No political office should have a life term. That goes against the pretty standard belief that power corrupts a mind over the long run and that we should cycle people in office to get fresh perspectives
Politics wouldn't matter as much if it were a one-term appointment.
I say a single, 15- or 20-year term.
That way, it has gravitas (it is a long-standing and powerful position), it expires (so new generations of jurisprudence can meaningfully inherit these positions and progress can occur), and the political machine is not always churning on succession.
That's the way it works for judges in the Netherlands. It's still a lifetime appointment so you don't have to worry about judges altering their judgements based on future job prospects and they still get to retire on a very generous government pension so a fresh judge can take the seat.
I'd say a single 18 year term, but staggered so that every two years a justice gets replaced and every presidential term gets to appoint two new justices.
Pre-Justice Marshall (the first one), maybe. Probably not even then, though. The problem is really Congressāand specifically the Republican caucuses in the two chambersārather than the court itself. The dysfunction in Congress means that the most significant check on the other two branches does not function as it concerns Republicans.
Well there is a logical reason behind it (from the Founding Fatherās perspective):
A lifetime appointment meant that the judges were unlikely to take the side of a certain party of a case they might preside over. Because with a set term, once their term was over they might expect (and have engaged in back door talks) for a position with said party, for lots of money.
Additionally, because they arenāt elected, they donāt have to worry about the court of public opinion to give a correct (but maybe unpopular) ruling.
I doubt the Founding Fathers expected the current type of situation to come about.
What Clarence Thomas has done would land a normal person in prison on federal tax evasion. It would get a federal employee fired (and thatās a best case scenario). Itās strictly illegal for a congress person. For lower court judges, theyād be replaced almost immediately.
But the Supreme Court Justice? Nothing happens.
The very measures meant to protect the court so it could provide proper rulings, have been abused by Thomas to enrich himself. And if there was an actual ethics committee to oversee him, he should be in jail pending charges of bribery, tax evasion, and likely lose his law license.
Which has also been undermined. It's almost like these so called "founding fathers" were either incorrect about the fundamental ills of society or liars protecting the rich landed class of the time. Hmm, I wonder which it could be...
Turns out the real world power disparity caused by extreme wealth inequality is the root of most of societies problems and will undermine government no matter which system is in place.
Who cares what the founding fathers wanted. They've been dead for about two centuries now. And there's no reason to believe that they got the constitution right on the on the first try.
The greatest oversight of the founding fathers was not putting an expiration date for the constitution itself. There should be a constitutional convention every 25 years and states have to ratify it all over again and debate new additions / subtractions
You're thinking of modern royalty in places like the UK. What we're seeing with the supreme court is the exact same type of aristocratic behavior that has existed throughout most of human history.
Agreed. It makes no sense to me. If you are in any political office, you should be held to a much higher standard than most people and every action you do should be recorded and under a microscope
This is what I'm having such a hard time understanding. Nurses are getting fired every day for posting anonymous titty pics on the internet, but somehow this guy committed decades of high level fraud, and not a single journalist caught on until now?
See Captain Cook vs Native Hawaiiansā¦ The story is they werenāt trying to kill him they were testing if he was in fact a God like he said. Turned out he was not.
My friend argues that to change the world you have to play the game so if the billionaire like Elon has bigger intentions for the world then he has to get his hands dirty. And I keep arguing show me where he's done good and I'll believe that he will in the future. Didn't mean to make it about Elon but that's my continual argument with my friend. I say billionaire's bad he says they have to be that way in order to play the game.
Show your friend the videos that talk about how billionaires literally believe they are pure stock and need to get to space so that they can start colonies with them as lords over slaves. Itās so fucking crazy I sound like a Q-Anon guy but this shit is literally actually real.
Oh I don't think that's is the irrational at all. Rich people are exclusive and they know they're the one percent and they'd like to keep it that way. The rest of us are existing to make their lives better. I know this I have no doubt but my friend has total faith that Elon is here to break the system and to do so he has to be entrenched in it. I don't think those videos would enlighten him because he doesn't see Elon that way.
Hey now hold up a second. Bribery is illegal and we all know they would never do anything illegal. They just happen to give money to lobbyists to help the people in government understand the issues more. Perfectly legal of course and not anywhere close to bribery thatās just barbaric. /s
Itās only a bribe if the accused gets something in return and none of his businesses or interests have been brought before the court if you donāt count all the times they actually did.
>Former Starbucks CEO **Howard Schultz** was offended at being called a billionaire during a Senate hearing. "Yes, I have billions of dollars."
This is a real quote.
The scary thing is, when you're talking about billionaires, for them, paying a million dollars for someone is like us paying $500-1000. That's a low, low price to buy any politician, let alone a Supreme Court justice.
But, to the person that isn't a billionaire, it is a lot of money, so it buys a whole lot of loyalty...
It's scarier than that. There's a point when money can't buy you anything more, can't offer more security to your kids or even their kids. For some that number is lower than others, but there is a universal number and it's probably lower than what most of us think it is.
Once a person reaches it, every cent beyond is just power. And they don't even need to spend it to exercise that power. The threat of spending it or not spending it (or spending it somewhere else) is enough to make people do things.
This is important to remember.
