Americans Say Sharing Military Plans With A Journalist Was A Serious Problem

The chart above is from the YouGov Poll -- done on March 25th of a nationwide sample of 5,976 adults with a 2 point margin of error. 

Who Leaked The Dobbs/Roe Decision? Could It Be A Justice?

The Supreme Court has announced that it was not able to find the person who leaked the Roe vs Wade decision. Could that be because the Justices were not examined as thoroughly as other Supreme Court employees? Could the leaker actually have been a Justice?

Robert Reich thinks that may be the case. He writes:

The Supreme Court yesterday announced that an internal investigation failed to identify the person who leaked a draft of the Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization — the opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that had established a constitutional right to abortion.

The Court’s marshal, Gail A. Curley, who oversaw the inquiry, said investigators had conducted 126 formal interviews of 97 employees, all of whom had denied being the source of the leak. (In a one-page statement accompanying the report, Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, asserted that Curley’s team had conducted a thorough investigation and he could not “identify any additional useful investigative measures” they should have taken.)

This shouldn’t end the matter. 

A modern Sherlock Holmes might well conclude that the leaker was … Justice Samuel Alito, Jr. 

First, it’s unlikely any of the justices was interviewed. The report said all witnesses were told they could be dismissed if they refused to answer questions. That’s a dead giveaway: Supreme Court justices cannot be dismissed from their jobs.

Second, Alito had a motive for leaking. He wrote the draft in Dobbs and got four other justices to tentatively sign on. He presumably wanted to lock them in. Leaking the draft was a way to do so. 

Third, Alito is already under suspicion for leaking another draft Court opinion that he authored, which marked another triumph for the religious right.

 

On November 19, the New York Times quoted Christian minister Rob Schenck as claiming that in 2014 Alito divulged the outcome of a Supreme Court case known as Hobby Lobby, which he authored — weeks before the opinion was released to the public. According to Rev. Schenck, Alito’s leak occurred when he and his wife were dining with a couple who were secretly collaborating with Schenck. Hobby Lobbyallowed religious exemptions to the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage requirement for certain for-profit corporations.

Alito has denied the allegation.

Even if uncontroverted evidence emerges that Alito leaked the Dobbs decision, there’s nothing the Supreme Court could do to discipline him. The Court has no code of conduct or rules of ethics. (Think Clarence Thomas.) Partly for this reason, public trust in the Supreme Court has been plummeting.

 

The last Congress introduced the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act which would, among other things, require the Court to adopt a binding code of conduct. With Republicans in control of the House, the current Congress is unlikely to do the same. 

But the Court need not await Congress. If Chief Justice John Roberts doesn’t want to be remembered as the Chief who allowed the Court to drown in disrepute, he will take the lead in creating clear ethical rules that all Supreme Court justices will swear to abide.

The Reason The GOP Wants To Focus Only On The Leak

The following is part of an excellent op-ed by Zeeshan Aleem at MSNBC.com:

The leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade on Monday shook the country, foreshadowing the likely end of a nearly 50-year ruling granting federal protection for abortion rights.

But many conservative politicians and pundits have tried to argue that the real news isn’t the opinion and its sweeping implications for reproductive rights, but the fact that it was leaked. National outrage should only be directed at whoever tarnished the high court’s sacred reputation by releasing the draft, they bluster.

Nobody should be fooled: The reason right-wingers are suddenly fans of propriety again is because so much of their political agenda requires using the Supreme Court to advance policy far too unpopular for the democratic process. . . .

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reportersTuesday, “You need, it seems to me — excuse the lecture — to concentrate on what the news is today: not a leaked draft, but the fact that the draft was leaked.” Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., a member of the Judiciary Committee, said the leak was “an attack on the court.” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, called it “the most egregious breach of trust at the Supreme Court that has ever happened.”. . .

Right-wing talking heads went even further in their fixation on the leak. Fox News has focused aggressively on the leak in its narratives. In a moment of hysteria, Daily Wire host Matt Walsh on Twitter characterized the leak as “an attack on our system 100000000 times more serious than the Capitol riot.” Breitbart News editor Rebecca Mansour claimed that the leak had produced a “freakout”that had resulted in the left calling for the Supreme Court to be “burned down.” (Mansour did not provide any examples.)

Set aside for a moment that conservatives do not know the ideology or intentions of the leaker and that the assumption that they're a liberal is therefore misguided. The big question is: Why are they so worried about norms all of a sudden?

After all, norms didn't matter when Republicans in 2016 blocked President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. Norms didn’t matter when Republicans went “nuclear” and altered the filibuster to confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court the next year. Norms didn’t matter when Republicans used the filibuster during the Obama presidency more than it had ever been used in history, ushering Washington into a new era of bad-faith governance. And norms were systematically obliterated during the impeachment-defined President Donald Trump era on everything from international diplomacy to the rejection of a peaceful transfer of power.

