The left and its kapos within the Republican party, who tried to portray the demonstration at the US Capitol on January 6 as some sort of “insurrection” (SPOILER ALERT: it wasn’t), are now hard at work carrying out their own assault on the US Constitution. Their target is the US Supreme Court. Their method is attempting the personal destruction of the Justices blocking their crusade to destroy the nation and delegitimize the Supreme Court as an institution.
Justice Clarence Thomas Targeted
The focal point of the attack is Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas has drawn their ire for several reasons. First, he survived the first iteration of what has become standard practice for the left during Supreme Court confirmation hearings. That, of course, was the bizarre, nearly psychotic testimony of Anita Hill accusing Clarence Thomas of “sexual harassment.”
AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
We’ve since seen this tactic used on Brett Kavanaugh. (Relatedly, they are launching a second go at the fraudulent allegations made against Justice Kavanaugh.) Thomas’ real sin was not offending a deranged harpy who’d hitched herself to his star; it was being a Black man who had worked diligently to succeed and, like economist, Dr. Thomas Sowell, experienced the “help” inflicted on Black families and communities by the Federal government since LBJ’s “Great Society.”
The left has never forgiven Thomas for surviving their attacks and has launched new rounds against him and his wife, Ginni, regularly throughout the years.
The current opening to curtail the ability of the Supreme Court to safeguard freedoms guaranteed under the US Constitution kicked off with a hit piece in the progressive outlet “ProPublica” headlined Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire.
It is the typical long-on insinuations, short-on facts, smear that leftist media specializes in. It accused Thomas of accepting perhaps millions of dollars in undisclosed gifts, which, in return, gave billionaire Harlan Crow backdoor influence in Supreme Court decisions. The allegations are balderdash. To their credit, a letter signed by all the Supreme Court Justices debunks the allegations and sets the record straight on disclosure requirements.
The incident forced Chief Justice into the unenviable position of declining an invitation to testify before a Senate committee allegedly looking into Supreme Court ethics regulations (Chief Justice Roberts Says No Thanks to Dick Durbin, Won’t Testify at Supreme Court Ethics Hearing) but seemed more interested in trying to force the resignation of Justice Thomas; see Senate Introduces Code of Conduct Bill for Supreme Court as Democrats Call for Thomas Resignation.
Justice Neil Gorsuch Hit by Scurrilous Allegations
Don’t think Justice Thomas is the only target. A ridiculous attack was mounted on Justice Neil Goresuch for belonging to a partnership that owned a parcel of land in Colorado. My friend and former RedState contributor Thomas Crown, who is an actual lawyer, took that slander apart using Politico’s own documents.
Politico’s attack on Justice Gorsuch appeals to the IQ of Politico’s readership.
So, being a lawyer, I went back and Read the Rule and also looked at the actual form. I'm a bit puzzled by the reporting here, or would be except it's Politico.
— (((Not That Crown, Maybe))) (@CrownMaybe) April 25, 2023
Let's begin with the form. https://t.co/WsJ7o9XPy8
On Page 1, Positions, Gorsuch identifies himself as a member of Walden Group, LLC, which he identifies as an LLC that holds “mountain property.”
This is the first weird thing: He rather explicitly identifies what the entity is and does on the very first page, but the Politico report and its preferred mouthpieces suggest he’s hiding exactly that.
Before I go any farther, I want to do some background explaining that will be useful in a bit. It’s gonna get all legal-ly and for those of you who already know this stuff, apologies.
Walden Group, LLC was a limited liability company. For most people, they just see a few letters after a company name and don’t think much about it, but it’s kind of important to what appears to be the whole story here.
Most — not all, it’s complicated, but most — of the big company names with which we’re familiar are corporations; their names end in “Inc.,” or the equivalent (for “incorporated”).
A corporation is a business organization that issues stock to its shareholders. A limited liability company is a business organization composed of members with membership interests.
These things don’t really matter much at the taxation or day-to-day corporate level except in scale: LLCs tend to be smaller than corporations (more or less; a lot of people form small business corporations for good reasons and ignorant ones).
When I advise clients on forming a business, my basic advice is to create a LLC if they’re gonna have 8 business partners or fewer or if they’re going to use the company for a single, discrete thing (like owning a piece of property).
If they’re going to want to take on investors or run a more complicated business (generally), I tell them to form a corporation.
Ok, so moving on, on Page 7, line 56., Gorsuch discloses that his interest in the Walden Group was sold at the end of 2017. He does not list the counterparty.
