I am a voracious consumer of the news. I watch at least one hour of it every day and read dozens of news stories from as many media outlets as I can find. Every topic is compelling to me: politics, economics, foreign affairs, healthcare, education, science, technology, all of it. From what some might say is an overexposure to the news has come a frustration with the country around me, leading me to join a chorus of people who are saying “I can’t take it anymore.” Even with the knowledge that media outlets only air the bad news because that’s what sells, things appear to be approaching a breaking point in the United States.

This is not the country your parents grew up in. The United States has lost something over the past generation. True, we’ve gained many conveniences and appear wealthier in many ways – and we did defeat a pandemic in a couple months – but we’ve lost a crucial ingredient that drives a people to be better, to be more aware of the dry rot setting in below the floorboards. The United States has lost its sense of shame. If how we view ourselves conflicts so starkly with the truth about ourselves, embarrassment and shame should force a reckoning. At least it has in the past. I don’t believe a reckoning is at hand; America has lost its ability to recognize its flaws and move forward as a society.

Is it a coincidence this decline is contemporaneous with the age of Trump? No, not at all. This President has ushered in an age in which we celebrate malevolence. Denigrating African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans is now a good thing. Women are once again judged solely by their physical appearance. Men are judged not by their wisdom or virtue, but by the amount of their wealth. Donald Trump is, without question, the most corrupt President in U.S. history. None of our country’s 45 other presidents come close to Trump’s dishonesty, venality, and ineptitude. Every citizen, corporation, and foreign country on earth knows that to get any attention from the Trump administration you must pay cash or value, not to the U.S. government, but to the Trump family. Consider the following:

• Qatar gave Trump a $400 million jet. Trump considers it his jet, not the U.S. government’s jet. The jet will be decommissioned before the end of Trump’s second term, presumably for Trump’s “official” use as a former president.

• The Saudi government’s public investment fund invested $2.0 billion in Affinity Partners, Jared Kushner’s private equity company. Jared Kushner (Trump’s son-in-law) had no reputation, experience, or practical background in the investment management world at the time the investment was made in 2021. He had run his father’s real estate company in New York City for ten years prior to Trump entering office in 2017. There were literally hundreds of other highly respected investment firms worldwide that would have been more rational choices. So why invest with Jared Kushner?

• The Albanian government is allowing Kushner’s firm to develop a large tract of its southern coast into dozens of resort hotels, as well as a separate island resort on a currently empty island in the Adriatic Sea off the Albanian coast.

• The United Arab Emirates royal family paid $500 million to World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s scam cryptocurrency, in return for the U.S. government selling restricted high-end chips to the UAE. Trump made $1.0 billion from the cryptocurrency in transaction and licensing fees while the actual investors in the coin lost their shirts.

The secret to a corrupt administration is not to commit, and then cover up, a Watergate scandal. The secret is to commit a Watergate scandal every week so that no single scandal gets the attention that Richard Nixon got in the early 1970s. Trump’s corruption is relentless, uninhibited, and unashamed.

Another secret to a successful crime family is to undermine, if not completely remove, every institution and individual whose job it is to investigate and indict the corrupt party. Trump excels here as well. He has removed most of the inspectors general in the Federal Government (or he replaced them with his own henchmen who only investigate democrats). He subjugated the U.S. Congress to his will. No Congress in modern U.S. history has been as impotent as the one between 2015 and 2026. The U.S. Department of Justice, normally the first line of defense against a corrupt president, now acts as a consigliere to the Trump crime family. So it goes with the FBI. The guardrails that were designed to thwart corruption have not only been neutered, they also have been repurposed to facilitate crime. Trump’s criminal activity is so voluminous and unchecked that the citizenry now ignores it since they feel helpless to stop it; we accept Trump’s extortion and blackmail as a normalized way our government should be run.

The only institution that has not been crippled (yet) is the U.S. judiciary. For the most part, once installed, judges act with a fair amount of independence. There is no central overseer who can compromise their power to render decisions. Obviously, they can be reversed by higher courts, but they are not controlled in the way a U.S. attorney in the Justice Department is controlled by the Attorney General.  

