
The idea behind the SC being lifetime appointments was to insulate it from political pressure, unlike the president and Congress which are suceptible to removal. The SC is (supposed to be) a rather apolitical body that determines if the laws passed are unconstitutional, in order to preserve basic rights.
Right now, it’s rife with partisan hacks, and it need to be removed and rebuilt from the ground up. Absolutely none of the current Republican justices meet the qualifications nor strength of character to be SC jucsticies.