U.S. CONGRESS
The other end of Pennsylvania Avenue doesn’t look much better. Did you know that there was a provision slipped deep into the One Big Beautiful Bill that would have allowed U.S. senators to collect $500,000 for every phone record lawfully acquired at the time of lawful investigations? The provision was clandestinely put in the bill after it was revealed that, in the FBI’s investigation into President Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, eight senators had their phone records lawfully analyzed due to their part in the scheme. < After severe public backlash, the provision was removed. >
Members of Congress are still trading stocks like mad, amid renewed calls for legislation that bans lawmakers and their families from trading individual stocks.
Interestingly, a bill banning Congress, the president and the vice president from trading stocks was recently approved by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, but only with the caveat that a divestment requirement included in the bill wouldn’t start until an elected official’s next term – meaning it would never apply to President Trump. What?
In 2022, reporting by The New York Times revealed that “from 2019 to 2021, 183 current senators or representatives reported a trade of a stock or another financial asset by themselves or an immediate family member. More than half of them sat on congressional committees that potentially gave them insight into the companies whose shares they reported buying or selling.” In the end, the Times found that “97 lawmakers or their family members bought or sold financial assets over a three-year span in industries that could be affected by their legislative committee work.”
This seems to be continuing to this day. According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of disclosure filings, between April 2, 2025 (“Liberation Day,” when President Trump announced sweeping new tariffs on imported goods) to April 8th (the day before he announced a 90-day pause on most of the reciprocal tariffs), over a dozen House lawmakers and their family members made more than 700 stock trades.
Ironically, Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Representative Rob Bresnahan (R-PA) – who both have called for legislation banning members of Congress from trading stocks – reported the most trades by themselves or family members, followed by Reps. Jefferson Shreve (R-IN), Julie Johnson (D-TX) and Michael McCaul (R-TX). Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) bought at least $28,000 of stocks, including that of FedEx, Amazon, Lululemon, Athletica, and Palantir Technologies. She also sold at least $50,000 in U.S. Treasury bills on April 8th.
Since disclosures don’t include specific amounts or prices, it’s not possible to tell if someone made or lost money in any transaction. However, the volatility in the markets between April 2nd and April 8th was the most dramatic it had been in years.
It just goes on and on, year after year. We're guessing it won’t surprise you that Republicans used super shady gimmicks to artificially reduce the cost of the One Big Beautiful Bill, but the slight-of-hand, hide-the-ball tactics they used to make this legislation look less fiscally damaging are epic.
One of these comes in how the tax cuts are structured and accounted for in the budget. The Republicans declared many of the tax cuts in the bill temporary as opposed to permanent because, if a program is considered temporary, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) doesn’t calculate it over the requisite 10-year period – obviously lowering the overall cost impact of the legislation. Problem is, these cuts aren’t truly considered temporary by anyone. Things passed by Congress rarely get cancelled; rather they typically get renewed, adding huge additional costs – in this case to the tune of $736 billion.
There was another shady trick involving the tax cuts. The tax cuts Republicans passed in 2017 were set to expire at the end of 2025 and extending them would cost an estimated $3.8 trillion. Historically, extending tax cuts beyond their scheduled expiration is considered a new tax cut. But Republicans just decided to ignore this $3.8 trillion by declaring that the old tax cuts would be extended regardless – making them appear in their new numbers to cost nothing.
This is even worse than it sounds because, to achieve this fairytale, the Republicans blatantly disregarded certain rules of reconciliation, the special legislative procedure they had chosen to use to avoid a filibuster in the Senate (meaning, their bill only required a simple majority vote and was not subject to limits on debate that require sixty votes to pass). The rules they chose but ignored – which say that legislation cannot add to the debt for more than a decade – are supposed to help contain how much debt is added by requiring bipartisan support.
But perhaps the shadiest trick is how the One Big Beautiful Bill is being phased in. Extending the 2017 tax cuts and increasing military and border spending will likely boost near-term growth. The temporary tax deductions for tip income, overtime pay and senior citizens, plus the full expensing of business investment will also help (these provisions, other than investment expensing, phase out after several years). However, the painful cuts to Medicaid, SNAP (food assistance), and new rules on health insurance kick in after the 2026 midterm elections. Anyone else find that timing curious?
The result is that the temporary sugar high from the tax cuts and increased military/border spending are frontloaded while the pain from spending cuts kicks in later – and that’s also about the time we’ll begin to see the longer-term impact of trillion-dollar deficits on interest rates, private investment and growth. It’s the ultimate double-whammy.
That said, shady gimmicks aren’t unique to Donald Trump and Republicans. When President Biden was pushing the original American Jobs Plan ($2.3 trillion) and the American Families Plan ($1.8 trillion), he claimed they wouldn’t add a penny to the national debt. He insisted that raising taxes on corporations and taxing anyone who makes over $400,000 would pay for both plans. This was not true. There just wasn’t enough money there to cover it. The largest tax slice of both proposals was taxing multinational corporations but, by the administration’s own calculations, that piece was estimated to only bring in $1 trillion.
The Penn Wharton Budget Model projected the American Families Plan (AFP) alone “would spend $2.5 trillion, about $700 billion more than the White House’s estimate, over the 10-year budget window, 2022-2031.” They estimated that “AFP would raise 1.3 trillion in new tax revenue over the same period. By 2050, the AFP would increase government debt by almost 5 percent and decrease GDP by 0.4 percent.” The final Congressional Budget Office report on AFP, released in November 2021, concluded that the American Families Plan would increase the budget deficit by $160 billion over the next decade.