The Supreme Court

I say this with one major caveat. At the top of the U.S. judiciary sits the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). Trump has appointed one-third of the U.S. Supreme Court and so far, the current Court supports the Trump agenda most of the time, going against him only in his most egregious violations of the Constitution (and even then, with far from a 9-0 vote).

The Supreme Court of the United States consists of nine of the most powerful individuals in the country. By law, there is no oversight of SCOTUS since the U.S. Constitution designed the justices on the Court to be the overseer of everything else (technically, a sitting justice can be impeached and thrown out by Congress, but in the current day that is functionally impossible). The SCOTUS justices decide what the Constitution does and doesn’t mean. They can overrule Congress. They can overrule the President. They decide if the laws Congress makes are constitutional or not. If the SCOTUS becomes corrupted, then it’s difficult to see a path forward for the United States.

What do we do if the Supreme Court justices become capos in the Trump crime family? Sound extreme?  Read on.

I break the current 2026 Supreme Court into four groups politically:

1. Liberals – Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson
2. Conservative – John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett
3. Ultra Conservative – Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch
4. Unabashedly Corrupt – Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito 

We may argue about the groupings above. You could make a case that Coney Barrett belongs in the ultra-conservative group. You could also argue that Neil Gorsuch shows signs of corruption. This essay though is about the 4^th group, Thomas and Alito. They are, in no uncertain terms, both illegitimate justices and personally corrupt. In a country that recognized its flaws, these men would not have been allowed to run roughshod over the U.S. legal system over the past two decades.

Clarence Thomas

If you asked the entire legal community which job represents the pinnacle of the legal profession, a majority would likely say a seat on the Supreme Court – maybe not in terms of earnings but certainly in terms of prestige, reputation, respectability, and legacy. It goes without saying then that the people who get appointed to SCOTUS should be well known as either attorneys, litigators, lower court judges, or legal scholars.

Having said that, every SCOTUS nominee must, in addition to legitimate legal credentials, have the necessary political affiliation. If a Republican president is in office, the nominee needs to be conservative. Ditto with a democrat president appointing a liberal justice. When George W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the Court in 1991, Thomas checked off none of these boxes either as a republican, centrist, or democrat. Don’t get me wrong. Thomas had long since proved his intelligence as a person and capability as an attorney but he was nowhere near the top of his profession. Here is a thumbnail sketch of Thomas’s resume.

• Graduated Holy Cross College in 1971 cum laude
• Graduated Yale Law School in 1974
• Assistant Attorney General of Missouri 1974-77
• Corporate attorney for Monsanto, 1977-79
• Legislative aide to John Danforth, 1979-81
• Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at U.S. Dept. of Education, 1981-82
• Head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Council 1982-90
• Appellate Court judge – 1990
• Appointed to SCOTUS – 1991

This is an impressive resume. In summary, prior to his appointment to the pinnacle of the legal profession, Thomas had 2 years of corporate law experience, 7 years at the assistant level in government bureaucracies, 8 years as the head of a government bureaucracy, and 18 months as a judge.

While this is an impressive resume for a guy living next door to you, it did not qualify Thomas for his appointment to SCOTUS. In 1991, there were literally thousands of men and women who were far more qualified. Thomas had, and still has, no record of legal scholarship. Other than his opinions on matters before the court over the past 35 years, and a personal memoir, he has published nothing. He has no experience as a litigator, either as a prosecutor, defense attorney, or in commercial litigation. He had 18 months experience as a judge on the appellate court. The American Bar Association gave him a “qualified” rating when he was nominated. Every other Supreme Court justice has received a “well qualified’ rating since that rating system was put in place. The “qualified” rating was, at the time, a message to President Bush and the Congress that Thomas was not a good choice for SCOTUS. We can’t ask Bush why he nominated him because Bush is dead. But why did the Senate approve him?

