The corruption continues in the Supreme Court of the United States,
and Congress appears like it might do something about it, or
at least it might try to do something about it.
This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter to
Chief Justice Roberts about one Samuel Alito.
And their particular concerns about an upcoming case that will be heard in front
of the Supreme Court.
And they're asking Samuel Alito to recuse himself from that case.
So let's get into the details why he might have to recuse himself or
why they're asking for him to recuse himself.
But first,
this is all because we now know that the Supreme Court has been bought and sold.
At least many of the members of the Supreme Court have been bought and
sold by billionaires like Harlan Crow when it comes to Clarence Thomas.
Or Paul Singer, who in June,
ProPublica reported that Alito accepted a flight on his private jet before
the Supreme Court ruled on a business matter involving Singer's hedge fund.
A decision that proved very lucrative for his firm and
not lucrative for the country of Argentina, Paul Singer is a POS.
Anyway, but this has to do with an interview that Justice Samuel Alito,
gave to The Wall Street Journal, which has been very, very receptive to Samuel Alito.
He's written op eds for them.
This was last week where an interview was published as a column on Friday that
lavished attention and praise on Alito and depicted him as a forthright truth-teller.
The only justice with a strong enough conscience and
the urgency needed to fight back against what the conservative writers
characterized as a political onslaught against the Court.
And in that interview, Alito basically said that he doesn't
believe that Congress has any authority to impose any standards
of ethics on the highest court in the land.
He said, quote, I know this is a controversial view, but
I'm willing to say it.
No provision in the Constitution gives them, that means Congress,
the authority to regulate the Supreme Court, period.
And that right there is what the Senate Judiciary Committee is, hold on, no.
So they believe that that actually violates his impropriety and impartiality.
But that's not all, because it's who Alito gave that
interview to at the Wall Street Journal that is also concerning to these Senators.
The interview was conducted, and this is part of the letter that they wrote to
Chief Justice John Roberts, was conducted in part by David Rivkin.
Mr. Rivkin is a partner at BakerHostettler LLP and is on the team
representing plaintiff-appellants in the case Moore versus the United States.
Whose dismissal at the district court level was affirmed by the Ninth Circuit.
On February 21, Mr.
Rivkin and his team sought certiorari, gosh, I hope that's right, for
their clients on this case, which the Supreme Court granted on June 26.
While this case has been pending before the Court, Justice Alito twice sat for
interviews with Mr. Rivkin, once in April and again in July.
The interview in which he said that he is effectively above the law.
Now, according to the Lever that reported on this, Mr. Rivkin isn't just
a contributor to the paper's opinion pages, the Wall Street Journal.
He's a part of the legal team, as was stated by that letter,
representing the plaintiffs in More v US.
And the court is gonna hear that next term.
And this is basically what that case is about.
The case asks the court to, this is according to the Lever, graphic six,
reimagine the basis for much of the tax code.
Rivkin's side is asking the Court to rewrite the modern definition of income
for tax purposes.
A decision that Rivkin himself has described in The Wall Street Journal as
an attempt to have the High Court prevent Congress from passing any future
wealth tax.
I think he's saying that as a positive thing.
So you guys get what is happening here.
A glowing interview with Justice Samuel Alito by a guy who has business
before the Court in the coming months that will effectively, what?
Redefine income, again, funneling money to the 1%.
But you guys, the corruption just does not stop.
And here the Senate is trying, saying, hey, you guys should recuse yourself.
We're not talking impeachment.
That obviously is gonna be a bridge too far, especially with Republicans.
But here, this is this imploring of Chief Justice Roberts to at least
put some kind of limits on these current justices,
given that a lot of them feel that they are above ethics.
>> Speaker 2: Yeah, so I wanna point out one other thing.
So, a guy who's part of the legal team with a case in front of Alito
just coincidentally happens to be the guy writing the positive op ed
about him in The Wall Street Journal.
Wall Street Journal is like, there's 330 million people in the country.
Who should we get to write the op ed about Alito?
How about a guy that has a case in front of him right away?