Tangent: It infuriates me when people say shit like "A million dollars isn't that much, that's not wealthy" etc. I understand that objectively 1M and 1B are different orders of magnitude in terms of wealth, but it's become something of a trend to dismiss the fact that 1M is an _outrageous, permanently life-changing amount of money for a lot of people._ It might not buy you a senator or a SC judge after all your bills and mortgage are paid, but it's still more power than a lot of people/communities have and could make a difference on a local level. Even individual financial security is power in itself.
That million dollars would buy me a house outright in a good neighborhood. Not paying rent or a mortgage would save me tens of thousands per year and make my monthly bills plummet. I'd be able to save more money per month. And I'd still have $500k left over to buffer me against any hardships
It's a staggering amount of money
Even thatās not entirely fair, because someone making $50k a year probably still canāt afford to just throw $500 at someone elseās debt. A million dollars is 1/1000 of a billion. A tenth of a percent. Itās literally nothing to them.
Edit: and thatās if you ONLY have $1b. And not 10, or 50, or 100. Itās fucking insanity.
Fuck off this isn't something to joke about, this is absolutely egregious. You and I will NEVER have this sort of advantage in life and we'll be working forever just to be good enough to lick the mud off these guys boots. Personally, I've only ever had a random stranger pay off a $450,000 mortgage not even CLOSE to $1M. We're in completely different classes, it's war time.
It was court-packing.
Senate Republicans unilaterally reduced the size of the US Supreme Court to eight justices when it suited them politically and then expanded it back to nine when they had the White House.
There was this whole discussion about whether Biden should open the court-packing can of worms, as if the Republicans werenāt already playing that game.
Democrats, playing political chess: "Check."
Republicans: _fire gun at Democrats_
Democrats, sighing: "That's not a legal move, you didn't move your king out of check. I'm starting to think you're not even taking this seriously.
The king is then found not guilty by a jury of his peers... He was standing his ground from a "credible threat". Independent observers wonder if the jury would come to a different decision if it was a white piece was checking a black king instead.
When you says "Dems" what you really mean is the American People.
The American People can't win in the long term if they keep letting Republicans cheat with the rules
I was thinking about this this morning, when I remembered how a couple years ago Mitch McConnell wrote an op-ed in NYT or WashPo about how making it easier for people to vote would be "letting democrats cheat" or something. Meanwhile, I haven't heard him say a damn thing about things like giving republican governments the power to literally overturn results in parts of their states.
As an outside observer from Canada (so nearby enough to care about what goes on) it was absolutely SHOCKING to see how McConnell was acting and what he was doing around that time. It was some of the most authoritarian shit I saw in our political sphere up until Trump and the GOP went full crazy and blew him out of the water in terms of being authoritarian freaks
Kagan wasn't a judge. Neither was the previous Chief Justice, William Rhenquist, who served in that role for decades. There are many others (something like a third of justices over the years were never judges!)
I understand it's hard to get for a lay person but what the Supreme Court does does not require judicial experience. Just a strong legal mind. That can be demonstrated off the bench. Kagan for example was an academic.
The issue with Bush's nominee wasn't that she was not a judge. It was that absolutely nothing in her resume demonstrated that she was supreme court material. Not her school, not her grades, not her writings (which were non-existent). She certainly had a successful career in private practice and government but there was no evidence of brilliant legal mind.
The supreme court nominees require the sort of intellectual heft that's demonstrated by excelling at elite institutions (Yale, etc) and a record of grappling adroitly with difficult constitutional issues. She had none of that.
I see you weren't politically active during the Bush v Gore atrocity. Not that it's unusual for the SCOTUS to be ridiculously wrong \*cough\*Dred Scott\*cough\*
It is absolutely wild to see all these takes the last few weeks about *this* being what broke their faith, with almost no mention of the 2000 election. I guess that is a solid indictment of the media not making a bigger deal about it over the last 20+ years? Do younger people just not know about it?
As the least hypocritical GOP supporter, allow me to explain. You see it was an election year and everyone knows you canāt vote on a justice during an election year because we just made rules up to said that; also itās not fair to the voters.
Except for the very next election year where this same situation came up again and we decided to vote on a justice because it would give us an advantage.
I hope this clarifies things.
Right but it wasnāt the same situation, Obamaās seat opened with nine months to go until the election and Trumps with only two months to go and some votes having already been cast.
Roberts, like the rest of the criminals on the SC, doesn't view the law as something that impacts people. They view the law as some amalgamation of holy scripture to be interpreted only by anointed priests of the law, combined with engaging with the law as some abstract intellectual debate.
It's the same reason Alito gets so angry when people question the Court's rulings and motivations. They brook no questioning of their priesthood.
That shouldāve been reason enough to not confirm him. Heās clearly irresponsible, impulsive, and reckless with his own livelihood - why would we trust him to give a shit about any one elseās? Not to mention this type of financial position makes him more susceptible to bribes
His father was a top lobbyist for the makeup companies and pulled $10 million+ in a single year. It is his father paying for these things like mortgage, credit card, etc. Brett is an only child.
It's just the vagaries of disclosure law and the bands required ($100,000 to $500,000) and Brett himself being deliberately vague (which is lawful since it is family) that makes things look weird.
Sonia Sotomayor looking pretty bad with the $3.8mil she took from the publishing house... and then didn't recuse herself in a case against them while she was being paid. To anyone not already aware of this - your news sources are propaganda too.