Thomas’s nomination looks even worse when you compare him to the man he replaced, Thurgood Marshall. Marshall received his law degree from Howard University in 1933. As a practicing attorney between 1933 and 1961 he argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court, and won 29 of them. He was a Federal Appeals Court judge from 1961 to 1965, U.S. Solicitor General from 1965-67, and served on SCOTUS from 1967 to his death in 1991. His experience as a litigator, judge, and government servant far surpassed that of Clarence Thomas. Similarly, Thomas’s resume does not compare well to any other sitting Supreme Court justice. All of them either have more scholarly work, experience as judges, experience practicing law, or a mixture of the three. Throughout history, there have been political appointees to SCOTUS who were similarly poorly qualified, including Hugo Black (1937) and Thomas Clark (1949). In modern times, virtually all SCOTUS nominations are politically motivated, but usually the appointees at least have backgrounds as federal judges, legal scholars, or experienced litigators.

In no way am I saying Thomas was incompetent. His career prior to his appointment to SCOTUS is respectable. It’s just that in a land with hundreds of constitutional scholars teaching in law schools and hundreds of judges on the bench at all levels of the federal judiciary, why pick the head of the EEOC for the Supreme Court?

Thomas’s record in his 35 years on the Court is equally unimpressive. His decisions are almost entirely predictable, that is to say entirely ultra-conservative and more recently, entirely MAGA. Upon joining the Court he was taken under the wing of Antonin Scalia, the Court’s primary conservative justice at the time. Between 1991 and Scalia’s death in 2016, Thomas voted the same as Scalia 91.0% of the time; they were the two most aligned justices in modern SCOTUS history. While the sheer volume of his decision writing and dissents will warrant a mention in future legal textbooks, his only consistent judicial philosophy is in the art of making an argument fit a predetermined decision. Thomas identifies with the originalist “philosophy” of jurisprudence (championed by Scalia back in the day). Having said that, court observers agree that Thomas was the more consistent originalist, refusing to depart from originalist philosophy even on the few cases that Scalia did so. For a full explication of originalism’s pitfalls, see the predecessor essay on this website, Supreme Court Jesters.

Corruption

A SCOTUS justice must, in addition to impeccable legal qualifications, enjoy a spotless moral and ethical reputation. As they say in the legal profession, the judge must be independent in appearance as well as in fact. An ethically compromised judge has no ability to render decisions that will be seen as independent by the public. This is most true for SCOTUS, whose decisions are not subject to review or reversal. Unlike politicians in Congress or the Executive Branch, SCOTUS justices are not subject to the citizenry. They serve with a kind of divine right of kings. They can remain on the Court for life. Technically they can be impeached and convicted, similar to a U.S. President. But this is exceedingly rare. Only one Justice has been impeached – Samuel Chase in 1805. He was acquitted by the Senate.

This is a problem with the current court, which, according to Gallup, has a 31.0% approval rating, an all-time low. Clearly, the public does not believe the SCOTUS is independent in either appearance or fact.

Clarence Thomas’s history of corruption is long, it’s documented, and it continues with impunity. Much of the research presented below was initially uncovered by ProPublica, an independent, investigative media organization.

According to several congressional oversight groups, Clarence Thomas has accepted gifts in an aggregate amount of $2.4 million over the past twenty years. Justice Thomas would tell us that nothing about these gifts is, technically, illegal. He’s right. It’s not. According to the law, justices are required to file annual financial disclosure statements in which they must declare gifts over a few hundred dollars (the exact amount changes over time), but the law is loosely written and even more loosely enforced. A large portion of the gifts Thomas has received has come in the form of vacations on privately owned yachts and jets, including one to Indonesia and one to the Greek Islands. He has been hosted at a number of other vacation spots free of charge. He has also been given VIP tickets to sporting and entertainment events. Once these undisclosed gifts were made public, Thomas’s response was that he was never obligated to report them (despite the fact they equated to hundreds of thousands of dollars in value) since the gifts came in the form of hospitality, not cash. He said “someone told him” that he didn’t have to report gifts of hospitality.

One of two things is true here. First, he’s lying and he always knew he should have reported it and just ignored the law. Second, he truly believed such gifts were exempt from disclosure, in which case his judgment is so flawed that he should be barred from serving on a local traffic court let alone a lifetime appointment to SCOTUS. You can take your pick.