And that guy is like, golly, gee, I was just sitting around, but, hey,
you guys found me.
And you know what?
I'll write an article and it'll turn out to be a glowing piece about,
Alito doesn't have to follow any ethics.
He doesn't have to follow the laws.
He could just help hedge fund guys all day long.
Do I have a case in front of him?
Did I say he shouldn't follow the ethics rules?
And if he followed the ethics rules,
he would make sure that he was not going to rule on that case.
But he's not going to follow them, is he?
[LAUGH] They're just being over the top.
If you put in a movie, they'd say, this is a B rate movie.
Nobody's this obviously corrupt.
And yet, yeah, that's what's gonna happen.
And Alito promised, as the Lever also points out,
that we get to in a little bit.
That he would follow the ethics rules when he was in front of the Senate,
when he was being confirmed, and now he's saying, yeah,
basically he's admitting I was lying.
I don't wanna follow any ethics rules.
How else would I get bribed by all these wonderful corporations who are my best
friends and write glowing pieces about me and do propaganda for me.
I mean, look, this reminds me of the Southern Pacific Railroad case.
So that was the first case that basically started corporate rule in America.
It was from a long time ago.
I wrote it in the book, justice is coming.
You can get it at tyt.com/justice.
And the Supreme Court rules that railroad companies, of course,
are not human beings and says that's absurd, right?
The Supreme Court clerk makes a mistake saying that the Court ruled that
they were human beings and they have all the rights of human beings.
That's absurd.
The Court definitely didn't rule that.
It was literally a clerical error, right?
Do you wanna know who the clerk of the Supreme Court was at the time?
The owner of a railroad company.
Another coincidence.
Look at this, a CEO of a railroad company wound up becoming a Supreme Court clerk
and changed their decision.
And it wound up having huge ramifications for railroad companies.
And here we are back at maximum corruption with almost no one noticing.
>> Speaker 1: Yeah, Jordan,
I wanted to kick it to you also given that Congress is now thinking about imposing
some kind of ethic standards for Supreme Court Justices.
And a lot of them are, nah, I'm cool on that,
including Chief Justice Roberts himself.
But yet you have this letter, so I don't know.
Senators are trying?
>> Speaker 3: I don't think they'll be successful.
I think you have enough people who would defect, even in the Democratic Party,
because who like to maintain the status quo.
But to go to what Alito said about Congress not having authority to implement
any restrictions or ethics guidelines or regulate if you want the Supreme Court.
Think about what the Constitution actually says about the Supreme Court.
It doesn't clearly define the number of Justices.
You could use that to make the argument for packing the Court and
make Alito's vote maybe irrelevant.
But also the way the Supreme Court functions and its role in our lives in
deciding some of these matters, that also doesn't come from the Constitution.
It comes from Marbury v Madison way back in the early days of this country.
And the role of this Court has evolved, and its size and
scope has evolved as a result of that case, not the Constitution.
So, for him to defer solely to the Constitution,
to deflect any attempts by Congress to implement ethics guidelines, is misguided.
One thing about this actual incident, though,
where he took this fishing trip that I saw today and just couldn't stop laughing at.
His justification for not declaring this fishing trip was that the seat on that
plane would have gone empty if he didn't take it.
So really, he was doing everyone a favor by taking that seat.
>> Speaker 2: Jordan, to be fair to Alito, Singer offered me the seat.
He offered, like, half of LA this seat.
He was going around at Ralph's go, hey, but he want a seat on my plane.
Anybody want a seat on a billionaire plane?
And nobody would take it.
That's why Alito jumped on it, to be fair.
>> Speaker 3: So nice of him.
>> Speaker 1: Yeah, it was like in the free section of Craigslist,
there was just, I got a seat on Paul Singer's plane.
Well, that's what's ridiculous about this, obviously,
is that each of these Supreme Court justices.
So the Lever also, or the Lever also reports about how eight of
the Supreme Court Justices, including Alito, promised, as Cenk mentioned.
Promised senators during their confirmation process,
that they would follow ethic statutes passed by Congress in 1948 and 1989.
