Samuel Alito's Wife Not Exactly Above Suspicion In Oil Lease Deal
Counterpoint: He's only one ninth of a Caesar.
The media's campaign to undermine confidence in the US Supreme Court by reporting on justices' shady ethics continues, with an Intercept story Monday revealing that even as Samuel Alito was working on his great mission to gut America's environmental laws, his wife, Martha Ann Bomgardner Alito, did a little bit of speculating in the oil and gas bidniss. In June 2022, she signed a lease with Citizen Energy III to explore for oil and gas on a plot of land in Oklahoma that she had inherited from her father. If the land produced any of the sweet fossil fuels that are causing climate change, she would be paid 3/16ths of any revenue Citizen Energy generated.
The Intercept notes that before the lease went into effect, "a line in Alito’s financial disclosures labeled 'mineral interests' was valued between $100,001 and $250,000." And when it comes to his own stock holdings, Alito has
often recused himself from cases that pose potential conflicts of interest with his vast investment portfolio. Many of these recusals were born from an inheritance of stocks after the death of Alito’s father-in-law, Bobby Gene Bomgardner.
And strictly speaking, Citizen Energy III doesn't seem to have any cases before the Court, so there's no "direct" conflict of interest, apart from Alito's overall friendliness to big corporations, including the gas and oil sector. Alito is very friendly to extractive and polluting industries, and very unfriendly to regulators who think it might be a good idea not to set the world on fire. So honestly, it's perfectly fine if his family stands to make a little money off fossil fuels, just as long as the particular name on the drilling rigs isn't also on a SCOTUS filing.
Jeff Hauser, founder and director of the good-government nonprofit the Revolving Door Project, told the Intercept that's a pretty narrow sense of ethical behavior, dude:
There need not be a specific case involving the drilling rights associated with a specific plot of land for Alito to understand what outcomes in environmental cases would buttress his family’s net wealth. [...] Alito does not have to come across like a drunken Paul Thomas Anderson character gleefully confessing to drinking our collective milkshakes in order to be a real life, run-of-the-mill political villain.
And now we must rinse from our brains the mental image of Sam Alito replacing Daniel Day Lewis in any number of movies, no thank you, ick.
Alito's positions on the government's ability to protect the environment have always come down firmly on the side of those who want to exploit resources and do with their land whatever the hell they want, regardless of how it might affect the rest of us, since after all we didn't buy the air or water, now did we? In May, Alito wrote the majority opinion in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, with the result of gutting the Clean Water Act. Alito essentially gave the OK for land owners to pollute wetlands as much as they wanna unless the wetland has “a continuous surface connection” to those waters. As a result, nearly half the nation's wetlands, tens of millions of acres, as well as Americans living downstream, are now no longer subject to federal protection, and everyone will get rich hooray.
As the Intercept notes, the plaintiffs' claims in the case were supported by some of America's dirtiest corporate citizens, such as "the American Gas Association, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association."
On top of that, last year Alito joined with the other rightwing justices in the Clarence Thomas opinion that preemptively gutted the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse emissions from power plants.
Previously:
Federal Judge Takes Dump On Clean Water Act In 24 States
Supreme Court: Isn't That $175,000 Bribe Really Just $175,000 'Speech'?
None of this is terribly surprising, given Alito's overall outlook on environmental matters and federal regulation; as the Intercept points out, Alito also isn't a great fan of science either, because excuse me, climate science isn't even in the Constitution, now is it. In a speech to the rightwing Claremont Institute in 2017, Alito claimed that there's nothing wrong at all with carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that's the most significant cause of global warming.
“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Carbon dioxide is not harmful to ordinary things, to human beings, or to animals, or to plants.” Alito said. “It’s actually needed for plant growth. All of us are exhaling carbon dioxide right now. So, if it’s a pollutant, we’re all polluting.”
Alito explained that when the Clean Air Act was passed, it was only meant to regulate harmful substances like soot or sulfur dioxide, not CO2, which is only a pollutant if you actually know anything about how it traps heat in the atmosphere and causes the planet to get warmer, putting human and animal life in danger. But CO2 wasn't listed as a "pollutant" in 1970, so the EPA can't do anything.
But wait! That has nothing to do with Martha Bomgardner's oil and gas lease at all, so how dare you suggest it's unethical, you commies? The problem, of course, is that just as Alito and his cronies take the narrowest possible readings of environmental laws, the ethics laws — especially under the last decade of Supreme Court decisions — only consider shady actions illegal if they have a bright flashing light saying "Quid Pro Quo," perhaps with an audible alarm, too.
Says Hauser, the Revolving Door guy,
"What makes political figures who violate ethics laws so exceptional is how much obviously unethical behavior is legal under our current overly permissive rules. [...] Our current ethics regime assumes that a person’s financial interests need to be extremely specific in order to influence their behavior, a worldview that ignores the foresight rich people and corporations regularly demonstrate."
Well look, buddy, if you wanted a country where judges have to be ethical and government agencies can actually protect the public from environmental catastrophes, then you should have found billionaires willing to resist other billionaires' efforts to skew laws and the judiciary since the Reagan administration.
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Alito does not have to come across like a drunken Paul Thomas Anderson character gleefully confessing to drinking our collective milkshakes in order to be a real life, run-of-the-mill political villain.
Are we sure Alito isn't actually Daniel Day-Lewis?
Republican Teddy Roosevelt came up with National Parks to preserve the land for future generations.
These days, even someone as horrible as he was on race would be primaried out as a RINO.