The free vacations, yacht excursions, and VIP tickets is just the small stuff. Yes, they were given to Thomas by people who had an interest in grooming a Supreme Court justice, but the big stuff came later.

Harlan Crow

Clarence Thomas’s main benefactor is a man named Harlan Crow. Crow is the Chairman of Crow Holdings, a real estate empire started by his father, Trammel Crow. The company was once described by Forbes Magazine as the largest landlord in the United States. Mr. Crow is one of the Republican Party’s largest donors, and one of the driving forces behind the GOP’s agenda. Mr. Crow facilitates much of his power in conservative politics through his board membership on The American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution. Forbes estimates his net worth at over $2.5 billion. He has disclosed over $15 million in contributions to Republican causes over the years, but, as the above paragraphs discuss, much of his donations are of the informal sort which elude public disclosure. He is one of the men who has been supplying Clarence Thomas with gifts, vacations, tickets, etc.

In addition to the gifts and vacations, several transactions between Crow and Thomas stand out as particularly obvious examples of corruption.

• In 2014, Crow bought Clarence Thomas’s mother’s home in Savannah, Georgia for $133,363. He also bought two other properties on the same block owned by the Thomas family; the three properties were co-owned in equal one-third interests, by Clarence Thomas, his deceased brother’s estate, and his mother. Crow made significant improvements to the home where Thomas’s mother continued to live. Crow did not take possession of the house. Thomas never reported the transaction on his financial disclosure form, a clear ethical violation as well as a violation of the law which states that all such transactions over $1,000 must be reported. According to most recent reports, Thomas’s 98-year-old mother has been living in the renovated home rent-free since 2014. (according to Thomas’s original financial disclosure form, he valued his one-third interest in the home at $15,000). When asked why Crow would purchase residential homes in a working-class section of Savannah, Georgia, he responded by saying he wanted to preserve the properties to potentially become a museum celebrating Clarence Thomas’s legacy. Wow. Maybe you should get your tickets before they sell out.

• Clarence Thomas legally adopted a grand-nephew, Mark Martin, when the boy was six years old and raised him as his son. He sent Mark to two private boarding schools, Hidden Lake Academy in Georgia, and Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. The tuition at these schools was over $6,000 per month. Harlan Crow paid the tuition throughout Mark’s enrollment. It is estimated that the monthly wire transfers from Crow to the schools amounted to approximately $125,000. Clarence Thomas did not report the tuition payments on his financial disclosure form. He defended the omission by saying that Mark Martin was not his biological son.

Other examples of corruption:

• Clarence Thomas’s wife, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas, has become an embarrassment even to her husband who is not exactly concerned with public displays of bias. Ginni is a member of the Heritage Foundation (the conservative think tank powerhouse that gave us Project 2025) and she founded Liberty Central, a non-profit advocacy group that fostered the Tea Party movement back in 2010. She also founded Liberty Consulting, an advocacy firm which supports MAGA causes. She is perhaps best known for her efforts to overturn the 2020 election which included emailing Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff at the time, urging him to take specific steps to reverse the election results. In addition, she contacted lawmakers in Arizona and Wisconsin, urging them to elect an alternative slate of electors who would put Trump in office over Biden. She also endorsed the Trump rally on January 6^th which led to the takeover over of the Capitol building. It is unheard of for spouses of Supreme Court Justices to take part in any political activity, lest it compromise their spouses’ appearance of impartiality. This does not appear to be a concern in the Thomas household.

Among other partisan activities, Ginni Thomas has a relationship with Leonard Leo, Chairman of the Federalist Society, a conservative non-profit legal organization which, with the Heritage Foundation, are likely the two most influential conservative groups in the United States. Since its founding in 1982, no Republican president has nominated a Supreme Court Justice without reviewing a short-list of nominees provided him by the Federalist Society. Each of the six current conservative justices was vetted and approved by the Society. The Society boasts 65,000 practicing attorneys and 10,000 law students as its members.

