The U.S. Supreme Court has wrapped up its 2022/23 agenda with the usual array of arresting (and sometimes controversial) opinions, including a notable set-back for affirmative action in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case. What’s so interesting about the current court is how the most elevated legal talent in the nation sees the same Constitutional language quite differently. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, for example, Justice Roberts and Clarence Thomas see the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as commanding a kind of “color-blindness” in college admissions and beyond, while Justice Jackson sees the same clause as commanding a call to rectify current systemic biases.
(A side note of some importance here: the nation seems to be at a tipping point when it comes to racial justice. After the George Floyd murder and Black Lives Matter protests, the backlash was not long in coming from those who refused to see the existence of systemic racial discrimination in policing, and how today, the sorry legacy of slavery, poverty, Jim Crow, redlining, and other biased practices by the nation’s institutions denies many people of color a chance to advance socially and financially. By insisting on color-blindness as a better kind of equality, the majority fails to see the bigger picture, a kind of color-blindness in itself. )
Given that people ––and Justices –– see our current situation so differently, it seems fair to ask whether Justices are blind to the realities of today, or, in other words, biased in favor of their pre-existing attitudes and beliefs. Bias, as the behavioral psychologists have proven time and again, is a common feature of human thought and action. At the top of many courthouses in the United States, people can see the figure of Lady Justice, holding her scales, with her blindfold on (but sometimes not) in order to be objective in dispensing her judgments. Blindfolded or not, the figure of Lady Justice is supposed to represent impartiality, or objectivity. But this is a difficult feat, indeed.
It’s hard enough to call balls and strikes in a baseball game. In his confirmation hearing, Chief Justice John Roberts likened his role to that of an umpire.
“I have no agenda, but I do have a commitment. If I am confirmed, I will confront every case with an open mind. I will fully and fairly analyze the legal arguments that are presented. I will be open to the considered views of my colleagues on the bench. And I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability. And I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.”
We will return to the “balls and strikes” analogy later –– it’s a truly terrible analogy, because in baseball, the strike zone is fairly well defined. Watching Colorado Rockies games (which takes a strong constitution these days), you can watch the “Subaru strike zone” after the fact and see whether the ball was within the box as it passed the batter, or was just outside the box, or just on the line of the box (a strike!). Those are three comparatively simple situations; on the other hand, when you’re trying to interpret 1968 constitutional provision the words themselves do not speak with that kind of box-like clarity.
And, as Clarence Page pointed out after the Students for Fair Admissions decision, his colleagues on the sports beat point out that there are “subtle but distinctly important standards vary with the umpire. They use different strike zones, for example, apply them flexibly, and have near-unlimited discretion in close calls.” He continues: “What may seem like simple differences can lead to a heartbreaker by the end of the game. Judges, like umpires, have tremendous power in deciding close calls. For the sake of their own credibility, they should work with the rest of us to assure that we can have the best, most credible justice system possible — not just the best that money can buy.”
But Page is wrong to suggest that the Justices have been “bought.” There’s no serious allegation that direct bribery has occurred. It’s a lot more subtle –– but not all that subtle. Consider the recent allegations of conflicts of interest involving Justice Alito and Justice Thomas. (Justices Gorsuch and Barrett are also under scrutiny, but the allegations involving Alito and Thomas are indeed serious, and sobering.)
Over the past year, there have been numerous revelations that Justices Thomas and Alito have been given extravagant travel freebies by “friends,” billionaires who befriended them after their ascension to the high court, who want to see U.S. law trend emphatically in right-wing direction.
The Supreme Court stands at the pinnacle of the U.S. justice system. The nine tenured-for-life judges –– always referred to somewhat reverently as “Justices” –– must decide the most complex and difficult cases. To be a judge (or a Justice) requires not only extensive knowledge of the law, but a kind of impartiality and objectivity that gives the public confidence that justice will be done –– by the Justices.
Where is that public confidence now? Only 47% trust the judicial branch; the previous low was 53%. The 40% job approval of SCOTUS is tied for a record low. A record high 42% say that the Court is too conservative.
Another poll is even more dismal: public approval of the nation’s highest court has fallen to an all-time low in the run-up to the one-year anniversary of the court’s highly controversial decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released on June 28, 2023..
The poll found only 30% of registered voters approved of the nation’s highest court, while 59% disapproved. That’s the high court’s lowest approval rating since Quinnipiac started asking the question in 2004.