Now, part of that is literally just declaring and
stating that that's what you did.
No one's actually going to hold you accountable, just like no one's held
the Supreme Court justices accountable for their reversal on Roe.
Even though each of them, when confirmed,
said that they would still protect it even if we knew that they were
purely nominated for their extreme views on abortion rights.
But so there you have it.
It's not, no one's gonna prevent you from taking that seat on Paul Singer's
private jet.
It's that you have to declare and say, yeah, this is what happened.
Clarence Thomas, yes my nephew got a free ride to whatever school, thanks to
a billionaire that happens to have a weird Nazi memorabilia collection, whatever.
The harsher penalty is not even coming down at them, and yet
they're still skirting that.
And even Justice John Roberts, who I do not think will honestly ask Alito to
recuse himself in this very important case about redefining what income is.
And potentially, again, further swindling the American people out of millions and
billions of dollars that should know belong to us.
But this is graphic eight, Alito isn't the first justice to say whether Congress can
impose ethics rules on the Supreme Court.
Roberts himself did so in a memo in 2011,
when lawmakers were considering an effort to improve ethics at the high court.
So, once again, when we're having this conversation, arguably,
probably one of the biggest conversations about ethics on the Supreme Court,
I think in my political lifetime.
You still meet this friction and
resistance from a court that believes they're above the law.
So what are we doing about it?
What is the Senate Judiciary gonna do about it?
This letter is important, it's good.
I don't think he's gonna recuse himself.
So how are we gonna actually bring this court to heal?
>> Speaker 2: Yeah, so last two quick things for me.
One, earlier I misspoke.
I said, no one noticed, and in this case, that's not true.
The Democrats have noticed, Congress has noticed, and the press has noticed.
So they've done an unusually good job in this case in pointing out these ethical
problems.
What I meant was, no one on the Supreme Court cares.
They're brazenly, Roberts, Alito, Clarence Thomas,
they're all saying, yeah, that's your opinion, man [LAUGH].
And we're the ultimate authorities on the law, and
we say we can break any ethics laws we'd like.
And that's just absolutely outrageous.
And one final thing is the confirmation hearings.
Please stop getting surprised that they're lying during the confirmation hearings.
They're all lying.
And by the way, so are the liberal justices.
What is my politics?
I don't even have any politics.
I just call balls and strikes.
And all the liberal justices, except for some of the business cases, rule,
in a way, in the left leading direction.
All the conservative justices rule in the right-wing direction, and
it's all a coincidence.
They were just calling balls and strikes.
No, they all have political opinions.
They're all definitely going to enforce their political and by the way,
religious opinions on the court.
And every part of the confirmation hearings is a lie.
So let's just stop pretending that it's real.
And we're shocked to find out that the Supreme Court justices were political and
unethical, come on, give it a rest.
>> Speaker 3: I wanted to check out what some of the conservatives were saying
in response to this Democratic push for Alito's recusal from upcoming cases.
And on a CNN panel yesterday or the day prior,
a conservative pundit was saying, well, how do we know that Kagan or
Sotomayor haven't benefited or taken gifts from billionaires?
Here's the thing, maybe they have, maybe they haven't.
But the nanosecond that gets reported, I think all three of us,
a lot of the viewers, and many Democrats, liberals, progressives.
Would also call for their recusal from cases that could have any sort of conflict
of interest, but ultimately maybe their removal from the Court.
Because here's the thing.
There's many of us who are opposed to corruption no matter which political
party they're affiliated with.
I would encourage that conservative pundit and
anybody else who's caping for Thomas or Alito in these cases to do the same.
Because we all lose when they are taking, effectively,
bribes from billionaires and corporations and special interests and
then allowing that to influence what they do on the Supreme Court.
We all lose when you just pick sides and pick and
choose who you wanna be outraged by.
>> Unless you're rich, Jordan I feel like you have an anti-rich bias,
and I feel like if you just had more money, you might not think
that's the case cuz somehow the billionaires keep on winning [LAUGH].
>> Speaker 2: Coincidence. >> Speaker 1: So, total coincidence.