In May, 2023, Leonard Leo instructed Kellyanne Conway (remember her?) to bill one of Leo’s consulting companies $25,000 and send a check to Ginni Thomas. Leo actually put into writing to Conway not to include Ginni Thomas’s name anywhere on the invoice. Thomas received the money for no apparent services rendered.

• In 1999, Anthony Welters, a wealthy healthcare executive and “friend” of Clarence Thomas, “loaned” Clarence Thomas $267,230 to buy a luxury motorcoach (which he and Ginni used for their vacations when not vacationing with Harlan Crow). Records show that Thomas paid interest on the loan at 7.5% for eight years, after which Welters forgave the principal. Thomas never reported the forgiven loan as income on either his financial disclosure form or his federal income taxes.

• In 2018, Clarence Thomas appeared as a guest at a Koch Brothers sponsored donor event in Palm Springs, California. Thomas spoke at a private $1 million/plate fundraiser dinner. He also spoke at a similar 2008 dinner. The Koch Brothers were two of the largest financiers of conservative and republican causes over the last thirty years. He flew to the dinner on a private jet, payment for which remains a mystery. The Koch Brothers routinely finance and support major cases that come before the Supreme Court. There is no record of Thomas recusing himself from these cases. 

It is incontrovertible that Clarence Thomas is in the pocket of the wealthiest men and women who are driving the MAGA and conservative agenda in the United States today. ProPublica has uncovered evidence of 38 destination vacations given to Clarence Thomas (many paid for by Harlan Crow, and none of which were reported on his financial disclosure forms), 26 private jet flights, standing invitations to private golf clubs, etc., etc., etc. ProPublica emphasizes that these are only the ethical breaches that they were able to uncover.  His benefactors have included Harlan Crow, the Koch brothers, Leonard Leo, Anthony Welters, David Sokol, Wayne Huizenga, Tony Novelly, and several others.

All of the above constitute transactions that should have been reported on Clarence Thomas’s financial disclosure form. Some of the above constitute taxable events that should have been reported as income on his federal income tax return, such as the forgiven RV loan.

Despite this, Clarence Thomas continues to serve on the Supreme Court without a hint of shame.

Samuel Alito

Samuel Alito is similar to Clarence Thomas in his willingness to accept gifts from wealthy businessmen, though incidents of such ethical failings are not as numerous. The two justices though are very similar in their predictable opinions; they vote together 97.0% of the time and in cases with 7-2 opinions, you can count on the two votes being Alito and Thomas. They fully support the Trump MAGA agenda, they support an almost unrestricted presidential power (at least during Republican presidencies), and exclusively support an ultra-conservative social agenda on matters such as abortion, immigration issues, LGBTQ rights, women’s issues, and environmental cases. In fact, their decisions are so predictable that the U.S. government could replace the two men with artificial intelligence software and save over $600,000 per year in salary expense.

There are numerous incidents of Thomas’s and Alito’s hypocrisy wherein a legal principle used to strike down a liberal petition on one day is abandoned when an opposite legal principle is needed to support a conservative petition on another day. For further exposition, see the preceding essay on this site, Supreme Court Jesters.

In 2008, Justice Alito took an all-expense paid fishing trip to Alaska, including round trip airfare on a private jet paid for by hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer. The trip is estimated to have cost $100,000. Similar to Clarence Thomas, Alito did not report the free vacation on his financial disclosure form. Singer is co-CEO of the hedge fund Elliot Management; Forbes estimates his net worth at $6.7 billion. He has been a consistent contributor to Republican causes, including a $1.0 million donation to the Koch Brother political efforts. His main objective has been to eliminate government oversight of the financial industry, and to diminish as much as possible taxation of wealthy citizens. His one departure from conservative causes is his support of LGBTQ rights which began when his son came out as gay in 1998.

Singer’s largesse paid off in 2014 in the Supreme Court case Republic of Argentina v. NML Capital Ltd. Singer’s firm held sovereign debt of Argentina on which the Argentine government defaulted. His company sued in a case that went up to the Supreme Court. The ruled 7-1 against Argentina, in favor of Singer’s firm which received a payout of $2.4 billion. Although Alito sided with the majority in what was not a controversial case, it is notable that Alito compounded his initial ethical breach by not recusing himself from the case in what was a clear conflict of interest. Alito explained his actions by stating he did not know Paul Singer had a stake in the court case, which defies credibility.