Only 10% of registered Democrats surveyed said they approved of the Supreme Court, compared with 53% of registered Republicans. Almost 7 in 10 registered voters said they thought the Supreme Court is “mainly motivated by politics” — compared with a fourth who said it is “mainly motivated by the law.” In brief, only a fourth seemed to see Justices as objectively calling “balls and strikes,” instead of coming up with legal words to bolster their political leanings.
Political leanings, biases, predilections –– whatever you call them, they should not be part of a judge’s mindset; judges, and most of all Justices, must apply the law to situations where political preferences and philosophies can determine not only the outcome of a particular case, but can also set rules for how the entire country must act. In undoing Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision, or in undoing affirmative action in the Harvard decision, the Justices are steering society in certain directions that many Americans disagree with. To do so, they must be sure that their thought process is not swayed by factors outside of the law as it is written, or (to extend the balls and strikes metaphor), outside the rules of the game and the contours of the strike zone. Certainly they should not have a stake in pleasing certain people, or maintaining “friendships” that may affect their deliberations.
Yet some of the Justices are blind to the obvious appearance of a conflict of interest. Suppose you have a “friend” ––who, by the way, became your “friend” only after you were promoted to the Supreme Court, and who is closely tied to organizations that routinely offer “friend of the court” briefs in key cases)–– who showers you with expensive gifts? How likely are you to rule against your “friend’s” values and positions? It surely doesn’t require an outright bribe ––a ‘quid pro quo’–– for you to lean in your friends’ direction.
Suppose you’re a traffic cop and see someone going 15 miles over the speed limit. When you get their license and registration, they offer you $300 to not write the ticket. Tempted? Succumbing to temptation might mean you fail to do your official duty; they would be corrupting you by offering a bribe to not do your duty. But suppose you pull over a vehicle and discover that the driver is your friend in his brand new car, someone who has you over to his house to eat, drink and be merry, and who takes you to Bali on a private yacht or Alaska on his private jet for special luxury vacations. You’re likely just to tell him to slow down. You haven’t taken a bribe, but your objectivity is clearly compromised. But, you protest, you haven’t actually taken a bribe!
Such is the narrow, crabbed interpretation that SCOTUS has put on corruption generally. See
Anita Cava and Brian Stewart’s article on Honest Services Fraud in the University of California Davis Law Review.
In brief, corruption includes far more than simple bribery, and ignoring serious conflicts of interest may be legal, but is still wrong. Here is Merriam-Webster’s definition of a conflict of interest:
1. a conflict between the private interests and the official or professional responsibilities of a person in a position of trust
2. a conflict between competing duties (as in an attorney’s representation of clients with adverse interests)
Over the past year both justice Clarence Thomas and justice Samuel Alito that failed to disclose what business ethicists see as conflicts of interest. Both Thomas and Alito accepted fairly extravagant gifts from billionaires who have made a habit of contributing heavily to the Republican Party and its politicians. Two brilliant podcasts from Dalia Lithwick (Slate Magazine) highlight how neither Justice will admit that accepting such gifts might present an ethical conflict of interest.
Both Justices have defended the non-disclosure of these gifts as within the existing ethics rules, but ethics experts beg to differ. Consider the following:
No one is saying that either Thomas or Alito have been bribed to reach a certain result in cases where their generous donors are actual parties. But the entire point of providing Justices with generous luxury gifts is to cloud their objectivity, to make them “lean” in the direction that the billionaires would prefer.
As Jaime Boulle puts it, wryly asking why each Justice can’t have his personal billionaire “friend,”
“This isn’t quid pro quo — no one is trading favors or taking cash for judicial decisions — it’s like-minded people enjoying one another’s company and friendship. It is showering the most important allies you have with prestige and, crucially, the esteem of their peers. It’s creating a web of personal and emotional bonds in addition to political and intellectual ones.”
“Your beneficiaries are already on your side, of course — otherwise they wouldn’t be in the club in the first place — but they might be a little less willing to buck the views and prevailing sentiments of their fellow travelers. And if all this social scaffolding means that your justice is a little more likely to cast the right vote in the right case at the right time, then it is money well spent. Even better, there is more where that came from: more billionaires, more influence and more perks for the justices to enjoy while they attend to the work they were appointed to do.”
All of this is quite distant from any ethical innocence. Justice Alito gave a favorable ruling to his billionaire friend back in 2014. Listen to Ruth Marcus, in a Washington Post op-ed from late June, 2023:
The resort at which he stayed, where rooms ran $1,000 a night, was owned by Arkley, a conservative California businessman and financial supporter of the Federalist Society. What is Alito’s relationship with Arkley? How could it possibly be acceptable to take this kind of gift?
