Wife’s Oil and Gas Leasing Deal Raises New Ethics Concerns About Justice Alito

Advocates for ethical government on Monday sounded the alarm on a report revealing that the wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito leased property in Oklahoma to a fossil fuel company around the same time that the firm was involved in a case before the high court from which the judge did not recuse himself.

According toThe Intercept, Martha Ann Bomgardner Alito last June leased a 160-acre plot of land in Grady County, Oklahoma, just southwest of Oklahoma City, to Citizen Energy III under an agreement that she would be paid 3/16ths of all the money the company made from oil and gas sales.

Last month, Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, which severely curtailed protections under the Waters of the United States rule, as Common Dreamsreported at the time. The environmental legal advocacy group Earthjusticecalled the ruling “a catastrophic loss for water protections across the country and a win for big polluters, putting our communities, public health, and local ecosystems” in peril.

The high court’s review was well underway at the time of the lease deal, with the justices agreeing to take the case in January 2022 and hearing arguments that October.

“There need not be a specific case involving the drilling rights associated with a specific plot of land for Alito to understand what outcomes in environmental cases would buttress his family’s net wealth,” Jeff Hauser, founder and director of the watchdog Revolving Door Project, told The Intercept.

There appears to be no limit to the culture of corruption from the extreme right wing judges on the #SCOTUS. This is not sustainable if we want to have a functioning democracy. #expandSCOTUS. https://t.co/lAvAKKyxfG

— Murshed Zaheed (@murshedz) June 26, 2023

“Alito does not have to come across like a drunken Paul Thomas Anderson character gleefully confessing to drinking our collective milkshakes in order to be a real-life, run-of-the-mill political villain,” Hauser added.

As Daniel Boguslaw wrote for The Intercept:

In the past, Alito has often recused himself from cases that pose potential conflicts of interest with his vast investment portfolio. Many of these recusals were born from an inheritance of stocks after the death of Alito’s father-in-law, Bobby Gene Bomgardner. Because Citizen Energy III isn’t implicated in any cases before the Supreme Court, Alito’s holding in Oklahoma doesn’t appear to pose any direct conflicts of interest. But it does add context to a political outlook that has alarmed environmentalists since Alito’s confirmation hearing in 2006—and cast recent decisions that embolden the oil and gas industry in a damning light.

During his 2006 Senate confirmation hearing, Alito appeared to set a high ethical bar for himself by stating justices should recuse themselves from cases in which “any possible question” might arise regarding “the appearance of impropriety.”

The new revelation comes hot on the heels of a ProPublicareport that exposed a previously undisclosed luxury fishing trip in Alaska that Alito was gifted by billionaire and GOP megadonor Paul Singer, whose hedge fund repeatedly had cases before the Supreme Court from which Alito declined to recuse himself.

A petition currently in circulation demands that Alito recuse himself from a pair of cases that will decide the fate of President Joe Biden’s plan to relieve the college debt burdens of tens of millions of Americans.

Unlike other federal courts, there is no code of ethics governing Supreme Court justices. Although justices must file financial disclosures under the Ethics in Government Act, the choice of whether or not to recuse themselves from cases involving a conflict of interest is up to them.

“What makes political figures who violate ethics laws so exceptional is how much obviously unethical behavior is legal under our current overly permissive rules.”

Another ProPublica report, this one published in April, showed how Justice Clarence Thomas and relatives apparently exploited this loophole by accepting lavish gifts including luxury vacations, domestic and international private jet travel, and even private school tuition for one of the judge’s relatives.

“What makes political figures who violate ethics laws so exceptional is how much obviously unethical behavior is legal under our current overly permissive rules,” Hauser told The Intercept. “Our current ethics regime assumes that a person’s financial interests need to be extremely specific in order to influence their behavior, a worldview that ignores the foresight rich people and corporations regularly demonstrate.”

Dave Dayen & Matt Stoller

Moving Past Neoliberalism is a Policy Project

For years, Joe Biden’s approval ratings have been in the doldrums, with almost 60 percent of voters unhappy with his management of the country and the economy. This isn’t necessarily a political catastrophe, though it could be. In the voting booth, the Democrats did better in the 2022 midterm elections than any incumbent party has in 20 years, despite Biden’s lackluster polling. But it is worrisome nonetheless, and is consistent with Barack Obama’s presidency, which saw the Democrats lose over 1,000 elected positions and then lose the White House to Donald Trump.

