Impeachable Supreme Justices?
Corruption rules.
One of the first essays I wrote on this platform was about what I knew was corruption in the Supreme Court. That at minimum, the majority was corrupt. Now this court has confirmed my suspicion.
That it comes from what I believe to be a corrupt President does not surprise me in the least.
Here’s what the Constitution says about impeachable offenses.
“Impeachable offenses for Supreme Court justices, as with all civil officers of the United States, include treason, bribery, and "other high crimes and misdemeanors". While "high crimes and misdemeanors" is not precisely defined, it encompasses conduct that is incompatible with the purpose and function of their office, including abuse of power, misuse of office for personal gain, or actions that undermine the integrity of the judiciary.”
This court, for the second time, has blatantly undermined the “integrity of the judiciary.”
The first time corruption was displayed by this court was when the Republican majority declared that state campaign laws were all unconstitutional and then the majority wrote a new campaign law that allowed for unlimited campaign donations, by anonymous donors.
The Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is a controversial decision that reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions and enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections.
While wealthy donors, corporations, and special interest groups have long spent money on campaigns, their role has ballooned as a result of Citizens United and subsequent decisions, resulting in a fusion of private wealth and political power unseen since the late 19th century.
Campaign bribery became lawful. Anonymous donations may be on the rise — especially within higher education — demonstrating donors’ (and, therefore, at least a portion of the public’s) appetite for maintaining anonymity. In 2023 alone, anonymous gifts to McPherson College ($500 million, on top of an initial $500 million pledge in 2022 [Nietzel, 2023a]), Montefiore Einstein’s College of Medicine ($100 million [Landoli, 2023]), and the University of Kansas ($50 million [Nietzel, 2023b]) are just the tip of the iceberg….
In the 2010 case Speechnow.org v. FEC, however, a federal appeals court ruled — applying logic from Citizens United — that outside groups could accept unlimited contributions from both individual donors and corporations as long as the groups don’t give directly to candidates. Labeled “super PACs,” these outside groups were still permitted to spend money on independently produced ads and on other communications that promote or attack specific candidates.
In other words, super PACs are not bound by spending limits on what they can collect or spend. Additionally, super PACs are required to disclose their donors, but those donors can include dark money groups, which make the original source of the donations unclear. And while super PACs are technically prohibited from working directly with candidates, weak rules that are supposed to enforce this separation have often proven ineffective.
Super PAC money, which largely comes from a small group of the very wealthiest donors, started influencing elections almost immediately after Citizens United. From 2010 to 2022, super PACs spent approximately $6.4 billion on federal elections. In the 2024 election, they set a record of at least $2.7 billion. Super PAC money has largely eclipsed donations by small donors (people giving $200 or less), despite funds from small donors growing.
This time, the 6 Republican jurists ruled that The US Supreme Court today issued a 6-3 ruling that will curb judges' powers to block President Donald Trump's orders nationwide.
While the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, established the principle of birthright citizenship, the Wong Kim Ark case provided a key legal precedent by explicitly stating that children of immigrants, even those not yet naturalized, are citizens. This ruling has been upheld for over a century.
Trump no doubt will take this as a big win because he can now deport not only undocumented people but also even their children born in the United States.
Trump has bumped up against the judicial arm of the nation for a number of his decisions, reversing them or at least delaying their execution.
It’s important to note that Donald Trump’s order does not seek to end birthright citizenship for all, it’s only to children born on US soil to undocumented migrants and people in the country temporarily.
According to Pew Research, external, about 250,000 babies were born to undocumented immigrant parents in the United States in 2016, which is a 36% decrease from a peak in 2007.
By 2022, the latest year that data is available, that figure rose to 1.2 million, Pew found.
But as those children may also have children of their own, the cumulative effect of ending birthright citizenship could potentially increase the number of undocumented immigrants in the country to 4.7m in 2050, the Migration Policy Institute found. In an interview with NBC's Meet the Press, Trump said he thought the children of unauthorized immigrants should be deported alongside their parents - even if they were born in the US.
Trump calls the decision a "giant win" and Attorney General Pam Bondi says it will stop the "endless barrage" of injunctions against the president
Writing in dissent of the opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor says the Supreme Court's decision is an "open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution"
The case stems from President Trump's order to end the constitutional right of birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants
Today's ruling will allow that birthright citizenship order to partially go into effect in 30 days, after judges in lower courts had blocked it.
This ruling did not directly tackle the constitutionality of Trump's order, a case likely to end up before the top court at a later date.
There is a conservative majority (6-3) in the Supreme Court and Trump appointed three of the nine justices.