The Hill’s Morning Report — Democrats vow to investigate Justice Thomas

by Alexis Simendinger and Kristina Karisch - 04/07/23 6:20 AM ET

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Supreme Court justices must adopt an enforceable code of conduct in the aftermath of a detailed news account that said Justice Clarence Thomas accepted luxury gifts from a billionaire Dallas businessman and omitted the pricey travel from his annual financial disclosure filings for decades, Democrats said Thursday.

They called for investigations, stricter gift rules and even Thomas’s ouster.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), after reading a lengthy investigative report published by nonprofit ProPublica about Thomas’s actions, pledged to dig into the findings and take action (The Hill).

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) called Thursday for Thomas’s impeachment, referring to the reported acceptance of gifts from billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow as “corruption.”

Last summer, Durbin said calls from within his party for Thomas’s impeachment were “not realistic” (Business Insider). The current Republican-led House would not embrace any articles of impeachment filed against a Republican-appointed justice. Impeachment of a high court justice took place once, in 1805, and the Senate voted for acquittal.

Last year, questions about Thomas’s ethics rose when it was disclosed that he did not step away from election cases following the 2020 election despite the fact that his wife, conservative activist Virginia Thomas, reached out to lawmakers and the White House to urge defiance of the election results (The Associated Press).

“Thomas must be impeached,” Ocasio-Cortez said Thursday.

Gift acceptance without disclosure filings and without clear rules reflects negatively on Chief Justice John Roberts, she added (The Hill).

Roberts has repeatedly lamented the public politicization of the Supreme Court. With a solid conservative majority, the court has been willing to revisit at least one landmark court precedent to buck public opinion and open the door to states that have made abortion illegal and imposed penalties on reproductive health providers. The court was also rocked by last year’s leak of a draft opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade, published by Politico, and later handed down by the court almost unchanged as the majority ruling. A subsequent internal court investigation, which condemned the leak as “an extraordinary betrayal of trust,” did not identify who was responsible.

“Barring some dramatic change, this is what the Roberts court will be known for: rank corruption, erosion of democracy, and the stripping of human rights,” Ocasio-Cortez continued.

The New York progressive is not the only Democratic lawmaker to blast Thomas. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said the ProPublica reporting merits an independent investigation.

The Hill: Democrats express outrage following ProPublica’s report on Thomas’s luxury travel.

In a statement, Crow told ProPublica that he and his wife have been friends of Thomas and his wife since 1996, five years after Thomas joined the high court. Crow said that the “hospitality we have extended to the Thomas’s over the years is no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends” and that the couple “never asked for any of this hospitality.”

The Dallas Morning News: Dallas billionaire’s friendship with Thomas raises ethics questions.

Thomas did not comment.

ProPublica’s story says that Thomas has been vacationing at Crow’s private Camp Topridge resort in upstate New York virtually every summer for more than two decades. During one trip in 2017, other guests included executives at “Verizon and PricewaterhouseCoopers, major Republican donors and one of the leaders of the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-business conservative think tank.”

A judiciary policy guide says food, lodging or entertainment received as “personal hospitality of any individual” does not need to be reported if it is at the personal residence of that individual or their family. That said, the exception to reporting is not supposed to cover “transportation that substitutes for commercial transportation” and properties owned by an entity, according to AP.

NBC News: Supreme Court justices, including Thomas, are their own ethics police.

Separately in the House, many Democrats are eyeing a procedural gambit known as a discharge petition to force floor votes on high-profile gun reforms, such as expanded background checks and an assault weapons ban, over the objections of House GOP leaders. Some Democrats back a package of bills that would advance “red flag” laws, fight ghost guns, ban high-capacity magazines, take on gun trafficking, and lengthen the review period for existing background checks, reports The Hill’s Mike Lillis.

“All of that should go in there,” said Rep. Jerry Nadler (N.Y.), senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over gun policy.

Related Articles

▪ The New York Times: Staring down a debt crisis, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) tries to navigate GOP divisions. He has doubts about his No. 2 and the Budget Committee chairman. Promises of balancing the federal budget in 10 years have gone by the wayside, a budget plan has yet to materialize and House Republicans cannot agree on spending cuts to demand in exchange for raising the debt limit.

