CLARENCE THOMAS WAS RIGHT! (Yes, I'm shocked, too).

Steve Martin's standup was genius, and I had not only watched him on Saturday Night Live but also purchased his album (vinyl, of course) "Let's Get Small." One of his short bits was to tell the audience that he had a joke tailored to a small segment- just the plumbers, which he assured the audience had a convention in town and many of them were at the show. Then he'd tell the "joke" with an obviously made up phrase for the "plumbers"- and the audience reacted with utter silence. And he'd follow up with: "Oh, they're not going to be here until the next show?" Which was funny, and they laughed. Ok, I guess you had to be there.

So here's an in joke for just the lawyers in the audience. It has to do with the fact that we as "liberals" are conditioned to say that "Nancy Pelosi is good" and "right" and "Justice Clarence Thomas is bad" and "wrong" on any subject on which they disagree. Well, this may confound some people, but once I actually read the Supreme Court's decision last week in Trump v. Mazars, the case in which the Court ruled in a 7-2 decision (Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas both dissenting) that Trump didn't have absolute immunity to keep his tax records private, my opinion is that Thomas and Alito were right and that Pelosi and her cohorts fucked up.

The case held that Congressional subcommittees are entitled to subpoena the financial records, including tax returns, of Donald Trump, but Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, noted that this was a case of first impression- the first time that the Supreme Court ever had to rule on any direct dispute between Congress and the President regarding whether or not a Congressional Committee had the inherent authority (that means that it is nowhere spelled out in the Constitution) to subpoena records from the President.

Justice Roberts, writing for the majority- which, amazingly, included Justices Gorsuch and Kavenaugh- held that Congress had that power. But he also ruled that Congress first had to satisfy a "four part test" once it went back to the District Court, and liberal pundits were moaning in print and on television that this let Trump off the hook because he could "run out the clock."

But here's the thing: the House Democrats fucked up. The committees' subpoenas and the lawsuits by Trump fighting them predated the "perfect phone call" to the President of The Ukraine last July. And the committees that tried to get the records- and there were three of them- never once mentioned the word "impeachment" in any of their inquiries or their court arguments. And even more confounding: the one committee, the House Ways and Means Committee, which by a 100 year old statute had the explicit authority to get the tax returns- didn't even try. Had the committees used the word "impeachment" to justify their subpoenas, there would be no four part test. Had Ways and Means subpoenaed the IRS to turn over the President's tax return, the statute gave neither the IRS nor the President any right to challenge the request.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-kleinbard-trump-tax-returns-20190409-story.html#:~:text=The%20statute%20permits%20the%20chairman%20of%20the%20House,session.%20An%20unauthorized%20public%20release%20is%20a%20felony.

So the real shock I had when I read the Supreme Court's opinion was that ALL NINE JUSTICES AGREED THAT CONGRESS HAD THE AUTHORITY TO GET THE PRESIDENT'S TAX RETURNS AND FINANCIAL RECORDS! Even Alito and Thomas, who said that if Congress had just said that they wanted the records to investigate criminal wrongdoing of the president to impeach him- then they could get them. Here's what Justice Alito, quoting Clarence Thomas, for whom I otherwise have no use and who is not remotely qualified to sit on any court, let alone the Supreme Court, wrote:


"The House can inquire about possible Presidential wrongdoing pursuant to its impeachment power, see ante, at 17-21 (THOMAS, J., dissenting), but the Committees do not defend these subpoenas as ancillary to that power.

Instead, they claim that the subpoenas were issued to gather information that is relevant to legislative issues, but there is disturbing evidence of an improper law enforcement purpose."
Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP (2020)

So the upshot is that the House, led by the ever so cautious to a fault Nancy Pelosi, who squelched any mentions of the word "impeachment" for as long as she could until finally even the newest, most moderate House members could no longer abide the criminality of Trump and she had to let the inquiry go forward- but she narrowed it to only issues with the Ukraine (with which I strongly disagreed in a letter that, incredibly, the New York Times published last December- I wanted the House to go big and go wide in their investigations for impeachment), was too clever by half by refusing to mention the word "impeachment" when they sought Trump's records. And had they done so, they would have long since had all of the documentation of the fraud and the Russian money laundering and other mentanglements that they could have wanted.
Of course, even if they had obtained (or still do obtain) every last one of those records, and even if absolute, unquestionable evidence of fraud and other criminal acts were revealed, none of that would have mattered to the Senate Republicans (other than Mitt, who showed some real mettle), or to the Trump cultists.

Susan Collins would have been "concerned," but as she walked past the still warm corpse lying on Fifth Avenue after Trump shot the guy, she would have said that he had "learned his lesson."

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-aide