The private-jet connection was even more questionable. At the time of the event, Singer, a hedge fund manager and major donor to Republicans and conservative causes, was embroiled in a high-stakes legal battle with Argentina, which had defaulted on its debt. Singer’s hedge fund was trying to force the country to pay up, in full. The dispute had already made its way to the Supreme Court once, the year before, and it was entirely foreseeable that the matter would be back before the court.
And so it was, eight times, including a June 2014 decision in which the court ruled 7-1, with Alito in the majority, for Singer’s firm. It ended up making Singer’s fund $2 billion. Given that most Justices aligned with Alito, this may seem inconsequential: Singer’s fund would have made that money even if the Court had ruled 6-2. But “recusal” ––- would seem to be appropriate where your “good friend” stands to make a lot of money if you vote in his favor.
To pretend that there is no conflict of interest is a kind of moral blindness, but not the kind of blindness that Lady Justice needs.
When ProPublica discovered the lavish gift giving of Singer toward Alito, the journal contacted Alito with a list of questions about their relationship. Rather than answer their questions, Alito went to Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and published an op-ed to the Wall Street Journal titled “Justice Samuel Alito: ProPublica Misleads Its Readers.”
In his op-ed, Alito defended himself against ProPublica’s accusations of impropriety as a Supreme Court Justice and said the two claims levied against him — not recusing himself from cases involving Singer and not disclosing his trip — were invalid.
“I had no obligation to recuse in any of the cases that ProPublica cites,” Alito wrote, while a legal and judicial ethics expert said the opposite to ProPublica, noting that if she represented a client and learned after the fact that the judge had taken a gift or vacation from the other party in the case, she’d be outraged. “If I found out after the fact, I’d be outraged on behalf of my client,” Smith told ProPublica. “And, frankly, I’d be outraged on behalf of the legal system.”
Similarly, despite seven ethics experts having told ProPublica that Alito should’ve officially reported his trip, Alito said that he and other justices “commonly interpreted” the rule’s hospitality exception “to mean that accommodations and transportation for social events were not reportable gifts.”
Aside from his failure to recuse himself from cases and not officially reporting his trip, Alito’s refusal to respond to ProPublica and then publishing a personal response elsewhere won’t help the public’s growing concerns about the high court.”
How shall we go from Odor in the Court to Order in the Court? We can hope that Chief Justice Roberts can corral his even more conservative colleagues to disclose potential conflicts of interest. Congress can’t, because the Senate would have to pass the new ethics rules to make clear that rules for all other federal judges should also apply to Supreme Court Justices. And GOP Senators, solidly behind this “new” conservative majority, don’t want to rock the anti-Roe v. Wade boat, and might even enjoy the spectacle of liberal hand-wringing over liberal handouts from pro-GOP billionaires working the judicial sidelines to guarantee a Court that is consistently friendly to “business interests.”
Some GOP Senators have actually attacked Democratic criticism of Thomas and Alito. Regarding criticism of Justice Thomas, Sen. Lindsay Graham claimed ––
“This assault on Justice Thomas is well beyond ethics. It is about trying to delegitimize a conservative court that was appointed through the traditional process,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, the committee’s ranking Republican.
(The “traditional process” is hardly consistent, though. President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland eight months before the 2016 election was blocked by then Senate Majority Leader McConnell, on the premise that “the people” should decide, but McConnell rushed through Justice Barret’s nomination by Donald Trump a mere two months before the 2020 election.)
Finally, we might usefully ask, “What is actually so conservative about buddying up to billionaires whose friendship is based on your position as a Justice of the Supreme Court?” How are “family values” and “traditional values” –– or support for democracy –– consistent with supporting plutocracy?
“Throughout human history, wise men have warned of the dangers of plutocracy. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates warned of the dangers of selecting captains of ships by their wealth. Teddy Roosevelt also warned, “of all forms of tyranny, the least attractive and most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.” Yet despite these warnings, America has gone from a democracy towards becoming, for all practical purposes, a plutocracy, moving away from a government of the people, by the people and for the people to a government “of the 1%, by the 1% and for the 1%,” as noted by the Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.”
(From the Diplomat, Sept 2020, by Kishore Mahbubani.)
If traditional values embraced by the Framers of our Constitution include government of the people, by the people, and for the people (a phrase used by that great Republican President, Abraham Lincoln), then current conservatism has become morally blind, not only to how corruption actually works, but to some foundational values for the Republic as well.