▪ The Hill: Congressional leaders on Thursday invited South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol to address Congress.

▪ Slate: D.C. Virginia and Maryland, once friendly rivals, have been locked in a quiet battle over a new FBI headquarters location. It’s getting a lot louder.

LEADING THE DAY

➤ ECONOMY

The U.S. economy is slowing, yes, but will there be a recession? And if so, how soon?

Six to nine months, suggested JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon this week. Other analysts say they think a recession is likely next year.

There are hopeful investors who imagine the current slowdown will encourage the Federal Reserve to pause its rapid pace of interest rate hikes. But there are worries from Capitol Hill to board rooms and kitchen tables that slower growth means declining revenues, and, in the case of workers, possible layoffs and an end to wage increases. Everyone wants to throttle inflation. Few are excited about economic doldrums.

A recession later this year or in election year 2024 would be bad news for the party in power in the White House. Months ago, President Biden said he did not think the United States would experience a recession. Lately, he is publicly focused on favorable job creation, growth numbers and spending programs enacted through last year.

In the absence of crystal balls, there’s one certainty: Everyone in the recession-gauging business is crunching as much data as possible. The government this morning will release March employment figures. The next GDP report is scheduled for release April 27. Thursday’s report on weekly filings for jobless claims, at 228,000 (higher than expected), stoked fresh slowdown fears (Reuters).

▪ The Hill: How strong is the labor market? A surge in layoffs raises questions ahead of this morning’s jobs report.

▪ The Wall Street Journal: March jobs report to show whether a hiring boom continued.

Heard this week:

“Today’s inverted yield curve implies that we are going into a recession. As someone once said, an inverted yield curve like this is ‘eight for eight’ in predicting a recession in the next 12 months,” Dimon wrote in his letter to shareholders on Tuesday. Referring to everything from failed banks to the war in Ukraine, Dimon told CNBC those developments are “likely to put the U.S. in some kind of recession six to nine months from now.” During a CNN interview on Thursday, Dimon used the word “recessionary” rather than recession.

Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY, in a note on Wednesday, wrote, “The economy is unwell. It’s not the flu, but it is a throat ache. And it’s unlikely to get better in the coming months” (CNN).

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told Politico on Thursday, “There is simply no way that interest rates would go up so much after being low for so long and there would be no vulnerabilities. Something is going to go boom.”

An IMF forecast released as Georgieva spoke calls for a prolonged period of slower global economic activity with growth remaining around 3 percent for the next five years, the lowest IMF forecast since 1990 (The Associated Press).

The Wall Street Journal: Bank failures. High inflation. Rising rates. Is the resilient jobs market about to crack?

➤ POLITICS

The case Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) unveiled against former President Trump earlier this week on charges of falsifying business records related to hush money payments is seen as shaky even by some Trump adversaries. In The Memo, The Hill’s Niall Stanage asks whether Democrats, prosecutors elsewhere and other Trump critics can stop the doubts around the Manhattan case from infecting the other, more serious legal probes that the former president faces?

Meanwhile, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) subpoenaed a former Manhattan prosecutor, Mark Pomerantz, about why he resigned from the district attorney’s office after investigating hush-payments allegedly ordered and paid to adult film actress Stormy Daniels (The Hill).

▪ NBC News: Bragg told House Republicans that efforts to call him to testify about an ongoing investigation is “abuse of power.”

▪ CNN: Daniels says she would “absolutely” be willing to testify if Trump goes to trial.

▪ The Hill: Who is Boris Epshteyn, the controversial aide who was seated near Trump’s side in court on Tuesday in Manhattan?

While the loss Republicans took in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election this week revealed how harmful the issue of abortion still is to the party — and will likely remain through 2024 — GOP leaders in states across the country are plowing ahead with new restrictions anyway. Hours after the Wisconsin vote, Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) signed legislation prohibiting traveling with a minor out of state for an abortion without parental consent. The same day, a Democratic lawmaker in North Carolina switched parties, granting Republicans a veto-proof majority that raises the prospect of further abortion restrictions in the state. And in Florida, the legislature is soon expected to send a six-week abortion ban to the desk of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

“It’s obviously a bad issue for Republicans,” Sarah Longwell, a moderate Republican strategist who has conducted extensive focus groups with GOP voters, told Politico.

