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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