Clarence Thomas recuses himself as Supreme Court rejects ex-Trump lawyer John Eastman's appeal
Clarence Thomas recuses himself as Supreme Court rejects ex-Trump lawyer John Eastman's appeal
With this Supreme Court everything is about politics.
Seems like the bigger piece here is that he clerked for Thomas. Nothing to do with the Trump stuff
I think an even bigger headline is that Thomas actually seems to be aware of the concept "conflict of interest in the supreme court"
I think it's still surprising he recused himself regardless of why, he's never cared about ethics before and his attitude has always been "so? What are you going to do about it?" every other time there was a conflict of interest.
More info on John Eastman from a 2022 NPR article.
Eastman has a long background in conservative law, having clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in the late 1990s and was a chairman in the Federalist Society. He worked at a law firm in California before leaving to teach at Chapman University, where he also served as dean, but left shortly after addressing the "Save America" rally before the attack on the Capitol.
Still, I picture him looking in the mirror, saying "ThERe LIbEraLs, I rECused mySeLF!"
I'm not willing to give Thomas credit for even this. Eastman's appeal was never going anywhere, with or without Thomas. He recused himself on what is fundamentally an uncontroversial case. He gets a little political reprieve for pretending to have suddenly discovered ethics, but nothing was on the line. There's not a chance he'd recuse himself if his vote had any chance of undermining democracy or human rights.
My thoughts exactly. This is the same as the Supreme Court making two small sane rulings before tossing out decades of precedent based on "they weren't conservative enough to count" and claiming that this makes them centrist.
More like shamed and pressured into doing the right thing. If this was a month ago he would not have recused.
I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a sense of shame, and does not care at all about external pressure. He is a Supreme Court justice for the rest of his life. Nobody, not even the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, can do anything to him in a punitive sense. The USSC will never do anything to limit its own power or those of its justices.
I’m just surprised he proactively recused himself from literally anything.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Eastman's case also involved the now-defunct Jan. 6 committee, centering on the former law professor's efforts to prevent his former employer, Chapman University, from handing over emails.
Eastman had pushed the discredited argument that then-Vice President Mike Pence had the power to refuse to certify the 2020 presidential election results.
Castro argued in his appeal that Trump is ineligible to be on the ballot under the Constitution's 14th Amendment because of his "aid and comfort to the convicted criminals and insurrectionists that violently attacked our United States Capitol on January 6, 2021."
Although some legal scholars have backed the argument, others have dismissed it, pointing out the difficulty of enforcing the constitutional provision and questioning whether Trump's actions rose to the level of "insurrection or rebellion."
Trump is facing criminal charges for his role in events leading up to Jan. 6 and was also impeached by the then-Democratic controlled House of Representatives in the days after the episode.
Even before the Supreme Court rejected Castro's appeal, it had signaled a lack of interest in the case by not even asking Trump's legal team to file a response.
The original article contains 592 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Did Thomas actually do the right thing? It must have been unintentional.
Is Thomas ill or something?
Newsflash: Justice Clarence Thomas finally learns how to recuse himself at age 75.
Don’t give him too much credit… Eastmans check didn’t clear