▪ Vox: How a vacant Arizona House seat explains Democratic politics in 2024.

▪ Politico: Whitmania: Dems eye Michigan gov’s sister for battleground House race.

IN FOCUS/SHARP TAKES

➤ ADMINISTRATION

A set of proposed changes unveiled Thursday by the Biden administration would designate blanket bans on transgender athletes participating on school sports teams consistent with their gender identity as a violation of Title IX. Under the White House’s proposal, schools would be prohibited from adopting or applying a “one-size-fits-all” policy that categorically bans transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity. Instead, K-12 schools and universities covered by the proposed rule would be permitted to draft their own policies limiting athletic participation based on a set of sex-related criteria unique to their community.

It is expected that transgender elementary school students will generally be able to participate on sports teams consistent with their gender identity, according to the department’s proposal, while older students — especially at the high school and college level — are expected to be subjected to sex-related criteria that limit their participation in school sports (The Hill and The Washington Post).

“Every student should be able to have the full experience of attending school in America, including participating in athletics, free from discrimination,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement.

The 19th: Anti-trans sports bans would violate Title IX under proposed Education Department rule.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that West Virginia transgender athletes can compete on female sports teams in response to a challenge by the state to allow it to enforce a law that prohibits such athletes from doing so.

In a brief, unsigned order, the justices denied the state’s emergency request to lift an appeals court’s injunction, allowing a transgender girl to compete on her middle school’s female teams until the three-judge panel reaches a final decision. In a statement dissenting from the decision, Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Thomas, said the case “concerns an important issue that this Court is likely to be required to address in the near future” (The Hill).

A large-scale refurbishment of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is underway following an allotment of $80 billion to the agency in Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act passed last year. The Hill’s Tobias Burns breaks down the operating plan released by the Treasury Department for its new budget, which will be spent over the course of the next decade and involves hiring tens of thousands of new employees, upgrading technology, and expanding its data and analytics capabilities.

▪ The Associated Press: IRS pledges more audits of wealthy, better customer service.

▪ Bloomberg News: GOP lawmakers from New York, who gained seats in the midterms last year, are making another push to overhaul the state and local tax credit (SALT). The credit was capped at $10,000 per year in the GOP 2017 tax reform bill through 2025.

The Biden administration on Thursday blamed conditions created by Trump for the chaotic withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, according to a summary of findings from an administration-wide after-action review. While the document doesn’t overtly admit to mistakes, it acknowledges lessons that have been applied since, including on the speed of evacuating citizens and allies and cites intelligence that provided overly positive projections of the local security situation, noting that Biden followed recommendations from his military commanders in executing the withdrawal (CNN and The Wall Street Journal).

▪ Axios: U.S. admits Afghanistan evacuation should have begun sooner.

▪ The Hill: The U.S. is flexing its military might in the Indo-Pacific as Washington seeks to downplay diplomatic tensions with China over meetings between U.S. lawmakers and Taiwanese officials this week.

▪ Politico: The State Department should have done more to prepare for the worst-case scenario of Afghanistan withdrawal, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told staff.

Biden on Thursday vetoed an attempt by Congress to undo waterway pollution regulations put forward by his administration — marking the second veto of his presidency and effectively killing the attempt to nullify the water rule. Majorities of both chambers of Congress had voted to nix the Biden rules, which defined which waters are subject to federal protections (The Hill).

➤ INTERNATIONAL

After months of pouring soldiers into eastern Ukraine, Russia’s progress essentially adds up to three small settlements and part of the city of Bakhmut, a high-profile battlefield with limited strategic value. The New York Times has visualized Moscow’s gains in comparison with what it had hoped to achieve from the winter offensive: seizing the entire Donbas region — which contains dozens more settlements, some of them much larger than Bakhmut.

In Bakhmut, seven civilians were reported killed by Ukrainian artillery strikes in Russian-controlled areas. Ukrainian soldiers in trenches just outside the city said they were ready for a long-anticipated counter-offensive once the weather improves. Elsewhere, other Ukrainian recruits trained hard for new combat missions (Reuters).

Meanwhile in Beijing, French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen urged Chinese leader Xi Jinping to use his influence to persuade Moscow to halt the war, now in its 14th month, and come to the negotiating table. “China advocates for peace talks and seeks a political solution,” Xi said. He has sought to position Beijing as a potential mediator in the conflict, but is seen by the West as favoring Moscow (CNN).

