Good day all. Recently, the Progressive Liberal Democrats have been screaming about a trip that Justice Thomas took…or something. Next, in violation of the separation of powers, the Senate Democrats started holding hearings to impose their idea of ethics on the Supreme Court.
In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court told the Senate Judiciary committee, currently being mismanaged by Senator Richard Durbin, aka Durbin the Turbin, to basically go pound sand when they demanded that John Roberts appear before the committee. Now we actually have an ethics issue. It seems that Justice Sonia Sotomayor ruled on a case she actually had an interest in. Here are the details from the Daily Wire:
Liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor declined to recuse herself from multiple copyright infringement cases involving book publisher Penguin Random House despite having been paid millions by the firm for her books, making it by far her largest source of income, records show.
In 2010, she got a $1.2 million book advance from Knopf Doubleday Group, a part of the conglomerate. In 2012, she reported receiving two advance payments from the publisher totaling $1.9 million.
In and of itself, the book deal isn’t that big of a deal. Judges write books all the time. I do find the advance to be a bit on the high side, but who am I to “Judge” what a publisher thinks a book will make for them? However, when a case comes up in front of a judge, or a justice where one of the two sides has dumped a ton of money on her? Yes, you should recuse yourself.
In 2013, Sotomayor voted in a decision for whether the court should hear a case against the publisher called Aaron Greenspan v. Random House. Greenspan was a Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg’s who wrote a book about the founding of Facebook and contended that Random House rejected his book proposal and then awarded a deal to another author who copied his book and eventually turned it into the movie The Social Network.
I have a very vague memory regarding that case. I also managed to not see the movie The Social Network. As I recall, it was a big mess, and I don’t remember which side actually won. The problem is the money that Sotomayor was getting from the publishing industry.
In 2017, Sotomayor began receiving payments each year from Penguin Random House itself, which continued annually through at least 2021, the most recent disclosure available, and totaled more than $500,000. In all, she received $3.6 million from Penguin Random House or its subsidiaries, according to a Daily Wire tally of financial disclosures.
I did a quick search on Amazon for the book(s) Sotomayor has written. I can’t see how these made any money, certainly nothing worth a few million dollars in royalties. I suspect most of these ended up on the seconds table in very short order.
In October 2019, children’s author Jennie Nicassio petitioned the Supreme Court to hear her lawsuit against Penguin Random House alleging that the book publisher had copied her book by selling one that was nearly identical. On the same day that the petition was distributed to the justices, Sotomayor received a $10,586 check from the publisher.
On February 24, 2020, the Supreme Court voted not to hear the case, denying the “writ of certiorari” and meaning that the case would remain where it left off — with a circuit court having found in the publisher’s favor. Sotomayor’s next check, coming in May of that year, was her largest ever from the parent company, at $82,807.
The Supreme court doesn’t announce how a justice votes when it comes to these “Cert” votes. They do announce when a justice recuses themselves, such as happened with former justice Breyer, who felt he did have a conflict of interest.
Fellow then-justice Stephen Breyer, by contrast, did recuse from the 2013 and 2020 Penguin cases. His wife is related to the family that founded a company, Pearson, which owned a stake in the publisher, and the couple held stock in Pearson: $1 million to $5 million in 2013, shrinking to $100,000 to $250,000 by 2020. Breyer also wrote books for the publisher, though he earned a much smaller amount than Sotomayor.
From my unschooled point of view, it appears that Justice Breyer had less of a conflict then Sotomayor, yet he felt there was enough potential that he decided to recuse. Also, that he made significantly less then Sotomayor for books that, again in my opinion, were probably a lot more valuable and interesting. (I don’t see myself purchasing them, but other might be interested)
Sotomayor’s Penguin Random House money dwarfed the pay that she received from the court and made up all of her reported outside earned income, with the exception of $6,000 in payments from groups — some of which related to her book — and a $5,000 “option fee,” which typically relates to books, according to the disclosures. The publisher also footed the bill for her to speak to various groups. Breyer, by contrast, would typically have those groups foot the bill.
This is starting to have a very bad smell to it. The Daily Wire then goes into the case that Sotomayor voted on with regards to the writ of certiorari. According to the story, there was a conflict between various circuit courts, and this is usually when the Supreme Court steps in. In this case the request was denied.
The findings come amidst a seemingly coordinated push in the media accusing a slew of conservative justices of misconduct related to their financial disclosures, such as Justice Clarence Thomas taking trips financed by a wealthy conservative friend. Fix The Court, a nonpartisan group that has long watchdogged Supreme Court finances and which compiled some of the financial disclosures used in The Daily Wire’s analysis, pointed out that Sotomayor failed to disclose six trips in 2016 funded by outside groups, before later correcting her disclosures.
Ever since the Greatest President of the 21st Century, Donald Trump managed to appoint three new justices, all of whom are constructionists, (Meaning they rule on what the constitution actually says and don’t make things up out of whole cloth), giving the court a solid conservative majority, the Progressive Liberal Democrats have been going absolutely berserk.
They are now seeing cases, such as Roe vs. Wade being reversed and others, especially with regards to the 2nd Amendment, going in favor of the Amendment and the right of the people to keep and bear arms. There are other cases coming up that could strip a lot of the powers the regulatory agencies have assumed away from them and put it back where it belongs, in the hands of the legislature, aka the Congress.
Since the Left has lost the Supreme Court, which they have used as their way of bypassing the people, states, Congress and the President, they have been talking about “Packing the Court” with progressive justices who will ignore the plain language of the Constitution and basically legislate from the bench. This is the problem we’ve had since the Roosevelt Administration, (FDR). With the Trump Justices, the tables have been turned.
This has also led to threats of violence against the conservative justices and protesters showing up to intimidate them. There are U.S. Marshals at the justices homes, but they are under direct orders from Merrick Garland to not arrest them even though there is law on the books regarding intimidation of a justice/judge.
The latest thing, as mentioned above, is an attempt by the Left to impose their idea of ethics on the Court. As usual, thanks to Sotomayor, it looks like this might just blow up in their faces yet again. I can’t say that Sotomayor was being bribed, but with all that money coming in, the appearance of corruption is there. Perhaps there should be calls from the Congress the the media for Sotomayor to resign? Yeah, that’s not going to happen either.
Thatisall
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