I really shouldn’t have, but I recently shared a “snarky” Facebook
post that said:
Trump’s daughter works at the White House
Her husband works at the White House
Rudy’s son works at the White House
Barr’s son in law works at the White House
Trump’s sons do foreign business
His daughter is getting Chinese patents
and Saudi grants.
But sure, let’s talk about Biden.
Mea culpa. I was hoping to “needle” some of my
Trumpian Facebook friends, and it worked.
They protested that Ivanka and Jared were doing “legitimate work” and
even “for free” –– while Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was doing nothing legitimate
for Burisma as a Board member, being paid $50,000 a month to do nothing but
provide access to his father, the Vice President. This right-wing narrative
suggests that “access” to then Vice President Biden was being bought by Burisma.
My two Facebook friends were declaring, in effect, that any nepotism around
President Trump was in no way corrupt, but that the Bidens were.
So, this rather lengthy post is about “merit,” “corruption,”
“access,” and “nepotism.” Hold on, dear
reader –– this is an interesting ride.
For the less patient among you, let’s note first that corruption has
many flavors, and that “corruption” is a vague and misunderstood term. Second, to preview the conclusion here, this
looks like another case of “the pot calling the kettle black” or, more
precisely, a pot posing as perfectly white calling out a pretty clean kettle
for being very black, indeed. As to the
Biden’s alleged corruption, it may turn out to be much ado about . . . .well,
not very much. (Since the GOP dominated Senate
is now bent on investigating the Bidens, presumably as “payback” for the House impeachment,
we may eventually know more facts than have been reported by FactCheck.org, but
likely not.) For the truly curious, the following link explains a lot.
The “we’re not corrupt but you are” is an old trope, for sure, and
is closely related to what I call “false moral equivalence” and “moral
misdirection,” where an individual, firm, or political party Tweets and
expounds on the moral misdeeds of others to draw attention away from
their own wrongdoing. Here are three
points to help dispel confusion and illusion about corruption and nepotism.
Point (1) is that paying for access to the politically
powerful is certainly legal, but is morally questionable. Lots of people and firms in the U.S. have
been paying big money to politicians’ campaigns in order to get “access” to
them. Bill Clinton’s use of the Lincoln
Bedroom to get donations for access was (and should have been) controversial:
using public property for private gain. That
Trump repeatedly uses the public budget and his “bully pulpit” in many ways
that benefit him personally does not alter the shady ethics of “pay for play”;
but it’s wrong to conclude that
“everyone’s doing it so there’s nothing to worry about here, folks.” It
would be closer to the truth to say that corruption wears many hats, that
“everyone’s doing it” is no excuse for bad behavior, and that some people are
so corrupt they don’t even see it as corruption.
Below the Presidential level, campaign contributions to politicians
in both parties are the tried and true (and legal) method of getting the ear of
politicians. Trump’s parade of foreign ministers and dignitaries to his hotel amount
to the same thing. Many a politician has
succumbed to “Potomac Fever,” wanting to stay in D.C., whether as a Senator or
Congressperson, which means having to ask for campaign contributions as a huge
percentage of their time in office.
While House and Senate members campaign to get the vote of
the average constituent, they govern mainly for the people and firms that have
access to them through monetary contributions.
This one form of corruption is corruption of the Democratic ideal of one
person, one vote, and that all Americans are deserving of representation.
Academic opinion seems divided, but major campaign contributions to
your federal representative is likely to skew what policies get made, and for
whose benefit. In short, selling and
buying access is perfectly legal, but ethically suspect. Bill Greider spelled this out in 1992 in his
book, The Betrayal of Democracy, and despite some intellectual support for the
notion that the Citizens United case has helped the citizenry and
politicians have rational discourse over public policy, Greider’s work is
empirically supported and his message is ever more clear and obvious: money corrupts,
and a lot of campaign money corrupts what would otherwise be politics and
policies for the marginalized and disenfranchised –– ironically, the very folks
that hoped Trump would be their champion against “special interests.”
Point (2): Nepotism –
hiring family and relatives instead of hiring people who bring the best talent
and potential productivity to a job –– is legal, common and accepted in certain
nations and places. And some great minds
publishing in places like the Harvard Business Review that it’s not necessarily
wrong.
