{"id":93918,"date":"2023-06-25T19:06:47","date_gmt":"2023-06-26T00:06:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=93918"},"modified":"2023-06-25T19:06:47","modified_gmt":"2023-06-26T00:06:47","slug":"93918","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=93918","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Conservative Supreme Court justice hit pieces: We are being lectured on ethics by scoundrels.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWait till the next empty shoe drops.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how law professor Josh Blackman\u00a0concludes<\/a>\u00a0a discussion of\u00a0The New York Times<\/a>\u2019 open-mouthed discovery that law schools have summer study-abroad programs and sometimes they recruit celebrity professors, even Supreme Court justices, to teach them.<\/p>\n

The Times believes it has found a scandal because George Mason\u2019s Scalia Law School has one of these programs and seeks Supreme Court justices to teach in the summer.<\/p>\n

My law school has one of these too. So does Blackman\u2019s.<\/p>\n

He comments: \u201cShocker! A DC law school works hard to connect its students with the leaders of the profession. My own law school has organized similar programs in the past with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Ginsburg. (My students described it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience.)\u201d<\/p>\n

But, you see, the law school and the justices involved here are conservative, so the Times thinks \u2014 or, more accurately, wants its readers to think \u2014 there must be something nefarious going on, perhaps \u201ccollusion.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Why, George Mason\u2019s legal clinic sometimes files friend-of-the-court briefs in the\u00a0Supreme Court<\/a>, which the paper would like you to believe is some sort of conflict of interest.<\/p>\n

Never mind that schools like\u00a0Harvard<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Yale<\/a>\u00a0were \u2014 until recently, anyway \u2014 much closer to many justices on the court than this.<\/p>\n

(Note that every member of the court except\u00a0Amy Coney Barrett<\/a>\u00a0is an alumnus of Harvard or Yale.)<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing there, but the Times doesn\u2019t care.<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court has ruled against the left on guns and abortion and is expected to strike down affirmative action any day now.<\/p>\n

Thus it must be delegitimized in any way possible.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Just as the breathless coverage of the (entirely fake) stories of Donald Trump cavorting with Russian hookers in Moscow convinced some people that with so much smoke there must be fire.<\/p>\n

Well, if the notion \u201cWhere there\u2019s smoke, there\u2019s fire\u201d is popular, you can expect a brisk trade in smudge-pots, and smudge is what the Times is dispensing.<\/p>\n

And other media outlets.<\/p>\n

This follows an equally bogus ProPublica story claiming Clarence Thomas\u2019 vacations with a rich friend, Harlan Crow, are unethical.<\/p>\n

Crow had no business before the court, and Supreme Court justices have always been allowed to have friends. (Chief Justice Fred Vinson played poker with President Harry Truman.)<\/p>\n

The point was for the press to make a big deal about it.<\/p>\n

It even tried to make Crow out as some sort of Nazi for having a statue of Hitler, omitting that he collects statues of all sorts of deposed dictators, including Joseph Stalin and Nicolae Ceau\u0219escu.<\/p>\n

You\u2019d think the Times \u2014 whose own Walter Duranty covered up Stalin\u2019s Holodomor, a campaign of starvation that killed millions of Ukrainians \u2014 would be OK with that. (The paper even kept Duranty\u2019s Pulitzer after his lies were revealed.)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an empty shoe.<\/p>\n

Former Justice Stephen Breyer, questioned about the Crow allegations in a PBS interview, responded simply that Thomas is \u201ca man of integrity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Politico then got into the game with a hit at Neil Gorsuch for the sale of a house he held a share in \u2014\u00a0for less than the asking price, to a Democratic donor, which transaction the justice reported.<\/p>\n

None of these stories would make headlines if the court were still reliably leftist.<\/p>\n

The Democrats and the media \u2014 but I repeat myself \u2014 live by a principle of \u201cRule or ruin.\u201d<\/p>\n

They consider it treasonous to cast doubt on elections but have no trouble undermining democracy by casting unfounded doubt on our highest court\u2019s honesty if it won\u2019t play ball.<\/p>\n

Some years ago \u2014 long enough that people thought it was a defense of Bill Clinton in his various scandals \u2014 Peter W. Morgan and I published a\u00a0book on ethics<\/a>\u00a0called \u201cThe Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society.\u201d<\/p>\n

We made two arguments.<\/p>\n

First, people who deploy the \u201cappearance of impropriety\u201d standard are generally trying to\u00a0create<\/em>\u00a0appearances, which they intend to use in ways that are themselves unethical.<\/p>\n

And second, a focus on appearances often distracts \u2014 and is often designed to distract \u2014 from things that are substantively much worse.<\/p>\n

The former is obviously present here, but so is the latter.<\/p>\n

The same news media that told us there were tough questions of \u201cjournalistic ethics\u201d in publishing the (truthful) news of Biden family corruption gleaned from Hunter Biden\u2019s abandoned laptop are trying to create false impressions of unethical behavior on the court.<\/p>\n

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As is so often the case, we are being lectured on ethics by scoundrels.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

By its fruit the tree is known.<\/p>\n

And the fruit of today\u2019s news media is poisonous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Conservative Supreme Court justice hit pieces: We are being lectured on ethics by scoundrels. \u201cWait till the next empty shoe drops.\u201d That\u2019s how law professor Josh Blackman\u00a0concludes\u00a0a discussion of\u00a0The New York Times\u2019 open-mouthed discovery that law schools have summer study-abroad programs and sometimes they recruit celebrity professors, even Supreme Court justices, to teach them. The … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,9,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-courts","category-enemies-foreign-domestic","category-hypocrisy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=93918"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93919,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93918\/revisions\/93919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=93918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=93918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=93918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}