5: Living in A Juristocracy with Gabe Roth

Justice By Design

Politics, News

4.5 • 616 Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2024

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Host Kimberly Atkins Stohr speaks with Gabe Roth from Fix the Court about the estimated $4 million in gifts received by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas from conservative donors, raising concerns about the lack of transparency and accountability in the Court. The conversation covers the erosion of public trust in the Court due to rapid precedent changes, ethics lapses, and the absence of oversight. Roth suggests reforms like live streaming proceedings, implementing term limits, enforcing ethics rules, and requiring greater disclosure. Kim and Gabe debate topics like impeachment, court packing, and the necessity of judicial term limits, emphasizing the challenges of reform and the crucial role of public pressure in driving change.

Kim's Article

Transcript

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0:00.0	$4 million. That's the estimation for the value of the total gifts that one Supreme Court
0:10.5	Justice, one Justice Clarence Thomas, has received from deep-pocketed conservatives. Now, those gifts were not disclosed until they were found out, and then some of them
0:25.3	were subsequently disclosed, and then we found out some more. And so who knows if the value is even
0:30.6	greater than that. But that's what we know of. So why is this problematic? I want you to think about
0:37.4	this.
0:37.7	It's not just that people like Harlan Crow billionaire with conservative interests was giving a lot of these gifts.
0:47.9	It's that these gifts gave access.
0:51.2	You had people like Leonard Leo who helped architect the rightward shift of the entire
0:56.7	judiciary, a very political actor who was sitting next to Clarence Thomas or going fishing with him
1:06.5	or doing all the things that they were doing on these luxury trips. It was having an influence in the
1:12.6	court. And that's what is one of the problems. That's why people, including me, are losing faith
1:20.0	in the court as an institution, as a fair arbiter of the biggest issues that we face. So how do we get
1:27.4	more accountability? How do we get,
1:30.6	you know, ethics at the U.S. Supreme Court? I'm Kimberly Atkins-Store. This is justice by
1:38.7	design where we talk about the biggest issues facing our society and the solutions for fixing them. And when it
1:45.9	comes to fixing the court, there's nobody more qualified to talk about that than Gabe Roth of
1:52.5	fix the court. Gabe, thanks for joining me. Thanks so much for having me. So give our listeners a little
1:58.2	bit of an intro of who you are and what you do.
2:02.1	Sure.
2:02.5	So Fix the Court is my organization.
2:06.2	I started it in 2014 to advocate for solutions to the lack of transparency and accountability in the Supreme Court and really all the federal judiciary.
2:16.9	Everything from live streaming to term limits to ethics reform, disclosure reform, learning more about their public appearances and entanglements. My background is actually in broadcast journalism. I went to to J-School for grad school and worked in local news in Florida for a bit, moved up to D.C. and switched over from
	...

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