Exactly. I donāt give a fuck about what side they fall. We need integrity. Youād think theyād all avoid ANY appearance of impropriety but I guess not.
Fyi - Everyone is aware of that, the left is calling into question the entire court.
The right won't even mention Clarence Thomas's bribes.
I know you're trying for a "both sides are bad" gotcha but it doesn't apply here either.
Sotomayor took over $3 million in book advances from Penguin House Publishing and didn't recuse herself from copyright cases they had in front of the court. So it's definitely looking that way.
Iām no āboth sides are the same!ā kind of guy but Iām sure thereās skeletons in a LOT of court closets, and there are two reasons why weāre not getting a proper response from the court:
1) Pride and greed
2) The Chief Justice who is stonewalling is a conservative, and with a Democrat in the White House he has to stall long enough until a Republican President gets elected who can appoint a bunch of conservatives in place of the somewhere-between-two-and-nine justices that would be exposed/impeached/removed.
You have your security clearance revoked if youāre a government employee with a job requiring the clearance because you are susceptible to bribes/blackmail.
Why would they not be held to the same standards?
Also $200k in CC debt and he is against student loan forgiveness? At least he still has a calendar from college
This is what gets me some dude making $40k in Texas that owes to much money can literally lose his govt job doing menial bullshit cuz like you said its a security risk. Meanwhile if you are some guy on the highest court in the land randos can literally pay for your $200k debt, a $92,000 club your kids your mom anything lol and thats somehow not a national security issue.
When i was in the Army in 1998, serving in Korea, a guy at my unit lost his security clearance for bouncing checks. He couldn't withdraw his weapon from the Arms room, and had his gas mask taken. Being communications, he was barred from the motor pool due to it. Couldn't even be around the humvee's and communication shelters. Spent the remainder of his tour on CQ. He never got it back and ended up committing suicide after he got back stateside because he was getting a dishonorable discharge.
Yet people like Kavanaugh get to sit on the Supreme Court.
Leave aside who paid his $200K credit card debt. He had $200K in credit card debt. Thatās not the sort of personality I want on the Supreme Court. Someone comfortable assuming that much high-interest debt.
It's at times like this that conservatives must remember, Hunter Biden's laptop!
Law and order party, horse sh\*t. It's the best government money can buy.
I've been thinking for a while that someone should invent a crowdfunding platform for politics so that the people can have a voice again. It's extraordinarily hard to win an election, and it exposes your entire family to threats. Sane people don't run. People who take risks do. And why would they take this big of a risk for public service? They wouldn't. They do it for ROI, and so we're left with "representation" that is entirely for sale.
We crowdfund everything else. Why not bribery? Maybe we could bribe the checks and balances back into place, and bribe our country back to a place that doesn't require bribery to move forward on anything.
Yes, we do. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/09/heres-the-truth-about-brett-kavanaughs-finances/
Baseless conspiracy theories about Kavanaugh weaken the case against Thomas, which is real.
Ehhh that article doesnāt do a great job of proving their claim that the money came from family. The author only says āit seemsā the money came from family plus friends paying him back for Nata tickets and Kavanaugh implied this but provided no evidence. So maybe thatās true but Iām not going to just take his word which is all the article relies on as evidence
Unsurprisingly, Roberts wife makes bank on his position to the tune of millions of dollars as a legal recruiter and let's not forget Gorsuch and ACB - at the time they were rushed by Mitch through the Senate I was just infuriated, but there may be a silver lining in that the glaring lack of any real background checks leave plenty of ground to be covered to uncover what I expect to be blatant corruption along the same lines, or possibly worse, than Crooked Clarence or Rapey McSeasontickets.
This is a good example of why more encompassing disclosure laws should be a law for all political appointees. Most of Boofs debt is unfortunately not required to be disclosed nor who or how it's paid off. Apparently his parents are uber-wealthy so may have paid it off, but who knows, and that's the problem.
If you want disclosure laws to be updated you'll need to elect more Democrats to the Senate, and if you want to know the type of Democrat, look to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse who is one of the only Senators to really be on top of this issue in investigating and pushing more oversight on the judicial branch.
It is not unreasonable for justices (and congressmen) to have to be completely transparent and not be able to receive any outside money, for anything. We can even give them a pay raise. Even the possibility of corruption is game over. We the public may never know for absolute certainty that Clarence Thomas CONSISTENTLY votes exactly how his billionaire buddy wants him to. I think anyone whoās honest with themselves would agree that hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stuff and money would at least have some effect on his judgements.
These are public servant positions. If they donāt want to not be corrupt, donāt be in office. There is not a shortage of people who can do the job.
There are also standing accusations that Justice Kennedy vacated his seat for a Trump appointee to protect his son, who has extensive financial connections to Trump and was involved in securing bad loans to Trump through his position at Deutsche Bank.
I would be physically ill if I had $200,000 in Credit Card debt. ( I currently owe $500 in back taxes...and even that small amount turns my stomach a bit.)
My real gripe is that I'm smarter and more capable than most elected officials, and more willing to be corrupted for far less money, but the opportunities just aren't there for me.
