Visible Corruption

Like many, I've said numerous times that Clarence Thomas should resign. Here's another reason, based on new information from Fix the Court:

Steven Mazie, reporter for The Economist who tweeted this table, noted a quote from the report that says the justices are paid four times the local median salary. According to Fix the Court, there is another $740,000 worth of Thomas's trips to private clubs that they didn't include in his total. (I'm not sure if the numbers include the billionaire who paid for Thomas's mother's house. It doesn't seem to be mentioned.)

I did a little math with the numbers from the total gifts column in the table. 

If you created a pie chart, Thomas would make up 85% of all the monetary value received by the justices, followed by Scalia (4.4%), then Alito (3.6%). The three of them together total 93%.

Stevens comes in at 1.9% and Ginsburg at 1.3%, so those five justices account for 96.2% of the gifts.

Are all of the gifts created equal, though, even among those five justices? Median gift amounts say otherwise.

Thomas's median gift was worth $20,944.48 and Alito's $10,630.94.

Scalia's and Stevens's were a good notch down from those numbers at $3,136.78 and $4,570.40, respectively (though many of their gifts could have been earlier than Alito's and Thomas's). 

Ginsburg's average gift amount was only three figures, $980.56, so even though her quantity was one of the highest, it suggests she got a lot of fancy plaques. 

Here's one of my favorite lines from the Fix the Court press release:

FTC notes that several entities Thomas listed on his 2000 and 2002 disclosures as “reimbursing” him for “private plane” travel did not, in all likelihood, own private planes at the time (e.g., high schools, small colleges, civic organization, etc.). Those flight-legs were then gifts, 20 in total.

20 in total! So in other words, Thomas straight up lied on his disclosures in those years, hiding direct payments.