But, point (3): whether
it’s Biden’s son getting fat paychecks just for being related to a powerful
politician, or Trump family members getting money or opportunities for
profit by the mere fact of relatedness, the cases are part of the same
phenomenon: the family members have done nothing to individually “earn” those
benefits and opportunities, other than being family. This offends many who think of the U.S. as a merit-based
society that values what you can do, not what you know. The very notion of a U.S. aristocracy was
anathema to the founders. Modern day
realists, however, rebuke such ideals with the oft-used phrase, “It’s not what
you know, but who you know.”
But my Facebook friends want to say that Hunter Biden’s
hiring by Burisma, or getting money from China was ethically “worse”––or
somehow more “corrupt” ––than the nepotism suggested in the Facebook post. But
this is a stretch, and a fair case can be made for the proposition that the
Trump family’s nepotism is even less ethical.
One of my Trump-embracing friends answered the post by saying “Legitimate work,” referring to Ivanka and Jared. But Jared surely didn’t do much work at diplomacy; more likely, he took notes from Netanyahu (never seriously trying to understand the Palestinian perspective or bring Palestinians to the table) and called it a “peace plan.” Is Jared being paid by the government? His expenses certainly are, and he fully expects to make profitable business connections for the Trump empire, if not now, then in the future. They are getting exceptional access to leaders of many countries to pave the way for future deals, and perhaps even deals not made public; we simply can’t know, as there is no transparency around what deals Jared and Ivanka are making as they make their contacts abroad. Jared’s close ties to Mohammed bin Salman seem especially worrisome.
Jared’s kinship with Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) is likely
motivated by potential “deals” that Jared could make with the Kingdom. It also
puts the U.S. squarely in the Saudi side of the Iranian-Saudi conflict, and
likely encouraged MBS to have his agents kill and dismember Jamal Khashoggi, a
U.S. citizen journalist that was exposing the corruption of the Saudi
regime. MBS almost surely knew in
advance that Trump would not downgrade U.S.-Saudi over the “internal politics
of the Saudi regime.” To the consternation of many GOP politicians in D.C.,
Trump soft-pedalled the murder of a U.S. citizen by agents of MBS. Khashoggi’s
“crime” was that he was active in trying to publish the truth about corruption
in the Saudi regime. Kushner’s
relationship with MBS, which bypasses established channels of diplomacy,
corrupts the accepted diplomatic processes the U.S. has maintained since World
War II, and is problematic in the extreme.
Jared’s wife, Ivanka may be working for “free,” but she is
also riding to international meetings at taxpayer expense, and presumably working
to profit from those contacts. Again, it’s hard to know because of how much is
hidden. The Chinese patents she was
awarded are often mentioned, as well as grants from the Saudis.
Side note: in
the Facebook flame wars that obscure sound moral inquiry, there is also considerable
misinformation about Ivanka’s role in the $100 million grant by the Saudis to a
program she championed –– the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative—better
known as We-Fi, or the “Ivanka Fund.” That misinformation showed up in the
snarky Facebook posting. A fuller
explanation can be found in the Atlantic article linked here, which leads us to
the conclusion that people from all over the political spectrum are inclined to
obfuscate the truth and make “the other side” look more corrupt. (Though I hasten to add that Trump’s ongoing
demonization of mainstream media has been a factor in the de-rationalization of
political discourse in the United States, and that his administration seems
content to allow Russian bots to poison social media with gross
misrepresentations, as long as it benefits Trump.). As to Ivanka’s evidently
unfair treatment in social media, see
In a similar way, Hunter Biden’s relationship with Chinese
firms has been misrepresented repeatedly by Trump and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani,
have both claimed that Hunter Biden got “$1.5 billion” from China for a private
equity fund. Don, Jr. has taken up the
accusation, but it’s just not true. Claims like these obscure the truth, much
like claims that Ivanka got money from the Saudis.
What is true, then? We can safely say that a similar kind of corruption occurs on both sides. In each case, a politician (Trump, or Biden) could be benefitting a family member financially by virtue of his position, or family members can benefit financially just by being related. But how are they dissimilar? For one thing, there is no evidence that Joe Biden asked or encouraged Burisma to hire his son, or that he received any benefit. For another, there is no evidence that Ukraine did any favors, or was asked to do any favors, by Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, or Burisma. Rudy Giuliani wants people to believe that Biden pushed Ukraine’s prosecutor to “go easy” on Burisma, but the known facts don’t bear that out. Finally, there was no change in U.S. foreign policy as a result of Hunter Biden’s employment by Burisma.