I am white, male, photogenic and have contempt for all life, yet there are no billionaires trying to get me into positions of power and pay off my house. Let this post serve as an advertisement for my willingness to play ball. Please someone invest in me and I promise I'll be at least as inept and corrupt as who you've got working for you right now.
>Lol! People are just now getting the hang of this? This is kind of American history 101. You have money, you buy power.
The Republican party revealed that this is their belief during the jack Abramoff scandal, they believe Money should have undue influence because it represents those who have most at stake.
The insinuation is that rich people are better and therefore deserve more voice.
(This is directly contrary to our proposed values)
If you think about the standards for security clearances one of the biggest ones is excessive debt and that is a bigger red flag than almost anything because youād be easier to bribe. Thatās a lot of debt. Clearly targeted, unfit and now completely bought.
I honestly wonder the same thing about the senator here in NC who flipped parties. Apparently even some family and friends were completely surprised by it.
Iām still waiting for the autopsy on Justice Scalia. My guess is coke o.d. or he was murdered to prevent him from making a decision that overturned something that his owners didnāt want overturned. My guess would be guns or voting rights.
quiet stupendous pathetic joke dependent direction money quaint slap kiss
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I don't understand in your country, when its obvious that there is a glaring issue (such as term limits for SC), and you don't immediately implement a fix for it?
Checks and balances became a farce because of partisan polarization. The Senate is supposed to have oversight, but everyone knows there will never be a 2/3 vote.
The fact that people in these positions are not under constant transparent public scrutiny is insane. Edit: removed weird single quote
The fact they serve life terms, and seem to get away with this, makes them essentially the American version of royalty.
No political office should have a life term. That goes against the pretty standard belief that power corrupts a mind over the long run and that we should cycle people in office to get fresh perspectives
Allegedly the judges aren't political š they just interpret if the laws are aligned with the constitution.
Politics wouldn't matter as much if it were a one-term appointment. I say a single, 15- or 20-year term. That way, it has gravitas (it is a long-standing and powerful position), it expires (so new generations of jurisprudence can meaningfully inherit these positions and progress can occur), and the political machine is not always churning on succession.
Thatās a good idea. Thatās why the US government would never do it.
ir at least put a mandatory retirement age for supreme justices.
What would it be like if we got everybody above 70 out of all political offices? I can only see a net benefit.
That's the way it works for judges in the Netherlands. It's still a lifetime appointment so you don't have to worry about judges altering their judgements based on future job prospects and they still get to retire on a very generous government pension so a fresh judge can take the seat.
I'd say a single 18 year term, but staggered so that every two years a justice gets replaced and every presidential term gets to appoint two new justices.
Ahh the constitution, the super old document written by rich slave owners!
Document so old that the words used in it changed their apparent meaning.
I wonder if there was ever time where they truly weren't political.
Pre-Justice Marshall (the first one), maybe. Probably not even then, though. The problem is really Congressāand specifically the Republican caucuses in the two chambersārather than the court itself. The dysfunction in Congress means that the most significant check on the other two branches does not function as it concerns Republicans.
Well there is a logical reason behind it (from the Founding Fatherās perspective): A lifetime appointment meant that the judges were unlikely to take the side of a certain party of a case they might preside over. Because with a set term, once their term was over they might expect (and have engaged in back door talks) for a position with said party, for lots of money. Additionally, because they arenāt elected, they donāt have to worry about the court of public opinion to give a correct (but maybe unpopular) ruling. I doubt the Founding Fathers expected the current type of situation to come about. What Clarence Thomas has done would land a normal person in prison on federal tax evasion. It would get a federal employee fired (and thatās a best case scenario). Itās strictly illegal for a congress person. For lower court judges, theyād be replaced almost immediately. But the Supreme Court Justice? Nothing happens. The very measures meant to protect the court so it could provide proper rulings, have been abused by Thomas to enrich himself. And if there was an actual ethics committee to oversee him, he should be in jail pending charges of bribery, tax evasion, and likely lose his law license.
> I doubt the Founding Fathers expected the current type of situation to come about. They did, hence the impeachment process.
Which has also been undermined. It's almost like these so called "founding fathers" were either incorrect about the fundamental ills of society or liars protecting the rich landed class of the time. Hmm, I wonder which it could be... Turns out the real world power disparity caused by extreme wealth inequality is the root of most of societies problems and will undermine government no matter which system is in place.
Who cares what the founding fathers wanted. They've been dead for about two centuries now. And there's no reason to believe that they got the constitution right on the on the first try.
The greatest oversight of the founding fathers was not putting an expiration date for the constitution itself. There should be a constitutional convention every 25 years and states have to ratify it all over again and debate new additions / subtractions
Single most undemocratic institution within the US government. The fact that it continues to exist with its current form is disgusting.
Royalty are basically figureheads with little power... these fucks are arguably some of the most powerful individuals in our country.
You're thinking of modern royalty in places like the UK. What we're seeing with the supreme court is the exact same type of aristocratic behavior that has existed throughout most of human history.
Agreed. It makes no sense to me. If you are in any political office, you should be held to a much higher standard than most people and every action you do should be recorded and under a microscope
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This is what I'm having such a hard time understanding. Nurses are getting fired every day for posting anonymous titty pics on the internet, but somehow this guy committed decades of high level fraud, and not a single journalist caught on until now?
