Who Really Sponsors Corrupting Influence on the Supreme Court?

Hint: The actors who'd have you believe it's Harlan Crow have been doing the job themselves for years, hidden in plain sight.

The recent and ongoing fracas about the Supreme Court and the alleged illicit influence on its work has focused on the Left’s perennial target, Clarence Thomas. But here’s the deal: Justice Thomas’s real offense against the Left’s sensibilities has very little to do with receiving gifts from a longtime friend, and lots to do with its unending fury at Thomas for being his own man and refusing to live on the liberals-are-wonderful plantation where they built the shanty he’s spent 32 years refusing to occupy.

In reality, though, the Left has much more in mind than just one more smear against Thomas. My friend Ann Coulter tends to see things in more florid tones than I often do, but nails the real source of the the current “ethics” campaign:

The sole purpose of the media’s sudden fixation on the Supreme Court’s “ethics” is to morally intimidate conservative justices by reminding them that the left controls the culture. Since they lost abortion, liberals have been in a panic that the court will junk other liberal sacraments, like gay marriage and affirmative action, too. That’s the reason for the stream of calumnies directed at the justices….

The media want us to believe that generosity from personal friends is an ethical issue, but that’s because that’s not how liberals bribe government officials. They bombard their targets with the sort of public adoration that money can’t buy -- or the sort of public hate that money can’t block. Your choice: Be beloved from every corner of society or be subjected to nonstop ridicule.

You can’t have been following the MSM for decades, as I have, and take any serious issue with that.

Thus, during her quarter-century on the court, [Justice] Ginsburg was showered with alms from the media, Hollywood, universities, television, publishing, the music industry, museums, clothing manufacturers, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Post Office and an array of nonprofits.

Did you ever hear the press complain about that? I must have missed it.

It’s a miracle she ever had time to write opinions with the constant procession of awards, retrospectives, portraits and honors -- the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture; the LBJ Foundation's Liberty & Justice for All Award; the World Peace & Liberty Award; a lifetime achievement award from Diane von Furstenberg's foundation; the 2020 Liberty Medal by the National Constitution Center; and the World Peace & Liberty Award from the World Jurist Association and the World Law Foundation.

I would wager that most people would prefer ceaseless public praise to a cruise, no matter how nice the yacht.

This is probably the place to emphasize that I never thought, and don’t think now, that Justice Ginsburg was bought off in any sense whatever. Like Justice Thomas, she remained true to her core beliefs about law. But that’s not the point. The point is that the culture and the press — the same culture and press that have spent 32 years and today bashing Clarence Thomas — left no stone unturned in using their enormous wealth and their considerable and wildly undemocratic powers to push the Court to the Left.

It’s curious that the very cultural institutions bestowing all these goodies on liberals don’t see them as “gifts” at all. There are no somber invocations of “ethics” when the Sundance Film Festival features a North Korean-style documentary about Ginsburg. Nor when The New York Times gushes that Ginsburg was “a trailblazing feminist ... [continuing] to point the way toward greater equality ... she never wavered in her commitment to the court as a vehicle for a more just and more equal America. She was a dogged, tireless fighter .…

 Try to imagine that string of accolades being given to Thomas, much less the Tiger Beat worship -- the coloring books, documentaries, bobbleheads, and so on.

But now, after decades of heavy-lift cultural shoving all the money on earth couldn’t buy, we’re supposed to swallow the idea that gifts from a longtime friend are a sleazy trick to tip the balance of justice.

In fact, the “honors and recognition” section on Thomas’ Wikipedia page contains a single item: “In 2012, Thomas received an honorary degree from the College of the Holy Cross, his alma mater.”

The only reward a conservative titan like Thomas will receive in this lifetime will be his friends spending their own money to enjoy his company. So the media have decided that’s a conflict of interest. Fawning media coverage worth millions of dollars: not a conflict of interest.

The media are correct that there’s a lot of private wealth and raw power being used to shove the justices in a particular direction. They’re just hiding the ball about which direction and who’s doing it.