AOC and Raskin Move to Finally Rein in Alito and Thomas

Democratic Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamie Raskin are introducing a new piece of legislation aimed at putting a cap on the number and value of gifts U.S. Supreme Court justices can receive.

The High Court Gift Ban Act, unveiled Tuesday, would prohibit justices from receiving gifts valued at more than $50 at a time, or more than $100 total per year. The bill would also put an $18,000 cap on gifts of personal hospitality, which are currently unregulated.

Justice Clarence Thomas has been under intense scrutiny after an investigation by the Senate Judiciary Committee found that he failed to include luxury vacations paid for by Republican megadonor Harlan Crow on his financial disclosure forms. Thomas has been subject to several other complaints, including that he never paid back a loan on his R.V. and that he cavorted with the Koch brothers while ruling on cases they’d brought to the Supreme Court.

Earlier this month, a report from a judicial watchdog found that Supreme Court justices had received close to a total of $3 million in gifts over the last 20 years—with more than $2.4 million of those gifts being directed solely to Thomas. Through gifts, Thomas has roughly doubled his official published income from the last 20 years.

Justice Samuel Alito has similarly come under fire for accepting lavish gifts from Republican billionaires, including over-the-top, all-expenses-paid vacations.

It seems, however, that little can be done to rein in the court’s high-ranking members over mounting concerns about their ethics. Raskin and Ocasio-Cortez wrote to Chief Justice John Roberts late last week, seeking answers on what he planned to do about Thomas, as well as Alito, whose recent flag scandal has also called into question whether he has conflicts of interest in cases before the court. Roberts has not yet responded.

“The Supreme Court is the highest court in the land but has the lowest ethical standards, which means pay-to-play billionaires, right-wing dark money groups and carbon-emitting special interests have freedom to purchase the best justice money can buy,” said Raskin in a statement Tuesday.

Ocasio-Cortez called their bill “a commonsense solution to address the deeply troubling and unethical influence dark money is having on our nation’s highest judicial body.”

“This is not about politics—it’s about safeguarding the strength and integrity of our democracy,” she said. It’s unlikely, though, that such a bill would pass in a brutally indifferent Republican-led House.

The Republican talking point that Joe Biden will be on performance-enhancing drugs during the first presidential debate on Thursday has broken containment and, as a result, is becoming much dumber. The latest: open speculation on Fox News that Biden is hunkered down in Camp David not to prepare for the debate but to trial different cocktails of supplements for it.

Maria Bartiromo on Tuesday shared the conspiracy, first theorized by Representative Ronny Jackson, a former White House physician who has faced newly resurfaced allegations that he orchestrated a pill mill for the Trump White House, in an interview with Missouri Representative Eric Burlison.

“Biden will have been at Camp David for a full week before the debate, and … they’re probably experimenting with getting doses right, getting him medicine before the debate,” she said.

Burlison, for his part, cautioned Trump against ramping up attacks on Biden’s age and mental capacity before Thursday, a mistake that the GOP has made repeatedly, handing Biden easy victories after competent performances in the 2020 debates and, more recently, his 2024 State of the Union address. But Burlison couldn’t help couch his warning between a bizarre pot shot at Biden and his team.

“Any patient or elderly individual or someone that has dementia, they can find some moments of clarity, right? They can find moments throughout the day that they have energy. I think Trump’s team should not underestimate Joe Biden and his team’s ability to, you know, whether they’re gonna jack him up on Mountain Dew or whatever it is,” he said.

Is Biden’s surprising coherence the result of dementia-induced energy spikes? Speed? Caffeinated soda? Republicans can’t seem to pick their favorite talking point to defend Trump ahead of a debate that hasn’t happened yet. But whatever the case, Republicans ought to heed Burlison’s advice, cynical and confused as it might be. If not, they may be in store for another debate disappointment.

Judge Aileen Cannon may actually reject an argument from Donald Trump’s defense team in his classified documents trial: on whether the FBI’s 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate was constitutional.

Cannon heard arguments from Trump’s defense team on the matter Tuesday, and she appeared to be skeptical of the attorneys’ challenge to the search warrant for Trump’s Florida home.

During the hearing, Cannon appeared frustrated with one of Trump’s lawyers, Emil Bove, who seemed to be off-topic. She reminded him that the issue at hand was whether the FBI’s warrant had been specific enough.

“It seems like it is,” Cannon said.

Bove tried to call attention to Trump’s other pending motions in the case, to which David Harbach from the special counsel’s office objected, accusing Bove of “hijacking the hearing.”

“It’s not fair,” Harbach told Cannon.

It’s unclear why Cannon entertained a motion from the Trump team contesting the search warrant, if she already seems inclined to believe the warrant was valid. Whether her actions are due to bias toward Trump or ineptitude is unknown. However, Cannon has agreed to hear many of Trump’s pretrial motions that have slowed down proceedings, including one questioning if special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment is constitutional. These delays give evidence to the theory that Cannon is serving Trump’s interests, as she has managed to postpone the trial indefinitely.

Even before the classified documents case was assigned to her, Cannon was involved in it.

Two years ago, she heard Trump’s lawsuit challenging the search of his property and mandated the use of a special master to review the classified documents seized by the Justice Department. Her decision was later struck down by a federal appeals court.

Cannon’s later actions presiding over the case itself have given weight to the accusation that she is prone to exploitation. When she was initially assigned the case, more senior federal judges in her circuit recommended that she turn over the case to a judge with more trial experience, but she refused. She’s ruled that parts of the case should be thrown out, and experts ranging from former Trump lawyer Ty Cobb to ex-federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman have called her judgment into question. Fox News, though, still has her back, despite their history of attacking the judges presiding over Trump’s many court cases.