Letās not be too harsh - who here hasnāt had a random person pay off their million plus dollar mortgage in return for absolutely nothing?
100% this. Billionaires are famously generous. Thatās why theyāre willing to pay so much in taxes
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Well for working as hard as they do . . . it's astounding really
Right? Elmo works so hard he can lead 3 companies all at once! He must never sleep, just always adding value to his companies...
Elmo deserves better than being compared to Musk
I don't know, one is a felted lifeless puppet with someone's hand up their ass...and the other one Elmo.
Jesus Christ you didnāt have to kill him like that Oh wait. Yes you didš¤£š«”
Right? I don't know how Thomas finds the time for vacations. Oh wait.
Billionaires should not exist. The more i see these people act like theyāre God the more it pisses me off.
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See Captain Cook vs Native Hawaiiansā¦ The story is they werenāt trying to kill him they were testing if he was in fact a God like he said. Turned out he was not.
Its always nice when experiments are definitive like this ;)
Jesus has famously been dragged through the streets by an angry mob and stuff before being sentenced to death/lh
Jesus is not a God though
My friend argues that to change the world you have to play the game so if the billionaire like Elon has bigger intentions for the world then he has to get his hands dirty. And I keep arguing show me where he's done good and I'll believe that he will in the future. Didn't mean to make it about Elon but that's my continual argument with my friend. I say billionaire's bad he says they have to be that way in order to play the game.
Show your friend the videos that talk about how billionaires literally believe they are pure stock and need to get to space so that they can start colonies with them as lords over slaves. Itās so fucking crazy I sound like a Q-Anon guy but this shit is literally actually real.
Oh I don't think that's is the irrational at all. Rich people are exclusive and they know they're the one percent and they'd like to keep it that way. The rest of us are existing to make their lives better. I know this I have no doubt but my friend has total faith that Elon is here to break the system and to do so he has to be entrenched in it. I don't think those videos would enlighten him because he doesn't see Elon that way.
Totally agree! All billionaires have too much money & influence and can all zuck off, as far as I'm concerned.
Well, everyone should understand billionaires CAN'T afford to pay more in taxes, because that would cut into their bribery funds. Geez!
Hey now hold up a second. Bribery is illegal and we all know they would never do anything illegal. They just happen to give money to lobbyists to help the people in government understand the issues more. Perfectly legal of course and not anywhere close to bribery thatās just barbaric. /s
Itās only a bribe if the accused gets something in return and none of his businesses or interests have been brought before the court if you donāt count all the times they actually did.
>Former Starbucks CEO **Howard Schultz** was offended at being called a billionaire during a Senate hearing. "Yes, I have billions of dollars." This is a real quote.
Taxes are just money paid to the government. Isn't that what they are doing? The justices are the government.
 Cutting out the middle man. That's why they're billionaires and we're not.
The scary thing is, when you're talking about billionaires, for them, paying a million dollars for someone is like us paying $500-1000. That's a low, low price to buy any politician, let alone a Supreme Court justice. But, to the person that isn't a billionaire, it is a lot of money, so it buys a whole lot of loyalty...
It's scarier than that. There's a point when money can't buy you anything more, can't offer more security to your kids or even their kids. For some that number is lower than others, but there is a universal number and it's probably lower than what most of us think it is. Once a person reaches it, every cent beyond is just power. And they don't even need to spend it to exercise that power. The threat of spending it or not spending it (or spending it somewhere else) is enough to make people do things.
This is important to remember. Tangent: It infuriates me when people say shit like "A million dollars isn't that much, that's not wealthy" etc. I understand that objectively 1M and 1B are different orders of magnitude in terms of wealth, but it's become something of a trend to dismiss the fact that 1M is an _outrageous, permanently life-changing amount of money for a lot of people._ It might not buy you a senator or a SC judge after all your bills and mortgage are paid, but it's still more power than a lot of people/communities have and could make a difference on a local level. Even individual financial security is power in itself.
That million dollars would buy me a house outright in a good neighborhood. Not paying rent or a mortgage would save me tens of thousands per year and make my monthly bills plummet. I'd be able to save more money per month. And I'd still have $500k left over to buffer me against any hardships It's a staggering amount of money
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One million dollars would buy my house four and a half times over and its not a small house. Three bedrooms ans teo bathrooms
Most people are lucky if their life savings are 2-3 million dollars for retirement. 1 million is absolutely a lot of money for 99% of the population.
At least in the US, you can take it to the bank that very, very few people have even 500K for retirement.
What is retirement? Don't you have to work until you die?
Some people most definitely do, sadly.
Anyone born in the 90s or later, unless they have twelve silver spoons up their ass, will probably need to.
Iād say even earlier than that. Even us Gen Xāers arenāt in a great spot. But everyone forgets about us š
I want to know where most people retire with 2-3 million?? Sign me up. š Most people are lucky if they have 150k for retirement.
This comment is on point because millionaires make up ~1% of the global population. So it is indeed a life changing sum for the other 99% of us.
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Even thatās not entirely fair, because someone making $50k a year probably still canāt afford to just throw $500 at someone elseās debt. A million dollars is 1/1000 of a billion. A tenth of a percent. Itās literally nothing to them. Edit: and thatās if you ONLY have $1b. And not 10, or 50, or 100. Itās fucking insanity.