▪ The Wall Street Journal: Russian court to hear appeal on detention of Wall Street Journal reporter.

▪ The New York Times: Ukraine war plans leak prompts a Pentagon investigation. Classified documents detailing secret American and NATO plans have appeared on Twitter and Telegram.

▪ Politico EU: The warm embrace and the cold shoulder: China mines Europe’s fractures during joint visit.

▪ The New York Times: Airbus to double production in China as it moves ahead with new orders. The French plane maker announced the agreement despite pressure on Europe from the Biden administration to isolate Beijing.

Israeli fighter jets struck parts of south Lebanon and the Gaza Strip early Friday, in response to an unusually heavy rocket barrage from Lebanon on Thursday that the Israeli military blamed on Gaza-based Palestinian militias with branches on Lebanese territory (The New York Times). The move marked the most serious escalation between the two countries since the 2006 war. The rocket fire came a day after a violent confrontation between Israeli police officers and Palestinian worshipers at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and occurred as tens of thousands of Israelis were celebrating Passover in northern Israel (Axios).

The Washington Post: How progressive Denmark became the face of the anti-migration left.

OPINION

■ Trump’s legal woes will put former President Gerald Ford’s pardoning metric to the test, by John T. Bennett, editor-at-large, Roll Call. https://bit.ly/3KeK0Gt

■ How the end of free preventative health care could affect us all, by Seth J. Chandler, opinion contributor, The Hill. https://bit.ly/3KGujtl

WHERE AND WHEN

📲 Ask The Hill: Share a news query tied to an expert journalist’s insights: The Hill launched something new and (we hope) engaging via text with Editor-in-Chief Bob Cusack. Learn more and sign up HERE.

The House will hold a pro forma session at 2 p.m. on Monday. Lawmakers will return to the Capitol beginning April 17.

The Senate meets at 11:30 a.m. on Monday for a pro forma session.

🐰 The president and first lady Jill Biden are at Camp David for the Easter weekend. Biden has no public events.

Vice President Harris is in Washington and has no public events today.

Economic indicator: The Bureau of Labor Statistics at 8:30 a.m. will report on the employment situation in March.

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff joins Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm at 9:30 a.m. CDT to tour Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Okla., and announce a benefit from the infrastructure law. The two will tour the First Americans Museum at 12:30 p.m. CDT with Chickasaw Nation Gov. Bill Anoatubby and Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt (R). The group will attend a Chickasaw stickball game. Emhoff and Granholm will participate in a roundtable discussion at 2:45 p.m. CDT at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Okla., about geothermal energy, joined by tribal nations representatives.

ELSEWHERE

➤ STATE WATCH

Two of the three Tennessee Democrats who last week took to the floor of the Republican-controlled House chamber to rally for stricter gun control in the wake of a school shooting in Nashville on Thursday were expelled from the chamber in a dramatic act of political retribution. State Representatives Justin Jones, Justin J. Pearson and Gloria Johnson faced expulsion, after the trio interrupted a floor session by using a megaphone to call for more gun control, leading Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton to call the lawmakers “insurrectionists.”

While Jones and Pearson were expelled from the House Thursday after party-line votes, Johnson survived, shocking some Democrats when the chamber voted 65 to 30 to remove her — falling one vote short of the two-thirds majority needed for ouster (WLPN and CNN).

“Today’s expulsion of lawmakers who engaged in peaceful protest is shocking, undemocratic, and without precedent,” Biden said in a statement following the votes. “Rather than debating the merits of the issue, these Republican lawmakers have chosen to punish, silence, and expel duly-elected representatives of the people of Tennessee.”

▪ The New York Times: Who are the three lawmakers?

▪ Politico analysis: The Tennessee expulsions are a glimpse of the future.

Tennessee isn’t the only state where a GOP-run state legislature is moving to restrict the autonomy of Democratic cities, writes The Hill’s Saul Elbein. In Texas, a state bill that would largely bar сity officials from the ability to set urban policy around broad areas like natural resources has made it out of committee and faces a serious chance of passage. In Mississippi, the majority-white state legislature is one vote shy of passing a bill that would create a special court for the whitest and most affluent parts of the Black city of Jackson, funneling those defendants into a separate court system. And in Georgia, the state’s recent ban on gender affirming care has called into question services in Atlanta, a Democratic-controlled city — and the South’s largest regional medical center.