We aren’t political consultants, and we aren’t going to tell anyone how to win elections. But our political theory, nicknamed “deliverism,” is that Democrats, when in government, need to not only say popular things, but actually deliver good economic outcomes for voters. They did not do this for many years, and neither did the GOP, which is why Trump blasted through both party establishments. Deliverism is linked to the death of neoliberalism, because it’s an argument that Democrats could reverse their toxic image in many parts of the country by reversing policy choices on subjects like NAFTA, deregulation, and banking consolidation, which have helped hollow out the middle class for decades.

Deepak Bhargava, Shahrzad Shams, and Harry Hanbury, in a piece called “The Death of ‘Deliverism,’” recently argued otherwise, asserting that Democratic unpopularity shows that a narrow focus on policy to improve people’s lives is largely irrelevant to electoral outcomes. They point to a series of Democratic policies that, though enacted, did not help win votes.

It’s an intriguing thesis, and worth considering. If economic policy doesn’t really matter to voters, as many political scientists argue, then politics really should orient itself around cultural questions. That said, these authors use an odd basket of evidence, and in doing so, actually show the real political problem with improving the material lives of Americans. The problem is that most Democrats are so set on defending our policy legacy against right-wing attacks that they have no idea how voters experience the economy, or how our policies impact people.

Take the Affordable Care Act, which now seems to have a strong political anchor after years of political controversy. Bhargava, Shams, and Hanbury argue that the ACA is “Obama’s signature achievement” that improved people’s well-being. Yet, they say, there’s a paradox, as it “did virtually nothing to shift political allegiances.” If those who believe that helping people economically are right, they allege, then the ACA should have switched large segments of the voting electorate.

But is this a fair test? Let’s take a quick look at how Obamacare actually affected normal people. First, the goal of Obamacare was to insure more people, and it did. Roughly 85 percent of Americans had health insurance in 2008. Today, it’s about 90 percent. So 5 percent of the country has something they didn’t have before, and it’s quite possible to say that many lives were saved. Biden built on this by giving higher subsidies to individuals to purchase insurance if they don’t get it from an employer or qualify for a public plan.

What about the other 85 percent? Well, in 2009, the average medical cost for a family of four was $15,609. Today, it’s $30,260. That’s almost the cost of a new car in health care costs, every single year. In other words, 85 percent of potential voters have the same or a worse experience with health care today, versus 5 percent who gained insurance. It’s hard to call that a net economic improvement in the lives of most voters. Obama himself said that the ACA would reduce costs by $2,500 a year. He knew what sells, even if he didn’t deliver that to voters. (Biden knows, too, as his promise to negotiate lower drug prices in Medicare attests. But the results of those negotiations won’t kick in until 2026.)

Most Democrats are so set on defending our policy legacy against right-wing attacks that they have no idea how voters experience the economy.

There’s more. The typical Democratic talking point, that Obamacare prevented discrimination against pre-existing conditions, isn’t true. Since the ACA kicked in, the number of high-deductible health care plans has skyrocketed from 7 percent to 32 percent. That means if you have, say, diabetes, you get to pay $2,000 or more in cash every single year before your health insurance kicks in. That may be better for some people than the previous system, but is that nondiscrimination? No.

That’s before you get to the fact that routine drugs used in all hospitals are in chronic shortages, including many drugs used in the treatment of cancer. Hospital understaffing is at a point of crisis, with as many as 124,000 physicians needed by 2034, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Nurses are in such demand that those who travel to fill shortages can make as much as $10,000 a week. And mass hospital closures have left medical deserts in large swaths of America, with nearly 80 percent of rural counties left “medically underserved.”

It’s possible, even likely, that our health care system would have been worse without the ACA, and many wonks make this point. But our point is that how voters respond to Obamacare is not a basis for testing the political reaction to a program that improved the material life of Americans under Democrats. Because the fact is, health care as experienced by most people is more expensive and harder to obtain. If you can’t accurately understand how Americans experience our culture and economy, the very acts of seeking the care to live or die, then your judgment on political and policy arguments will be off.

BHARGAVA, SHAMS, AND HANBURY’S ESSAY is full of this style of analysis. In the opening anecdote, they are mystified by the lack of enthusiasm from working-class parents for the monthly Child Tax Credit checks passed in Biden’s American Rescue Plan. One person asked, “What’s the catch?” Indeed, there was one: The credit expired within six months! The cynical assumption that the monthly checks wouldn’t last is an artifact of decades of Democrats failing to follow through on promises—and it turned out to be completely warranted.

Polling at the time showed that voters who received the benefits were more likely to support Democrats until the credit expired, when they shifted to Republicans by 15 points. Yes, you can thank Joe Manchin almost entirely for this; but the point is that it’s not surprising a temporary policy that ended didn’t flip voters.