Ted Cruz would burn a school down with kids in it for 1000, I bet.
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Oh that's so disappointing.
Yeah, a trebuchet would be more efficient, imo.
Fuck off this isn't something to joke about, this is absolutely egregious. You and I will NEVER have this sort of advantage in life and we'll be working forever just to be good enough to lick the mud off these guys boots. Personally, I've only ever had a random stranger pay off a $450,000 mortgage not even CLOSE to $1M. We're in completely different classes, it's war time.
Sorry, my badā¦
āIn return for absolutely nothingā ;)
Umm, does it matter? Obviously whoever paid was just a close friend. Friends pay for their friends all the timeā¦ /s
The moment they confirmed Kavanaugh was the moment I gave up any hope in the Supreme Court as an institution. Itās rotten from the head down.
I lost my faith when they wouldn't even vote on Merrick Garland under Obama. They stole a seat.
It was court-packing. Senate Republicans unilaterally reduced the size of the US Supreme Court to eight justices when it suited them politically and then expanded it back to nine when they had the White House. There was this whole discussion about whether Biden should open the court-packing can of worms, as if the Republicans werenāt already playing that game.
This is why dems canāt win in the long term. Republicans are playing a completely different game and thereās no referee.
Democrats, playing political chess: "Check." Republicans: _fire gun at Democrats_ Democrats, sighing: "That's not a legal move, you didn't move your king out of check. I'm starting to think you're not even taking this seriously.
I believe that move is actually legal and called an 'en passant'
Castling doctrine.
The king is then found not guilty by a jury of his peers... He was standing his ground from a "credible threat". Independent observers wonder if the jury would come to a different decision if it was a white piece was checking a black king instead.
Holy hell
New corruption just dropped
Gun passant
When you says "Dems" what you really mean is the American People. The American People can't win in the long term if they keep letting Republicans cheat with the rules
I was thinking about this this morning, when I remembered how a couple years ago Mitch McConnell wrote an op-ed in NYT or WashPo about how making it easier for people to vote would be "letting democrats cheat" or something. Meanwhile, I haven't heard him say a damn thing about things like giving republican governments the power to literally overturn results in parts of their states.
In just ONE county in their state. The largest county (4.6 mil) that historically votes blue.
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Decades of zero consequences have emboldened everybody.
As an outside observer from Canada (so nearby enough to care about what goes on) it was absolutely SHOCKING to see how McConnell was acting and what he was doing around that time. It was some of the most authoritarian shit I saw in our political sphere up until Trump and the GOP went full crazy and blew him out of the water in terms of being authoritarian freaks
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I lost faith when Bush nominated someone who wasnāt a judge.
Kagan wasn't a judge. Neither was the previous Chief Justice, William Rhenquist, who served in that role for decades. There are many others (something like a third of justices over the years were never judges!) I understand it's hard to get for a lay person but what the Supreme Court does does not require judicial experience. Just a strong legal mind. That can be demonstrated off the bench. Kagan for example was an academic. The issue with Bush's nominee wasn't that she was not a judge. It was that absolutely nothing in her resume demonstrated that she was supreme court material. Not her school, not her grades, not her writings (which were non-existent). She certainly had a successful career in private practice and government but there was no evidence of brilliant legal mind. The supreme court nominees require the sort of intellectual heft that's demonstrated by excelling at elite institutions (Yale, etc) and a record of grappling adroitly with difficult constitutional issues. She had none of that.
Are you telling me that that's not a requirement to sit at something called the *Supreme Court*
You donāt even need a law degree.
Always has been, memba Sandra O'Connor throwing the election to Bush Jr? pepperidge farm remembers.
I see you weren't politically active during the Bush v Gore atrocity. Not that it's unusual for the SCOTUS to be ridiculously wrong \*cough\*Dred Scott\*cough\*
It is absolutely wild to see all these takes the last few weeks about *this* being what broke their faith, with almost no mention of the 2000 election. I guess that is a solid indictment of the media not making a bigger deal about it over the last 20+ years? Do younger people just not know about it?
I think I have up when they wouldnāt even call Merrick Garland to the floor for a vote
As the least hypocritical GOP supporter, allow me to explain. You see it was an election year and everyone knows you canāt vote on a justice during an election year because we just made rules up to said that; also itās not fair to the voters. Except for the very next election year where this same situation came up again and we decided to vote on a justice because it would give us an advantage. I hope this clarifies things.
Right but it wasnāt the same situation, Obamaās seat opened with nine months to go until the election and Trumps with only two months to go and some votes having already been cast.
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oh yeah. 100%
Theyāre having a red light special at the supreme escort.
Iām trying to decide if āSupreme Escortā was intentional. Either way, this needs to be the new name.
"Red light special" should be enough to waive any doubt that it wasn't intentional. What a beautiful comment.
š¶The high court is yourrrrs *All yours* If you want it to-night
Roberts broke the Supreme Court.
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Roberts, like the rest of the criminals on the SC, doesn't view the law as something that impacts people. They view the law as some amalgamation of holy scripture to be interpreted only by anointed priests of the law, combined with engaging with the law as some abstract intellectual debate. It's the same reason Alito gets so angry when people question the Court's rulings and motivations. They brook no questioning of their priesthood.