By contrast, Trump’s “perfect phone call” was by all reliable accounts an attempt to benefit himself, skewing and confusing U.S. foreign policy; whether it was or was not intended to benefit Trump’s political prospects (it was), it could not have actually furthered U.S. interests in the region and could only have hurt Ukrainian efforts to push back Russians in the Eastern parts of Ukraine. Finally, if Trump were seriously interested in corruption, his Presidential words and acts would be markedly different. As Jonathan Chait wrote in November of 2019, “Trump’s interest in rooting out corruption in Ukraine was not even zero. It was, in fact, less than zero.”
So, it was anything but a “perfect phone call” but rather it was an illegitimate effort to extort the new Ukrainian president to announce an investigation into the Bidens. So, how “legitimate” and “free” is the work of Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and her husband Jared Kushner? They are not entirely working for free, since a lot of their travels are taxpayer funded, and they may well be serving their own financial interests, whether short term or long term. It seems fair to be skeptical of any claims that they are volunteering their time and efforts for “free,” given Trump’s own history of self-enrichment, fraud and deceit as a businessman. There is a glaring lack of transparency around Trump and his ongoing businesses, now led by Don, Jr. The former White House ethics advisors argue that Trump’s publicly announced plan to divorce himself from his own business interests while President is deeply flawed, and has not even been followed.
Setting all that aside, however, there is still room to
criticize the Bidens. Joe Biden could
have told Hunter that taking money for nothing was not morally right; he
evidently did not do so. (He reportedly
said to him “I hope you know what you’re doing.”) Granted, telling your offspring to avoid even
the appearance of a conflict of interest is something we would not expect Trump
to understand or implement; it is only in an ethicist’s wildest dreams that
Trump would tell family members that they could have no role in his
administration, given all the potential conflicts of interest. In this way, my Facebook friends want to
hold the Bidens to a standard that they would apply to the Trumps.
Admittedly, my snarky reposting on Facebook, like many false
pronouncements from Trump, is a classic example of “whataboutism” –– a phenomenon
that will only be more obvious once the Democrats have nominated a person for
Trump and his allies to attack. These
will predictably fall into the category of “I’m not so bad, but you are worse,”
or “I’m perfect, and you’re an enemy of the people.” It’s predictable that Trump would call his
opponents “evil” and “sick,” because anything repeated often enough short
circuits rational thought.
All that political trash talking is not designed to get to
the truth, but only to obscure what’s really going on. To be fair, other
Presidents have tried to obscure what’s really going on in their
administrations. But Trump hides the truth
with particularly tenacity and effectiveness.
Tellingly, Trump has even demanded a pre-publication review
of John Bolton’s book, which may claim that Trump directed the entire Ukraine
“do us a favor” fiasco.
As far as Trump and the family finances are concerned, he
has succeeded in hiding the truth thus far, and it works for him politically to
accuse opponents of being corrupt. At
this point, what’s perfectly legal but wrong is that the lies are not illegal
and seem to work politically. Why? Carefully
reading FactCheck.org on the Biden allegations is not simple for the average
citizen, and many do not even care to ferret out facts from fake allegations on
the “Biden scandal” or any other matter. It’s much easier for the people of one tribe
to say that “the other side is evil and corrupt” or conclude that all
politicians are corrupt, so none of it matters.
That’s a perfect recipe for citizens to engage mindlessly, or to
disengage entirely, driven by the now well-known tendency of people to view
events through a lens that is predisposed to believe what they already believe
–– confirmation bias. Confirmation bias enables distortions of judgment,
enables tribalism and “how can I be bad when X is worse?”
As Michael Josephson reminds us, “When winning is the most
important thing, people will do anything to win.” If America is to be the “shining city on the
hill,” an image that Pres. Reagan invoked, then freedom of speech, rational
discourse, and the search for truth must be part of that. But obfuscation reigns, and the Commander in
Chief is particularly adept at the art of misdirection and obfuscation. My
father, an accountant with Price Waterhouse, was particularly proud of a
needlepoint he hung in his office that said “Eschew obfuscation.” He liked the irony. But there’s nothing ironic about a President
and a party that promotes obfuscation, especially hiding the facts of ongoing
corruption and pointing the corruption finger at others.
Trump has been touted by many as the most corrupt politician
in modern times. The list is long and
mind-boggling, and Alex Schultz and Jay Willis have already summed it up
through November of 2019.
But Trump, and Trump partisans, will not look at any such list
with any degree of moral reflection. Tribalism
and party loyalty cannot take seriously the words of Jesus Christ from the
Sermon on the Mount: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye,
but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
That would take mental effort and moral courage, both of which seem in very short supply these days.
