A Bright & Shining Example of Judicial Restraint

Last Thursday the LATimes published details on valuable gifts that our Supreme Court justices have accepted and are required by law to report. Before getting to the hair-raising extremes on this list, please first consider that justices Stephen Beyer and David Souter steadfastly refuse all gifts and club memberships, no matter how small or how lavish. They just don't take gifts. Which seems judicious somehow. Other justices, like Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, occasionally take money awards and speaking fees but donate them to charities.

Not so Justice Clarence Thomas. He's a regular entrepreneur of the gift trade, a grand pasha of baksheesh, reporting $47,745 in gifts accepted since joining the high court 13 years ago. Among his acquisitions:

1. $100 worth of cigars from talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh.

2. A $500 Stetson hat from the Houston Club.

3. $150 worth of cigars from Kansas City businessman Tim Trabon, "who said he had never met the justice."

4. A $375 "performance chip," a gift from a Corvette supplier Thomas met at a rally, for the computer on his Corvette.

5. An $800 Daytona 500 commemorative jacket, after Thomas served as grand marshal at the race in 1999.

6. $1,200 worth of tires from a businessman in Omaha in 2002.

7. $1,375 in cowboy boots, Stetson hats, rawhide coat and a silver buckle after engagements in Texas in 1995 and 1996.

8. A $5,000 check from Earl Dixon, a pest control company executive in Jacksonville, Fla., and former Republican state legislator, to defray the education costs for Thomas's grand-nephew.

9. A bust of Lincoln that the justice valued at $15,000, from the American Enterprise Institute.

10. The Bible that once belonged to Frederick Douglass, which Thomas valued at $19,000, from Texas millionaire and right-wing activist Harlan Crow, the son of well-known Dallas real estate executive Trammell Crow. (Harlan Crow also gave $25,000 last summer to help launch the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign deriding Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John F. Kerry, but let that go. His monetary lavishment on Justice Thomas is potentially far more wide-reaching.) According to the LATimes story, "In an interview, Crow said he met Thomas 10 years ago at a conference in Dallas .... Soon afterward, Crow invited Thomas to a family campground in East Texas ... [for an] all-male gathering. 'They were all smoking cigars. It was a very manly Texas thing,' [another guest reported] .... In 1997, Crow flew Thomas on his personal plane to the San Francisco area and sponsored him as his guest at the Bohemian Grove, a private organization that for more than 125 years has held all-male retreats in the redwoods of Northern California for government and business leaders." Crow also donated $175,000 for a new Clarence Thomas wing at the justice's childhood library in Pin Point, Ga.

All perfectly innocent? Male-bonding, camouflaged in cigar smoke.

But at the time of those gifts, Harlan Crow was a national board member of the Center for the Community Interest, "an advocacy group that filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court espousing conservative views on cases involving such issues as crime and pornography."

The federal rules under which Thomas reported these and other gifts say a judge "shall not accept a gift from anyone who is seeking official action from or doing business with the court." "If Harlan Crow is a member of the board of a group that files amicus briefs with the court, then I think he comes within that provision," says New York University law professor Stephen Gillers, a legal ethicist.

It smells, and not just the Harlan Crow pelf. It smells as foul as our Democratic leaders in the state legislature accepting the fancy hospitality of the Smithfield Corporation in Raleigh. All of it smells.

And adds to our considerable store of Republican Hypocrisy in High Places.