In the years after the undisclosed trip to Alaska, Republican megadonor Paul Singer’s hedge fund has repeatedly had business before the Supreme Court. Alito has never recused himself.
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Until recently, I had naively assumed that Supreme Court Justices were mostly above bribery. Politicians get all sorts of political donations, and it’s no surprise that they can hide more than they actually get, but Justices aren’t exactly politicians. Turns out that it’s even easier to hide being bribed since they’re not doing any active fundraising. All you have to do is just not tell people that you’re being bribed and it’s fine.
The part that gets me, is that all nine justices signed a letter saying that they didn’t need any oversight (or something along those lines), which leads me to believe that all nine justices have done something similar to this.
Or hope/plan to if they haven’t yet.
There is an interesting story in all this:
Argentina’s president labeled Singer and his fellow investors “vultures” attempting extortion; Singer complained the country was scapegoating him.
In 2014, the Supreme Court finally agreed to hear a case on the matter. It centered on an important issue: how much protection Argentina could claim as a sovereign nation against the hedge fund’s legal maneuvers in U.S. courts. The U.S. government filed a brief on Argentina’s side, warning that the case raised “extraordinarily sensitive foreign policy concerns.”
The case featured an unusual intervention by the Judicial Crisis Network, a group affiliated with Leo known for spending millions on judicial confirmation fights. The group filed a brief supporting Singer, which appears to be the only Supreme Court friend-of-the-court brief in the organization’s history.
The court ruled in Singer’s favor 7-1 with Alito joining the majority. The justice did not recuse himself from the case or from any of the other petitions involving Singer.
