Senator Mike Lee's Toxic Waste
The Utah senator is trying to defend his old Supreme Court boss and his billionaire donor.
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Mike Lee got elected to the U.S. Senate after trying to clear the way for his corporate client to dump foreign nuclear waste in Utah. Now, he’s dumping toxic waste into the discourse about the Supreme Court, attempting to defend his old boss Sam Alito, other conservative justices — and by extension, his billionaire donor — from criticism over their flagrantly corrupt behavior.
In a Twitter screed yesterday, Lee blames “The Left” for the corruption and ethics scandals that have engulfed Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, Amy Barrett and Alito — the latter of whom he twice clerked for.
“The Left is on a dangerous, relentless campaign to de-legitimize the Supreme Court,” Lee tweeted. “At the top of their list, they’re attacking Justice Thomas—for anything they can possibly think of. Untethered by law, logic, or truth, they channel all of their leftist angst into hating a man who committed the cardinal sin of being conservative while Black.”
Of course, Lee doesn’t address the very specific questions of law in the Thomas case — the questions about whether Thomas deliberately and knowingly flouted very clear disclosure laws.
Lee’s Twitter thread also doesn’t mention reporting from his hometown newspaper about Harlan Crow, the billionaire who lavished gifts on Thomas while the conservative justice participated in cases of interest to Crow’s company and the political groups with whom Crow is affiliated.
That reporting found that “nearly half the money the Texas billionaire has given to Beehive State politicos went to Sen. Mike Lee” — and that’s just direct campaign contributions. The newspaper also found that Crow “co-founded the conservative Club for Growth, whose political action committee spent more than $5.4 million boosting Lee’s 2022 reelection campaign.”
If you’re looking for stuff that delegitimizes the court, this is it right here — a court that has spent nearly 15 years trying to legalize corruption, all while its bankrolled allies on Capitol Hill defend ever-more cartoonish forms of that corruption.
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