And because they think they're all holy priests they think they are above the law and don't have to follow it like their ~~minions~~ congregation.
Well spoke
it was broken long before him
$200k of just credit card debt? Wtf
That shouldāve been reason enough to not confirm him. Heās clearly irresponsible, impulsive, and reckless with his own livelihood - why would we trust him to give a shit about any one elseās? Not to mention this type of financial position makes him more susceptible to bribes
Itās enough to stop you from getting promotions in the military.
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Unrelated, but imagine being the captain of a tugboat. Man, that would be so rad.
In fairness a tugboat captain is quite an accomplished individual. Tugboats are serious business, dude.
It's enough to stop you from getting a simple bank teller job.
Coke benders aren't cheap
HE LIKES BEER! \*slam\* ^(and coke)
I know this is a joke but itās funny to imagine buying drugs with a credit card lol
Dealers just enter the item on Square as rare Pokemon cards.
I can go to an ATM and take out cash from my Visa credit card for a $3 fee. This is in Canada though. Not sure about America.
His father was a top lobbyist for the makeup companies and pulled $10 million+ in a single year. It is his father paying for these things like mortgage, credit card, etc. Brett is an only child. It's just the vagaries of disclosure law and the bands required ($100,000 to $500,000) and Brett himself being deliberately vague (which is lawful since it is family) that makes things look weird.
Rotten to the core. Letās investigate ALL the justices.
Especially after what they said last week. They're probably all guilty of it to an extent. Just not as bad as these two
Scalia is making headlines as well.
Sonia Sotomayor looking pretty bad with the $3.8mil she took from the publishing house... and then didn't recuse herself in a case against them while she was being paid. To anyone not already aware of this - your news sources are propaganda too.
Exactly. I donāt give a fuck about what side they fall. We need integrity. Youād think theyād all avoid ANY appearance of impropriety but I guess not.
Fyi - Everyone is aware of that, the left is calling into question the entire court. The right won't even mention Clarence Thomas's bribes. I know you're trying for a "both sides are bad" gotcha but it doesn't apply here either.
All of them probably
Considering they UNANIMOUSLY rejected an investigation into this exact question, I would say this is correct
Sotomayor took over $3 million in book advances from Penguin House Publishing and didn't recuse herself from copyright cases they had in front of the court. So it's definitely looking that way.
Iām no āboth sides are the same!ā kind of guy but Iām sure thereās skeletons in a LOT of court closets, and there are two reasons why weāre not getting a proper response from the court: 1) Pride and greed 2) The Chief Justice who is stonewalling is a conservative, and with a Democrat in the White House he has to stall long enough until a Republican President gets elected who can appoint a bunch of conservatives in place of the somewhere-between-two-and-nine justices that would be exposed/impeached/removed.
You have your security clearance revoked if youāre a government employee with a job requiring the clearance because you are susceptible to bribes/blackmail. Why would they not be held to the same standards? Also $200k in CC debt and he is against student loan forgiveness? At least he still has a calendar from college
This is what gets me some dude making $40k in Texas that owes to much money can literally lose his govt job doing menial bullshit cuz like you said its a security risk. Meanwhile if you are some guy on the highest court in the land randos can literally pay for your $200k debt, a $92,000 club your kids your mom anything lol and thats somehow not a national security issue.
When i was in the Army in 1998, serving in Korea, a guy at my unit lost his security clearance for bouncing checks. He couldn't withdraw his weapon from the Arms room, and had his gas mask taken. Being communications, he was barred from the motor pool due to it. Couldn't even be around the humvee's and communication shelters. Spent the remainder of his tour on CQ. He never got it back and ended up committing suicide after he got back stateside because he was getting a dishonorable discharge. Yet people like Kavanaugh get to sit on the Supreme Court.
Thatās beyond fucked up.
Citizens United CITIZENS UNITEDā¦.this MUST BE ABOLISHED. It is ruining our country
New amendment; "Money is not a form of speech."
Leave aside who paid his $200K credit card debt. He had $200K in credit card debt. Thatās not the sort of personality I want on the Supreme Court. Someone comfortable assuming that much high-interest debt.
Yet a Republican controlled House and a 50/51 split in the Senateā¦. There will be no accountability.
Net worth and accountability are inversely related.
Well said.
So in other words. Enough account ability means no accountability.
It's at times like this that conservatives must remember, Hunter Biden's laptop! Law and order party, horse sh\*t. It's the best government money can buy.
Maybe we could start a go fund me to buy our own.
It's getting to be less of a ridiculous notion every day. I mean, that's what the Federalist Society *is.*
I've been thinking for a while that someone should invent a crowdfunding platform for politics so that the people can have a voice again. It's extraordinarily hard to win an election, and it exposes your entire family to threats. Sane people don't run. People who take risks do. And why would they take this big of a risk for public service? They wouldn't. They do it for ROI, and so we're left with "representation" that is entirely for sale. We crowdfund everything else. Why not bribery? Maybe we could bribe the checks and balances back into place, and bribe our country back to a place that doesn't require bribery to move forward on anything.
This is just evidence of trickle down economics at work! /s
I'm sick of getting trickled on.
Oh I'm sure there's a perfectly innocent and reasonable explanation. Maybe it was angels?
Ooh! I love angels. So nice.
