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  • From: Tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] Old scaley
  • Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 21:35:16 -0700

You got that right, Scaley Scalia, playing footsy with a guy whose case is impending before the Supreme Court. The guy George Bush wants to be the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court---who makes his decisions in a duck blind, a freebie flight on a private jet, in courthouse corridors and backrooms out of public view.


Impeaching Antonin Scalia, yet again
Scalia won't recuse himself from considering whether Vice-President Cheney broke federal laws by refusing to disclose who met with him to draft big energy-industry legislation.

In an unusual 21-page memorandum, he rejected a request by the Sierra Club. The environmental group said it was improper for Scalia to take a hunting trip with Cheney while the court was considering whether the White House must release information about private meetings of Cheney's energy task force.

Scalia said the remote Louisiana hunting camp used for a duck hunting and fishing trip "was not an intimate setting" and that the energy case was never discussed.

The justice said he was guilty only of hunting with a friend and taking a free plane ride to get there. "If it is reasonable to think that a Supreme Court justice can be bought so cheap, the nation is in deeper trouble than I had imagined," Scalia wrote.

"My recusal is required if ... my impartiality might reasonably be questioned," he said. "Why would that result follow from my being in a sizable group of persons, in a hunting camp with the vice president, where I never hunted with him in the same blind or had other opportunity for private conversation?"

Given the circumstances of the trip, Scalia wrote, the only possible reason for recusal would be his friendship with Cheney.

"A rule that required members of this court to remove themselves from cases in which the official actions of friends were at issue would be utterly disabling," Scalia wrote.

Many Supreme Court justices get their jobs "precisely because they were friends of the incumbent president or other senior officials," he wrote.

As with most of Justice Scalia's writings about GOP ethics, this is full of bald-faced lies, bias, and deflection. Any district court judge who tried this would be up on charges.

First, the rule for all federal judges other than Associate Justices and the Chief Justice is that a judge should recuse himself when a "reasonable person" believes there could be a conflict of interest. Thousands of reasonable people believe that in this case, including calls for recusal from "dozens of newspapers," members of Congress, and many legal ethicists. Justice Scalia is only concerned about other people's ethics.

Second, Justice Scalia lamely claims that since he did not interact with Cheney or discuss the case with him, that there is no perceived conflict of interest. Any bets on whether or not Rush Limbaugh or Dick Cheney would have trusted Justice Stevens had he vacationed with President Bill Clinton before ruling on the Paula Jones lawsuit, but said they never talked about it?

Third, Justice Scalia says that since the trip was planned long before the Supreme Court agreed to hear Vice President Cheney's appeal, that there was no need to cancel it. That's as ridiculous as saying, "I planned to take a box cutter on an airplane flight long before 9-11, so I saw no reason to change my plans since I knew I wouldn't be using it to hijack a plane." He would never buy such specious reasoning from a petitioner before the Supreme Court - unless petitioner was equally archconservative.

Fourth, Justice Scalia has successfully been deflecting the issue to one of his friendship with the Vice President, as seen above. That is the least of the worries. The Vice President is appealing an order from lower courts to disclose details of meetings held to draft the administration's energy bill.

But as many have noted (including the Christian Science Monitor), a big feature of the bill is opening protected federal lands to much more exploration and drilling. The National Resources Defense Council noted that the Bush administration opened up sacred Native lands, full of archeological treasures, to drilling by one of Bush's biggest donors just two weeks after Bush took office, so "let's drill everywhere" is not exactly a new part of the Bush plan.

More relevant to this case, though, is that Justice Scalia's trip was paid for by Wallace Carline, a "multimillionaire oil-services tycoon" who "owns an oil rig services firm," namely Diamond Services Corporation. Energy Justice points out that a big part of the plan that came from Cheney's secret meetings involves not only allowing more drilling (which means more oil rig servicing), but huge incentives to drill new wells and redrill old wells:

Billions of dollars of subsidies and research money would be provided for drilling in our coastal waters, including "ultra-deepwater" drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and "unconventional" drilling on land (such as deep diagonal drilling that would be used to drill for oil and gas under the Great Lakes). The Senate bill also provides for research and tax breaks for coalbed methane drilling. Such drilling is destroying farms and the rural ecology of states like Wyoming and Montana and even eastern states like Pennsylvania. Tax credits are even granted for oil and gas drilling in marginal wells, subsidizing otherwise unprofitable drilling operations. Under the 2002 House bill (Sec 6223), "unwarranted" denials and stays on drilling on federal lands would be eliminated.

Please recognize what has happened here.

About a year ago, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Antonin Scalia invited the Vice President of the United States to accompany him on an all-expenses-paid duck hunting vacation. The vacation, the travel on a corporate jet, and the location itself were all provided by Wallace Carline, owner of an oil rig services company. At the same time, the Vice President was already fighting in federal court to avoid revealing whether his energy policy, which would funnel billions of dollars of taxpayer money to companies like Carline's, was largely created by the energy industry. Everyone knew the losing side would appeal the case to the Supreme Court.

Justice Scalia's friendship with Cheney is a red herring: Scalia voted to review - and thereby possibly overturn - a court ruling that Cheney must reveal who helped him craft this policy. At the same time, Scalia was accepting paid gifts from Carline, a man hugely affected by this same policy that would likely funnel hundreds of millions of dollars of new business to Carline's company.

By any ethical rule whatsoever, Justice Scalia should have recused himself not only from hearing the case, but even from voting to accept it. He is hopelessly compromised through his acceptance of gifts from Carline, because Carline stands to earn huge sums of money if the Supreme Court rules for Cheney. (The energy bill has almost no chance of passing if the energy industry's role becomes extensively documented, as will happen if Cheney loses the case.)

The fact that Justice Scalia invited Vice President Cheney on the trip, rather than mitigating it, makes it even worse. When the case came for Supreme Court review, Justice Scalia knew he was going to take a free trip from an interested party and that he had invited the actual petitioner to join in. His friendship with Vice President Cheney should have been reason to say, "Man, stay away from this trip after all," but instead, as with Bush v. Gore in 2000, Scalia blatantly displayed his bias, sure in the fact that even if anyone called him on it, no one could make him do anything about it. That was borne out today with his "defiant" refusal to obey the same rules of ethics he so gleefully wishes to impose upon others.

The only body that can do anything about this is the US Congress through Articles of Impeachment, and Justice Scalia has given them plenty of reason to draft them (see here, here, and maybe even here. They won't, of course, because the GOP-controlled House of Representatives wants more blatant partisans like Scalia, not fewer.

It's all the more reason to take the House away from them.
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  • [Homestead] Old scaley, Tvoivozhd, 09/28/2004

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