Crooked Media - What A Day: Neil-jerk reaction

Apologies, folks. The Supreme Court isn’t as corrupt as we thought. (It’s actually more corrupt than that.)

• The latest scandal doesn’t even involve Clarence Thomas, or a right-wing billionaire. It instead concerns Neil Gorsuch. For years before he became a Supreme Court justice, Gorsuch had tried and failed to sell a 40 acre piece of land he owned in Colorado. Nine days after his confirmation he found a buyer. Thanks to Politico’s Heidi Przybyla, we now know who it was: Brian Duffy, the CEO of the huge corporate law firm Greenberg Traurig, which frequently represents clients before the Supreme Court. 
   
• Duffy paid just over $1.8 million for the property, netting Gorsuch (a 20 percent stakeholder) somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000. Gorsuch disclosed the sale, but concealed the buyer and has proceeded to render judgment on his cases. The appearance of corruption deepens when you tally up Greenberg Traurig’s batting average in the Gorsuch era. Since 2017, Greenberg Traurig has had interest in 22 cases before the Court. Gorsuch voted in 12 of them. And in eight of those 12 he sided with Greenberg Traurig.
   
• Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin continues to duck his obligation to investigate this corruption. In a statement to Politico he reiterated his call for the Supreme Court to “take adequate action” to police itself. Prior to that Durbin sent Chief Justice John Roberts an invitation to testify voluntarily before the committee about Supreme Court ethics in general. He also justified his unwillingness to demand in-person testimony from Thomas, the Court’s most crooked justice, because, he said, “I think I know what would happen to that invitation. It would be ignored.”

Roberts, by contrast, simply declined Durbin's invitation outright. 

• It’s extremely unclear what Durbin expects to get out of passing the buck to Roberts. The chief justice is embroiled in a corrupt relationship with big law firms that resembles Gorsuch’s. After Roberts was confirmed, his wife took up a job as a legal recruiter, and has made millions of dollars in the years since then placing powerful lawyers at top firms—including (of course) ones with business before her husband. It’s almost like the big corporate law firms have looked for ways to put money directly into the pockets of the judges who rule in their cases. Or the Republican ones, anyhow. 
   
• It would be great if the 78-year-old Durbin recognized that rooting out this corruption was his solemn obligation and a political winner for Democrats. In the accountability vacuum Durbin has created, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden has asked Thomas’s patron, right-wing billionaire Harlan Crow, for a “full accounting” of the undisclosed gifts he’s given to Thomas over the years. And Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who heads the only Senate investigations committee that allows the chairman to issue subpoenas unilaterally, has called on Thomas to resign, raising the possibility that he will step up where Durbin has not. 

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Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm’s surprise decision to endorse the Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline has environmentalists scratching their heads, wondering whether the Biden administration has made a simple concession to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), or is trying to create an offramp for Republicans so that they don’t plunge the U.S. into default on the national debt. Granholm has asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to prioritize advancing the pipeline, which would run through Manchin’s state. Manchin, who chairs the Senate Energy Committee, has tried to muscle the project through by withholding support for a fifth, tiebreaking FERC commissioner. The vacant FERC seat leaves the commission evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats which has stymied clean-energy projects that the administration also supports. However Manchin (along with many Republicans and Democrats) also supports broader “permitting reform” which would facilitate the construction of energy infrastructure of all kinds. Granholm’s letter to the FERC could be a gesture of support for permitting reform, which could be the kind of bipartisan provision that would give Republicans thin cover to claim they only increased the debt limit after Democrats agreed to their conditions.

• President Biden officially launched his re-election campaign Tuesday with a video announcement that contrasts the dystopian end of Donald Trump’s presidency with the triumphs of Biden’s own first term.
   
• Republicans responded with a video of their own, but they had to use artificial intelligence to generate fake-dystopic moments from Biden’s first two years in office. Can’t make it up!
   
• Florida's conspiracy theorist surgeon general, Joseph Lapado, personally doctored state research in order to create a false impression that COVID-19 vaccines pose a significant risk to young men. 
   
• Fulton County, GA, District Attorney Fani Willis will announce charges stemming from her investigation of Donald Trump before the end of this summer, and has warned law-enforcement agencies in the state that right-wing extremists may react with violence. 
   
• A jury in New York heard opening statements Tuesday from lawyers for E. Jean Carroll who accuses disgraced former president Donald Trump of raping her over 20 years ago.
   
• Disney and ABC News have laid off most of the staff of the data-journalism website FiveThirtyEight, and its founder, Nate Silver, expects to leave the company soon. 
   
• The Department of Education may not have the tools or resources it needs to resume processing student-loan payments later this year.
   
• Harry Belafonte has died at age 96.

Last week’s failed SpaceX starship launch (read: it exploded) has officials scrambling to assess the environmental and public-health impact, and forced the Federal Aviation Administration to ground the SpaceX starship program for the foreseeable future. Ahead of the launch, SpaceX and its manchild CEO Elon Musk assured the federal government that in the event of a launchpad failure, debris would be confined to a one-square mile radius. Instead, the launchpad itself exploded, creating a dust cloud that reached the town of Port Isabel, six miles away from the launch site in Boca Chica, TX. The particulate matter in that dust cloud was likely hazardous to health and wildlife, to say nothing of the damage from the explosion itself, which shattered windows and caused other property damage in neighboring communities. Yet more reassuring news for Tesla drivers about Musk’s careful engineering and concern for human safety. 

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Washington state has passed new gun regulations, including a ban on assault rifles.

Biden has embraced the Dark Brandon meme for his re-election.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) becomes the second senator (ignore the headline) to call on Clarence Thomas to resign from the Supreme Court.

Abby Grossberg, the former Fox News employee (so, grains of salt), says she has over 90 secret recordings from her time at the network, and that Special Counsel Jack Smith has asked for some of them.