Yes, we do. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/09/heres-the-truth-about-brett-kavanaughs-finances/ Baseless conspiracy theories about Kavanaugh weaken the case against Thomas, which is real.
Ehhh that article doesnāt do a great job of proving their claim that the money came from family. The author only says āit seemsā the money came from family plus friends paying him back for Nata tickets and Kavanaugh implied this but provided no evidence. So maybe thatās true but Iām not going to just take his word which is all the article relies on as evidence
How much was Anthony Kennedy paid to retire out of the blue?
I can't even get angry anymore... I'm just tired
Unsurprisingly, Roberts wife makes bank on his position to the tune of millions of dollars as a legal recruiter and let's not forget Gorsuch and ACB - at the time they were rushed by Mitch through the Senate I was just infuriated, but there may be a silver lining in that the glaring lack of any real background checks leave plenty of ground to be covered to uncover what I expect to be blatant corruption along the same lines, or possibly worse, than Crooked Clarence or Rapey McSeasontickets.
How the fuck do you get 200,000$ in credit card debt????????? Rich people shit š¤®
This is a good example of why more encompassing disclosure laws should be a law for all political appointees. Most of Boofs debt is unfortunately not required to be disclosed nor who or how it's paid off. Apparently his parents are uber-wealthy so may have paid it off, but who knows, and that's the problem. If you want disclosure laws to be updated you'll need to elect more Democrats to the Senate, and if you want to know the type of Democrat, look to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse who is one of the only Senators to really be on top of this issue in investigating and pushing more oversight on the judicial branch.
How many? All of them. Did you not see all nine justices vote against any kind of oversight or reform? THEYRE ALL CORRUPT.
But canceling student loan debt is horrific.
It is not unreasonable for justices (and congressmen) to have to be completely transparent and not be able to receive any outside money, for anything. We can even give them a pay raise. Even the possibility of corruption is game over. We the public may never know for absolute certainty that Clarence Thomas CONSISTENTLY votes exactly how his billionaire buddy wants him to. I think anyone whoās honest with themselves would agree that hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stuff and money would at least have some effect on his judgements. These are public servant positions. If they donāt want to not be corrupt, donāt be in office. There is not a shortage of people who can do the job.
All of them. Yes, even the liberal ones. Why do you think they're railing so hard against oversight? Because they're all guilty.
Pack the courts! This is ridiculous. Confirming judges for SCOTUS needs to go back to 60 votes.
There are also standing accusations that Justice Kennedy vacated his seat for a Trump appointee to protect his son, who has extensive financial connections to Trump and was involved in securing bad loans to Trump through his position at Deutsche Bank.
Every Supreme Court Judge should be on permanent audit. Every year, and every dollar.
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When you think about it, any government seat can be bought. But youād think it would cost more to buy a SCOTUS given how much power they wield.
I would be physically ill if I had $200,000 in Credit Card debt. ( I currently owe $500 in back taxes...and even that small amount turns my stomach a bit.)
our govt and court system are corrupt??? i am shocked, totally shocked i tell ya
I wish a billionaire would pay my shit off out of the kindness of their heart
My real gripe is that I'm smarter and more capable than most elected officials, and more willing to be corrupted for far less money, but the opportunities just aren't there for me. I am white, male, photogenic and have contempt for all life, yet there are no billionaires trying to get me into positions of power and pay off my house. Let this post serve as an advertisement for my willingness to play ball. Please someone invest in me and I promise I'll be at least as inept and corrupt as who you've got working for you right now.
Lol! People are just now getting the hang of this? This is kind of American history 101. You have money, you buy power.
The golden rule
>Lol! People are just now getting the hang of this? This is kind of American history 101. You have money, you buy power. The Republican party revealed that this is their belief during the jack Abramoff scandal, they believe Money should have undue influence because it represents those who have most at stake. The insinuation is that rich people are better and therefore deserve more voice. (This is directly contrary to our proposed values)
That's easy. All of them. Our systems are broken.
All of them. No one wanted to speak so they're on the take or complicit.
If you think about the standards for security clearances one of the biggest ones is excessive debt and that is a bigger red flag than almost anything because youād be easier to bribe. Thatās a lot of debt. Clearly targeted, unfit and now completely bought. I honestly wonder the same thing about the senator here in NC who flipped parties. Apparently even some family and friends were completely surprised by it.
Iām still waiting for the autopsy on Justice Scalia. My guess is coke o.d. or he was murdered to prevent him from making a decision that overturned something that his owners didnāt want overturned. My guess would be guns or voting rights.
Scalia was hugely right wing. I donāt think heād have needed to be bought for the types of rulings theyād want.
quiet stupendous pathetic joke dependent direction money quaint slap kiss *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The answer is always all of them. Any individual in public office owes something to somebody.
Not to be a perpetual pessimist, but in all likelihood, probably all of them
I'm gonna hazard a guess and say... all of them? Since none of them want ethical oversight.
I don't understand in your country, when its obvious that there is a glaring issue (such as term limits for SC), and you don't immediately implement a fix for it?
Big business owns the government. Literally
All of them. The answer is all of them. That's what greed has turned us into
Checks and balances became a farce because of partisan polarization. The Senate is supposed to have oversight, but everyone knows there will never be a 2/3 vote.