After months of relentlessly attacking the judge in Donald Trump’s hush-money case, Fox News hosts are now donning the white hat to chastise those taking shots at the judge in his classified documents case.

On Tuesday’s episode of Outnumbered, hosts Kayleigh McEnany, Emily Compagno, and Harris Faulkner were up in arms, defending Judge Aileen Cannon, whom many have criticized as helping the former president worm his way out of allegations that he kept classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and obstructed efforts to retrieve them.

The accusations must’ve left a bitter taste in the hosts’ mouths, as they argued that those on the left were doing exactly what they’d done for weeks: attacking a sitting judge.

“This is a credible person with a great life story that is doing her job,” said McEnany, who served as Trump’s White House press secretary. “And yet she’s called ‘partisan petty primadonna,’ ‘whacko,’ ‘crazy,’ ‘right-wing,’ ‘outlandish,’ ‘ridiculous,’ ‘nutty,’ ‘loony.’”

“No, she’s a credible woman and she deserves to be respected—and I thought we didn’t attack judges? Bring in Judge Merchan, oh wait, but we do if it’s going against us,” McEnany added.

From the time jury selection began on April 15 to the court’s adjournment on May 21, Fox News made more than 220 claims about Judge Juan Merchan’s so-called anti-Trump bias, according to Media Matters. When Merchan placed a gag order on Trump to prevent him from making rampant, baseless accusations against the judge, courtroom staff, and family members, Fox took up Trump’s crusade against those holding him to account, constantly pushing the story that Merchan was biased when the former president couldn’t. Now they’re accusing the other guys of doing exactly the same thing.

“It’s really disheartening to watch, and also, again underscores the hypocrisy of the left,” Compagno said, underscoring her own disheartening hypocrisy. She herself was a sharp critic of Merchan, who she argued sided too readily with prosecutors.

“Because apparently, if you’re Judge Alito you can be attacked, if you’re Judge Clarence Thomas you can be attacked, if you’re Judge Cannon—but somehow they’re missing the whole substance, which I guess they don’t like her ruling on both sides, they’re not seeing the facts here,” Compagno continued, completely unaware that criticizing judges for their political bias is normal—if there’s actual evidence that they’re biased and if the criticisms don’t involve presidential candidates directing their mobs against the judge’s family members.

Importantly, Cannon has not ruled “on both sides.” Cannon processed pretrial motions at a glacial pace, threw out portions of the case, showed an unfaltering compliance to all of Trump’s time-wasting requests, and even indefinitely postponed the actual trial. Last week, it was reported that Cannon refused calls from senior federal judges to hand off the classified documents case, signaling her insistence on keeping the high-profile case on her desk. This week, she has brought the trial to a complete standstill so Trump’s lawyers can play out a hearing over the validity of special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment.

Faulkner also weighed in on criticism of Cannon. “Well, they don’t want a judge who’s actually going to look at this from a fresh perspective, and follow the justice and the legal system’s rules on this,” she said, arguing that attacks on the Trump-appointed judge went “all the way to the White House and the president’s campaign team.”

“From a group of people, liberal media, who said, you know, you can’t pick on women, they fall to the woman card, the race card, yet they pick on who they need to pick on,” she said. When Cannon had announced the hearing into Smith’s appointment, “the left lost its mind, and this is proof of that. I wish they were classier at it, but they’re not.”

Faulkner too readily forgets that she herself was part of Fox’s smear campaign against a judge and his family: She once said that Merchan’s decision to preside over the case was a form of “legal terrorism.” If hypocrisy is tasteless, Faulkner’s not so classy now.

Representative Bob Good’s primary race for his congressional seat is still too close to call, and his complaints about the election are drawing insults and mockery from his fellow House Republicans.

Good is currently trailing state Senator John McGuire III, who was endorsed by Donald Trump, by 373 votes and has called for a “do-over” in the city of Lynchburg. Good also claimed that three precincts in his district had fires on Election Day last week, despite state election officials saying that there were no fires, only fire alarms. On Thursday, Good even said on Steve Bannon’s show War Room that he has “lawyers at the ready.”

“We’re going to have a full recount. We’re going to have a full investigation,” Good told Bannon. “It’s going to stretch out for a couple of weeks.”

“It’s the swamp versus the Freedom Caucus. Are we going to allow the seat to be bought by the McCarthy revenge tour?” Good added, referring to ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s efforts to target the representatives who vacated his speakership.

But Good’s Republican colleagues scoffed at his allegations of election misconduct.

“No one is buying it, but all understand this is one of the several stages of electoral grief,” one House Republican told Axios anonymously, adding that Good’s attacks on the electoral process are “the reflexive thing people who can’t accept loss say these days.”

“F**k Bob Good. Bob Good is a sore loser. His defeat strengthens our majority,” another House Republican said, while a different anonymous GOP representative said, “I assume Bob Good is full of s**t.”

Other House Republicans called out Good openly.

“[Of] course Bob is claiming election fraud. He is grasping at straws to help save his political career,” said Representative Derrick Van Orden, who endorsed McGuire.

Representative Mike Lawler noted that Good mentioned Lynchburg despite winning the majority of votes there. “What a loser,” Lawler said.

The whole reason that Good, who heads the far-right House Freedom Caucus, even had a tough primary battle in the first place was because he endorsed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the Republican presidential primary, earning him Trump’s ire. After DeSantis withdrew from the race, Good tried to get into Trump’s good graces, even traveling to Trump’s hush-money trial in Manhattan to help Trump skirt his gag order in the case.

That was all for naught, as Trump would endorse McGuire and call out Good as “BAD FOR VIRGINIA, AND BAD FOR THE USA.”