In January, 2021, in the midst of the MAGA assault on Washington, D.C., Alito flew an upside-down American flag outside his home in Virginia. Flying an upside-down flag is generally a distress symbol, but at the time was the symbol used by Trump supporters attempting to reverse the 2020 election results. By flying an upside-down flag, Alito was projecting not just his support for Donald Trump, but his support for rejecting U.S. law to insert an illegitimate government in the United States. The idea that a Supreme Court Justice would advocate an insurrection is unthinkable.

A few years later Alito flew the ‘Appeal to Heaven’ flag outside his New Jersey beach home. This flag was originally designed during the Revolutionary War but has been appropriated in the 20^th century as a symbol of Christian nationalism and, later, the Stop the Steal movement.

When questioned about the flags outside his homes, Alito blamed it on his wife. No, seriously, he said his wife put up the flags. Alito did not recuse himself from any of the election cases that came before the Court in subsequent years.

If you or I fly these flags we would be making a statement about our beliefs. That’s fine. It’s simple first amendment stuff. When a Supreme Court Justice flies these flags, it is not fine. These 9 SCOTUS justices must maintain an appearance and reputation for being above politics, party, and bias. Samuel Alito, apparently without the slightest reservation, has said, screw that. He is telling the country that he is a committed MAGA apparatchik, he’s going to cast his opinions as such regardless of what the Constitution says, and there’s not a damn thing you or I can do about it.

Summary

There is a scene in the Francis Ford Coppola film The Godfather in which Don Corleone does a favor for a friend on Corleone’s daughter’s wedding day. The Godfather says to the man, “Someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call upon you to do a service for me, but until that day, accept this gift as a justice on my daughter’s wedding day.” This is the long game that is played in the world of corrupt men. This is the game that has been played with Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

The image of a Supreme Court justice sipping champagne on a private jet or sitting on the deck of a yacht listening to a billionaire’s discourse on how the law should be applied is not a good one, especially in a country as polarized as the United States is today. Yet that is precisely the image that Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito project.

I should make clear that neither Thomas nor Alito had incidences in which they received cash or gifts from parties which were petitioners or respondents at the time a gift was made. That’s not how this kind of corruption occurs. The men who bought Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito did so through a long grooming process in which a friendship is proffered through expensive gifts in one year with an intention of a payoff many years later. Paul Singer paid Samuel Alito over $100,000 in 2008; he received $2.4 billion six years later in a case that no one could have foreseen would be before the Court when the gift was made. Harlan Crow was not necessarily interested in a specific case that affected his personal wealth. He, like the Koch brothers, Leonard Leo, Anthony Welters, and a host of other ultra-conservative, ultra-wealthy men see something much more valuable in a relationship with a Supreme Court justice. They are seeking power. If they can influence an irreversible Supreme Court opinion about environmental issues, campaign finance, presidential immunity, voting rights, immigration, etc. then they can place themselves ahead of the U.S. government and ahead of the U.S. voters. They get to play because they paid. You and I do not get to play.

As discussed above, there have been only two SCOTUS justices prior to Thomas and Alito who have had ethical complaints on a similar level. In 1969, Abe Fortas resigned from SCOTUS when it was discovered he received $20,000 from a financier. Fortas returned the money and resigned from the Court. Fortas experienced a public shaming and did what the public expected at the time. Samuel Chase was impeached in 1804, though there was no evidence of corruption or ethical violations. He was accused of letting personal bias affect his judgment and was acquitted by the Senate. That case was basically political theater.

The United States has never before seen ethical violations and corruption on the level displayed by Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. The true humiliation to the United States is that neither man is even remotely embarrassed or ashamed by his ethical violations which were made public. Neither Congress nor the executive branch of government has taken any punitive or corrective action against them. Like Trump, we have accepted their corruption as just another day at the government office.

Their behavior continues to this day with impunity.

• John Barton