In fact, virtually all of the pop-up safety-net provisions delivered during the COVID-19 pandemic—some passed under Trump, some under Biden, making it hard for ordinary individuals to differentiate—have been rolled back, with millions losing Medicaid benefits, expanded food stamp payments, enhanced unemployment, rental assistance, and more. Democrats might say it wasn’t sustainable to maintain all these policies after the pandemic. But the lived experience of beneficiaries is that they lost government help.

The authors point out that in 2020, lots of voters supported a higher minimum wage in Florida and Nebraska, and yet still voted for Republicans. That’s evidence, they assume, that people won’t vote for Democrats even if that would increase the minimum wage. Once again, this ignores lived experience. People don’t want a higher minimum wage; they want higher wages. They don’t care if that comes from a tighter labor market or direct wage policy.

If you look at the data, yes, under Trump, low-income wages went up faster than they did under Obama. You can write about MAGA extremists and racism as much as you want and cite political scientists on racism, but Obama didn’t deliver on higher wages, and Trump did. (Wages for lower-income workers have also boosted under Biden, which may explain some of his political success, though those gains have been eaten away by inflation for higher earners, which may explain Biden’s ceiling.)

The authors are right that a pure policy program is not enough, and that we need political narratives that voters find compelling. But it’s unclear what the authors’ prescription is on that front. They say that Democrats must “construct a social identity,” speak to social isolation and disorder, make clear who the culprits fueling this discontent are, and offer a vision of the good life through organizing that fosters a sense of community. They offer a few examples of smaller community organizations that they say do that. But the main example of a broad community uprising that checked most of these boxes, organizing people into a meaningful fight against defined enemies, happened in the Progressive Era.

Medical costs are up and wages are not for one reason that is very easily understood by Americans: monopolies. Hospitals, doctor’s practices, health insurance, pharmaceuticals, ambulances, nursing homes, rehab facilities: Every part of our health care world is increasingly controlled by greedy bankers who kill people for money. Meanwhile, big corporations have consolidated over the last 40 years, pushing wages down for workers by tens of thousands of dollars a year. That’s an easy, true, and compelling story, and it’s the story that carried 19th-century progressive populists, and the New Dealers behind them. It brought together workers, farmers, and business upstarts who were being overrun by concentrated power. In the hands of Franklin Roosevelt, it was even seen as an antidote to fascism.

This is not a story that today’s Democrats are comfortable telling, and not one that today’s progressives, for all their discussions of the need to move beyond neoliberalism, have internalized. Joe Biden sort of gets there, and the midterms showed voters will shockingly support an unpopular 80-year-old. Some of the best things he’s done, like a fight on insulin that led the drug companies to lower prices, show this instinct. But his administration is too split to offer a coherent policy or political agenda.

The phenomenon of negative partisanship is real, and fighting Republicans who seek to take away rights and benefits, from the freedom to read the books they want to the right to an abortion, will continue to pay political dividends for Democrats. But if you want to test whether improving people’s lives sells, then you have to improve people’s lives.

It’s embarrassing to admit the last few decades of Democratic politics has delivered bad economic outcomes for most people. To admit that, we’d have to admit that cherished programs that we fought for, like Obamacare, didn’t work out as advertised. But if we can’t understand that reality, then it’s going to be harder than it should be to come up with a coherent and winning argument to realign the country around a progressive political agenda.

Dominion Energy, a utility company that holds a monopoly over much of the Virginia’s electricity sector, is one of the largest political donors in the state. This year, environmental groups got Democratic candidates to pledge to reject Dominion funding:https://t.co/YbLjfN8qDx

— The Nation (@thenation) June 27, 2023

More than 4 years have passed since the CPD entered into a federal consent decree.

The dept.'s Bureau of Internal Affairs has initiated more than 11,000 officer misconduct investigations in that time, according to a Tribune analysis of police data.https://t.co/b8tSl4JKjv

— Sam Charles (@samjcharles) June 27, 2023

It takes a remarkable lack of self-awareness to tell people they aren’t welcome in your state because you “like freedom.” https://t.co/gk6crnE2yT

— Ben Spielberg (@BenSpielberg) June 27, 2023

Supreme Court rejects ‘independent state legislature’ theory

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rebuffed a legal theory that argued that state legislatures have the authority to set election rules with little oversight from state courts, a major decision that turns away a conservative push to empower state legislatures.

