The Washington Independent

Posts Tagged Clarence Thomas

House Dems call for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from health care cases

Rep. Keith Ellison is among 74 members of Congress who called  on United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Friday to recuse himself from hearing any cases that have to do with health care reform after revelations that Thomas’ wife makes a living from organizations that oppose the implementation of More…

Most of the Supreme Court’s conservative wing to skip State of the Union

By | 01.25.11 | 12:57 pm

Tonight’s State of the Union address will likely be full of many showy “bipartisan” moments. President Obama will likely make a number of statements about reaching across the aisle, and many Republicans and Democrats in Congress will sit with a member of the other party to break up the traditional More…

Koch-Led GOP Network Laying the Groundwork for a Post-Midterm Push

By | 10.20.10 | 9:04 am

The vast Koch Industries-led cabal of GOP donors, free-market ideologues and titans of industry is real, it turns out, and The New York Times has obtained the letter that proves it. Before the 2010 midterms are even over, the company led by Charles and David Koch has sent out More…

Kagan Witnesses Begin Testimony in Today’s Hearing

By | 07.01.10 | 4:23 pm

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee finished hearing directly from Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan yesterday, after 17 hours of question-and-answer sessions. Now they’ve begun to hear from witnesses — some will praise her, some will rake her across the coals.

Here is the witness list from the More…

The Ginni Thomas ‘Controversy’

By | 03.16.10 | 8:30 am

I’m a little surprised to read exposes of how Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has launched a Tea Party group, Liberty Central. After all, I reported on Liberty Central back on Feb. 24. When The Washington Post reports that “it was not until this More…

Tea Party Patriots Poll: Up to 57 Million Conservative Activists in U.S.

By | 02.24.10 | 9:53 am

Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is at the helm of a new conservative group called Liberty Central. Its first project is a poll, conducted with Tea Party Patriots, analyzing just how many current and potential conservative activists there are in the United States, and figuring More…

Some Justices Seem Wary of New Member

By | 09.04.09 | 10:44 am

Excerpts released by C-SPAN in advance of its upcoming series on the Supreme Court, scheduled to begin airing October 4, suggest that some of the more conservative justices on the court are more wary of the impact their new colleague, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, may have on the court’s dynamic.

“To More…

A Push to Keep Guns From Foreign-Convicted Felons

By | 07.29.09 | 3:04 pm

Perhaps emboldened by a rare victory over the gun lobby last week, a group of liberal senators introduced legislation Wednesday to prevent people convicted of felonies overseas from owning firearms.

The proposal attempts to close a loophole created by a 2005 Supreme Court decision, which found More…

The Legend of Miguel Estrada

By | 06.26.09 | 1:54 pm

Neil Lewis writes about the oversized role that conservative bitterness is playing in the fight against Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. There’s a lot of focused on bruised feelings from the Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings, and some focus on the more important precedent: the extended More…

Supreme Court: It’s Not Okay to Strip-Search Students for Ibuprofen

By | 06.25.09 | 1:55 pm

If the recent Supreme Court decisions denying prisoners the right to DNA evidence or allowing companies to dump toxic mining waste in public lakes were getting you down, you can take heart in today’s decision, perhaps the last to be written by retiring Justice David Souter. The high More…