The reason that the idea of a sacred Supreme Court matters so much to the GOP is because it is central to its theory of change: Republicans desperately rely on institutions that operate outside of or counter to the principle of majority rule.

The GOP has survived multiple recent presidential contests thanks to the fact that the Electoral College system isn’t based on the popular vote — and George W. Bush’s victory in 2000 was ensured by a politically sympathetic Supreme Court. Republicans also rely heavily on a legislative body that structurally overrepresents the rural and conservative part of the population — the Senate — to act as a bulwark against Democratic legislation. And they deploy the counter-majoritarian filibuster rule to thwart the Democrats even when Democrats manage to win a majority in a body that structurally favors the right.

The Supreme Court is a premier part of this antidemocratic toolkit. As an institution that faces no accountability from the electorate — and as a branch of government that Republicans, through a combination of sheer luck and procedural power plays, have arranged in their favor — it’s a powerful vehicle for defending the right-wing agenda and laying waste to progressive reform. As New York magazine’s Eric Levitz wrote in a sweeping essay about the right’s attentiveness to federal courts in 2020, much of the right-wing agenda is widely unpopular and primed to cause intense backlash, and using courts allows conservatives to circumvent the obstacles and consequences of realizing its goals.

“In some respects, the conservative movement’s obsession with the courts is a testament to its weakness,” Levitz argued at the time. “There is no popular majority for banning abortion, scaling back the welfare state, or eroding basic labor and consumer protections in the United States — and, judging by the millennial and Zoomer generations’ political views, there never will be. The right has responded to this reality by rapidly stocking the judiciary with as many 40-something-year-old reactionaries as it can find.”

Today, abortion rights remain broadly popular, and overturning Roe v. Wade remains deeply unpopular. But as Jay Willis, editor-in-chief of the legal analysis publication Balls and Strikes, told me, Republicans are banking on “the myth of an apolitical judiciary” to help them weather the backlash that will accompany an assault on abortion rights. While Republicans’ raw exercise of power in the White House and Congress has become entirely transparent, the Supreme Court is the last branch of government where the right can cloak its agenda in the idea of rights and technocracy that transcend vulgar everyday politics.

Protecting the Supreme Court’s reputation as made up of high priests rather than ideologues is a useful long-term strategy for the right. Willis told me this leak and potential future leaks will help puncture that myth — which many liberals still subscribe to — in an era in which the Supreme Court is more conservative than it has been in about a century.

“The court derives so much of its legitimacy by handing down its opinions like Moses descending from Mount Sinai,” he said. “I think people would be well-served to learn more about what goes on inside this black box and to understand that the justices are just like any other politicians they see on TV.”

One 12-Year-Old Trump Tax Return Has Been Leaked

 On her Tuesday night show, Rachel Maddow revealed that one of Donald Trump tax returns had been leaked to her -- and she revealed it to her viewing audience. The return was actually mailed anonymously to reporter David Cay Johnston, who revealed it to Maddow.

It was a 12 year-old return (from 2005). It showed that Trump had made $150 million that year, and he paid about $38 million in taxes on that income. That's about a 25% tax rate -- more than the 13% that Romney paid on an income of $25 million, but less than many upper middle class Americans pay on far less income.

It is interesting that $31 million of that tax came from the "alternative minimum tax" -- a tax that Trump has said he wants to abolish in his tax reform proposals. If there were no alternative minimum tax required, Trump would only have paid about $7 million in taxes (about a 4.7% tax rate).

Where did this tax return come from, and why was it leaked to the press? Only Trump and his family, the IRS, and his accountant had access to Trump's tax returns. I seriously doubt the accountant would have leaked it, since that would endanger a very lucrative contract with Trump. I also doubt anyone at the IRS would have done it. The IRS takes the secrecy of tax returns very seriously, and would fire anyone who leaked any return (and maybe even file charges against them).

Was the leak authorized by Trump himself? That's a distinct possibility. He could have done it to distract the public from the miserable failure of the GOP health plan roll-out. He could also have done it to blunt the continuing calls for his to release his returns. Maybe he thought if the public saw one return where he paid taxes, they would stop clamoring for him to release other, more recent returns.

That's not going to work though. The public now believes he is trying to hide something in his more recent returns -- that he paid only a tiny percentage, or that he has more economic ties to Russia than he's admitted. They are still going to want to see his returns -- at least for the last five years.

The charts below are from a new Public Policy Polling survey -- done between March 10th and 12th of a random national sample of 808 registered voters, with a 3.4 point margin of error. It shows 61% of the public wants Trump to release recent returns, while only 32% say it's not necessary -- a gap of 29 points. And 61% also say they would support a law requiring a president (presidential candidate) to release at least the last five years worth of tax returns.

This issue is not going away -- and by refusing to release the returns, Trump is just making it look like he has something to hide.

(The photo of Rachel Maddow above is by Paul Schultz and was found at Wikipedia. The Trump photo is by the AP and was found in the Business Insider.)