🚨 NBC News: The city of Jackson, Miss., the largest in the state, is reeling from faltering garbage collection (contract dispute), a clean water crisis, neglected street conditions and gun violence, among other municipal problems. “This is absolutely ridiculous. We have all of the problems with crime, potholes, dilapidated buildings, and we are putting our effort and energy into garbage,” said Tim Norris, who is considering moving his restaurant, Mom’s Dream Kitchen, out of town. “At the end of the day, it’s poor leadership.”

Lake Mead, which straddles Nevada and Arizona, has seen its water levels beat expectations in recent weeks after a precipitation-heavy winter, writes The Hill’s Zack Burdyk, but experts warn it’s only a temporary reprieve without a comprehensive water management plan. While the Colorado River reservoir’s elevation was projected to sink to 1,043 feet above sea level by March, according to Bureau of Reclamation data, it sat at about 3 feet higher as of Monday.

“We had a really, really good winter here out west. In northern Arizona we had record snow on the ground,” Christopher Kuzdas, a senior water program manager with the Environmental Defense Fund, told The Hill. “I’m hopeful that we won’t have another terrible fire season,” he added, which would continue the positive trend.

➤ HEALTH & WELLBEING

The Biden administration has finalized its plans for reducing overpayments in the Medicare Advantage program, announcing a three-year transition to a payment model that it says will save excess taxpayer dollars from going to private insurance companies, write The Hill’s Joseph Choi and Karl Evers-Hillstrom. When the White House began discussing potential plans for changing the Medicare Advantage payment model last year, the health insurance industry launched a multimillion dollar lobbying campaign against the proposed changes, claiming the federal government was cutting Medicare funding.

▪ The Washington Post: The Food and Drug Administration yanks the approval of Makena, only drug cleared to lower preterm birth.

▪ The Atlantic: Ozempic is about to be old news. A “huge explosion” in obesity drugs is on the horizon.

▪ The Washington Post: Assisted-living homes are rejecting Medicaid and evicting seniors.

The latest polls show that Americans now fear cyberattack more than they fear nuclear attack, a finding that illustrates the changing nature of warfare and the nation’s collective unease with its computers. The Hill’s Daniel de Visé examines a few actual examples of cyberattacks, successful and foiled — a dam in New York, a cross-country pipeline and a nuclear reactor in Iran.

THE CLOSER

And finally … 👏👏👏 Congratulations to this week’s Morning Report Quiz winners! Clever readers knew their U.S. history about politicians and their brushes with the law.

Here’s who went 4/4 with public servants who took wrong turns: Richard Baznik, Paul Harris, Patrick Kavanagh, Tom Chabot, Kathleen Kovalik, Bill Grieshober, William D. Moore, Elizabeth Ropp, Amanda Fisher, Edwin Shanahan, Harry Strulovici, J.A. Ramos, Stan Wasser, Ki Harvey, Luther Berg, Robert Bradley, Jack Barshay, Jerry LaCamera, Steve James and Pam Manges.

They knew that when Secret Service agents escorted Vice President Spiro Agnew to face criminal charges in the 1970s, they kept their mission secret — even from their own bosses. Agnew resigned the vice presidency in 1973 and received what amounted to a felony conviction stemming from an income-tax violation. He was fined $10,000.

Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D), who was convicted and impeached on corruption charges in 2009, received a commuted sentence in 2020 from former President Trump, who this week denied felony charges in Manhattan.

The Congressional Post Office scandal refers to a conspiracy to embezzle House Post Office money through stamps and postal vouchers to congressmen. Among those ensnared in the scandal, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.) denied wrongdoing but pleaded guilty in 1996 to mail fraud and served 15 months in prison. Former President Clinton pardoned him in 2000.

In 1798, Rep. Matthew Lyon of Kentucky became the first member of Congress recommended for censure for spitting on Rep. Roger Griswold of Connecticut. (Kudos to a reader who mentioned that Lyon represented both Kentucky and Vermont! And trivia bonus: Speaker spittoons remained in the House chamber until the 1980s.)

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