I want to focus in on this a bit because it’s fairly important to the hatchet jo– reporting at issue. Judge Gorsuch did not own the property. An LLC of which he was a member-owned and sold it.
The clues here are such subtle things as the disclosure that Walden Group owned Mountain Property; that he disclosed selling “Walden Group” and not property; and that the “sale” closed on December 31, 2017.
Swing back to the LLC stuff above. When a special purpose entity like Walden Group sells its sole asset, it usually holds the proceeds long enough to pay any debts, do an accounting, prepare distributions, etc., and then commits suicide.
For accounting convenience, the management of the LLC usually reports the termination of the LLC to December 31, 2017 (it saves icky tax and membership distribution calculations). Which is what happened here.
The report says that Gorsuch sold “Walden Group” — that is the asset identified because *that is the asset of which he owned a part* — for somewhere between a quarter and half a million dollars and lists no counterparty.
The reason for this is that some states treat termination as a buyback of member shares and then suicide, and it works a lot easier for the accountant’s purposes (note that the disclosure was prepared by Gorsuch’s accountant).
So, simply, *there was no counterparty to disclose.* Had Gorsuch listed Greenberg Traurig’s CEO or managing partner or however they have it set up as the counterparty, *he would have been lying under oath*.
Swing back to the Politico piece:
Skip past the part where the LLC is described as “the name that he and his two co-owners gave themselves,” which is either stupid, mendacious, or both, and get to this:
Ignore the idiotic appeal to authority at the end of that and really look closely. Nowhere in the rules or statutes does an investment in an LLC “require more details than the justice includes in his financial disclosures.” Instead, Area Hack *believes* it does.
Then note the second paragraph, and note that “appears” is a sudden guest star, as in, “This transaction appears to also require naming the buyer.”
But of course, the transaction requires nothing of the sort, hence “appears.”
Lawyers live inside of shades of gray and constantly try to show that it’s really pitch-black where we are. We know our own, and this is sophistic BS. The transaction *had no counterparties to list.* There was therefore no requirement to list them.
The better argument, a bit more nuanced but much more convincing, is that this sort of thing can serve as an oblique way to cover corruption very easily, and the forms should be modified to account for that.
A weaker but still better than Politico’s piece argument would be that Justice Gorsuch had an obligation to describe the entire transaction from SPE sale to SPE wind-down, precisely because a LLC is closely-held; he was selling something he owned a lot of, and not F500 stock.
But as written, this is worse than nonsense: It skims along the edge of libel while taking advantage of the fact that somewhere between half and 90 percent of its readers wouldn’t know why it’s BS on stilts.
The attack is stupid, but Politico knows its audience, so that is not a barrier to publication. It also fits the narrative that is being pushed: all conservative Supreme Court Justices are ethically bent or outright crooks; therefore, no decision by that court has any credibility.
This is where Utah Senator Mike Lee hits it out of the park. He says when you combine this attack with the demonization of the Federalist society, you can see how painting the Supreme Court majority as wildly partisan, culturally retrograde, and corrupt has some positive side effects.
7. They also attack any Supreme Court ruling they dislike as the product of partisan justices—always without offering any analytical explanation of their disagreement with such rulings.
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) April 26, 2023
7. They also attack any Supreme Court ruling they dislike as the product of partisan justices—always without offering any analytical explanation of their disagreement with such rulings.
8. Ultimately, they want to delegitimize the Court so they don’t have to live with rulings with which they disagree. They want to remake the Court into a political body—one they can control. They want to “pack” the Supreme Court with more Biden nominees. So they attack.
Now they’ve moved on to introducing patently illegal legislation, like a bill sponsored by arguably one of the two stupidest members of the entire Congress, Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono, that changes how lawsuits are filed when federal regulations are challenged. They know this bill isn’t going anywhere, but that isn’t the point. It will be defeated by Republicans who have closed ranks to defend a corrupt, reactionary court.
In the ferment of the late 1960s, German socialist Rudi Dutschke coined the phrase “The long march through the institutions.” The idea was that Marxism couldn’t overthrow existing governments, but it could suborn them by taking over the institutions. It has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. In America, institutions like law enforcement and the military, which used to be the backbone of Americanism, have been thoroughly corrupted and conquered by the left. The bulwark between the vibrant, confident America of the Founders and the gender-queer, weaselly America the left wants to create is the conservative majority on the Supreme Court and some federal circuit courts (Florida Scores Huge Win for Free and Fair Elections Over Marc Elias and an Obama Judge). The left knows it will take decades to replace justices and unravel their rulings, so they have opted for the shortcut of destroying and discrediting the institution because the only value they recognize is power.