By a 6-3 vote, the court rejected the “independent state legislature” theory in a case about North Carolina’s congressional map. The once-fringe legal theory broadly argued that state courts have little — or no — authority to question state legislatures on election laws for federal contests.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court’s opinion, joined by the three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, along with two conservatives, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

In doing so, the nation’s top court maintained the power of state courts to review election laws under state constitutions, while urging federal courts to “not abandon their own duty to exercise judicial review.”

This is a shame, and I know it has to do with climate change – most especially the Ottawa fires. Where I reside it’s windy and cooler today, but I had to close our windows.

As our @merryvishmas wrote earlier this year, the tenant screening industry is plagued with inaccurate information and sloppy data-keeping.

That's why Biden's best regulators at the @CFPB and @FTC are taking a closer look. https://t.co/2RsLehERQy

— Revolving Door Project (@revolvingdoorDC) June 27, 2023

Elizabeth Warren to Janet Yellen: You’re wrong on bank mergers

The Massachusetts Democrat in a letter Tuesday to Yellen, top bank regulators and the Justice Department called out the Treasury secretary and Acting Comptroller of the Currency Michael Hsu for recent comments that signaled an openness to further bank consolidation amid industry weakness exposed by the meltdowns of Silicon Valley Bank and other lenders.

Yellen has said that more mergers could be healthy, while Hsu, who regulates the largest U.S. lenders, has told Congress in recent weeks that his agency is “committed to being open-minded” on the issue.

Warren said Yellen and Hsu appear to be taking “the wrong lessons” from the failures of SVB, Signature Bank and First Republic.

“Allowing additional bank consolidation would be a dereliction of your responsibilities, hurting American consumers and small businesses, betraying President Biden’s commitment to promoting competition in the economy, and threatening the stability of the financial system and the economy,” Warren wrote.

Warren’s rebuke revealed a major new rift with top Biden administration officials over economic policy, in what will likely be just the beginning of a push by her to curtail mergers involving large banks.

At the heart of the conflict is a clash between a broader corporate merger crackdown sought by Biden and the view held by some administration officials that more bank mergers could help shore up the U.S. financial system post-SVB. U.S. officials, for example, blessed JPMorgan Chase’s takeover of the teetering First Republic last month.

Yellen, who played a lead role in policing the banking industry when she was Federal Reserve chair, has been the most prominent Biden administration voice signaling an openness to more bank M&A. Bank lobbyists, who want the administration to loosen up on mergers, have noted “something of a sea change.” Bank regulators and the Justice Department — not Yellen — have the power to reject proposed bank mergers.

“We certainly don’t want overconcentration and we’re pro-competition, but that doesn’t mean no” mergers, Yellen said in a Wall Street Journal interview published Friday. “We have more banks, relatively speaking, in the United States than almost any country of which I’m aware.”

In Warren’s view, “This would represent exactly the wrong approach.”

Warren in her letter Tuesday — which also went to FDIC Chair Martin Gruenberg and Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr — pressed the agencies for an update on merger review guidelines sought by Biden in a 2021 executive order.

She also took aim at Justice Department assistant attorney general for antitrust Jonathan Kanter, who last week announced steps that officials are taking to expand scrutiny of bank mergers. Kanter has been leading the Biden administration’s crackdown on mergers across industries.

Warren pressed Kanter on why DOJ will move away from forcing banks to divest branches as a condition for merger approval and defer to banking agencies to determine remedies to address competition problems.

Warren said shoring up the banking system will require “stronger regulation and more vigorous oversight of big banks to keep them from failing in the first place,” as well as stronger merger guidelines that limit the size and number of too-big-to-fail banks.

“To that end,” Warren said, “I urge you to accelerate your work to update the bank merger review guidelines to put an end to regulators’ practice of rubber stamping merger applications and strengthen the standards under which mergers are considered.”

Zelensky Visits Frontline Troops; Biden Administration Announces New Arms for Ukraine https://t.co/v6uew7sD6I

— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) June 27, 2023

NEW – No Labels, quietly and through a non profit arm, hired a canvassing firm with ties to Ron DeSantis last year.

via @jsscpprhttps://t.co/0VEmsTC9Ei

— Sam Stein (@samstein) June 27, 2023

Same outfit who wants Manchin and Sinema to join their group.

“Failed” Green Party candidate 😆
What’d she fail at? Certainly didn’t fail at triggering you losers pic.twitter.com/SkmojDDbqn

— Due Dissidence (@DueDissidence) June 22, 2023

Rep. Ted Lieu, Sen. Patty Murray, and Sen. Cory Booker have introduced the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act, legislation that bans so-called 'conversion therapy.'

There are 62 co-sponsors in the House and 32 in the Senate.

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 27, 2023

Not likely to go anywhere in Congress, but glad to see something in the works.