So, at best the Biden administration was doing the fuzziest of fuzzy math. At worst, they were being straight-up deceitful.
To pay for the American Jobs Plan, the Biden administration planned to raise the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent; increase the global minimum tax from 10.5 percent to an average of 21 percent (the exact calculation on this is country specific); impose a 15 percent tax on “book-incomes,” or the amount of income corporations publicly report; end federal tax breaks for fossil fuel companies; crack down on U.S. corporations claiming to be foreign companies; stop deductions for moving jobs overseas; and offer tax credits for bringing jobs back home to America.
But here’s the catch, and it’s a BIG one (and we think it’s super sketchy they even tried this). The Biden administration said that the $2.3 trillion worth of spending in the American Jobs Plan would take place over the next 8 years, but that it will take the next 15 years of higher taxes on corporations to pay for it. Sorry to break it to you, Joe, but that ain’t what we call apples to apples. Do you think no one is going to look into this stuff? C’mon man!
For one, the “spend for 8 years, tax for 15 years” plan couldn’t even logistically work because, back in 2021, Joe Biden had zero control over what would or would not happen over the next fifteen years (as evidenced by the fact that he only served one term, which was definitely not in his plan). When he was making these grand promises, he knew he only had “control” for the next four, possibly eight, years, and even that was a stretch given our practically dead even Congress.
The Biden administration also used the “temporary versus permanent” trick. Take, for example, just four of the “temporary” policies in the original American Families Plan; an increase in the Child Tax Credit; an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit; support for childcare and pre-k; and an expansion of the Affordable Care Act.
If these four programs were renewed, it would add $2.18 trillion to the bottom line. This means that the cost of the bill would actually be $4.29 trillion instead of the officially stated $2.43 trillion. Meaning, the total deficit impact would be $2.7 trillion. Shady.
Meanwhile, Biden’s funding strategy for his American Families Plan was no more realistic. This one allocated money for universal pre-K, free childcare, two years of free community college for all, a paid family and medical leave program, Affordable Care Act subsidies, scholarships for teachers, increased Pell Grants, and expanded nutrition programs, among many, many more things. It also claimed to help solve climate change and racial inequities, end child poverty, and ensure world peace (okay, we made that last one up).
For this phase of his plan, President Biden intended to impose new taxes on rich people. This included almost doubling the capital gains tax to 39.6 percent for people earning over $1 million a year (this would have been the highest capital gains tax in a hundred years). Plus, the top marginal income tax rate would increase from 37 percent to 39.6 percent (effectively rolling back the Republicans’ 2017 tax cut).
What President Biden obviously forgot is that, although it makes good television to say that huge taxes on rich people and corporations will solve every single cash crunch in this country, all that really happens – as we learned from the ProPublica tax exposé – is that uber rich people find ways to wiggle around tax law. Especially when, although the Biden administration talked a big game about “closing tax loopholes” and the like, there was no meaningful tax reform to accompany their tax hikes.
So, what would have really happened is that corporations, rich people, and their teams of financial wizards would have found tax loopholes to exploit, and the astronomical cost of this legislation would have been passed through to consumers and employees through higher prices and lower wages. Like always.
U.S. Supreme Court
… and then there is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In the past few years, there have been several concerning stories about ethical issues and Supreme Court Justices – everything from Justice Samuel Alito, Jr. engaging in luxury travel to Alaska with a billionaire hedge fund manager who often has business before the Court to the Mississippi Book Festival buying 1,500 copies of Justice Elena Kagan’s books in exchange for her speaking at the event.
But these things are child’s play when compared to Justice Thomas, who has shown not only outrageously bad judgement (first and second examples below) but who has also exhibited corruptive behavior that is worthy of impeachment (third example).
Under the heading of outrageously bad judgement: First came the text messages sent between former Donald Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, Clarence Thomas’ wife, in the weeks following the 2020 election. The text messages sent between Mark and Ginni show Ginni’s extraordinary access to the White House, and that she not only championed but encouraged efforts to overturn the perfectly valid 2020 presidential election.
** It is very, VERY important to remember that, at the time of these texts,
Donald was very publicly declaring his intention to take what
he called a “major fraud on our nation” to the U.S. Supreme Court. **
On November 10th, seven days after the 2020 election, Ginni texted: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!...You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
Even though some of the text messages were completely unhinged on Ginni’s part – “Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.” (Kraken is a term often used by followers of QAnon) – every American has the right to his or her own political opinion, regardless of whom they are married to. Plus, to be fair, in her September 29, 2022 testimony before the January 6th U.S. House Select Committee, Ginni said her husband was “uninterested in politics” and that they don’t discuss her “day-to-day work” or who she is “calling, emailing, texting or meeting.” Also in her testimony – where she made clear she still believed the 2020 election was “stolen” – she claimed that she “never spoke to her husband about legal challenges to the 2020 election” and that they do not talk about pending Supreme Court cases as “an iron clad rule.” …which we find very hard to believe, but whatever.
However, in a text exchange between Meadows and Ginni on November 24, 2020, she mentions having a “conversation” with her “best friend” (it is well documented that Clarence and Ginni often refer to one another as their “best friend” in public). Meadows kicked things off with, “This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”Ginni responds: “Thank you!! Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now… I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!”
In case there was any doubt she was speaking of her husband in the text, Ginni’s testimony to the January 6th committee pretty much cleared it up: “My husband often administers spousal support to the wife that’s upset. So, I assume that that’s what it was.”
We get that Ginni Thomas having a “conversation” with her “best friend” is not illegal. BUT it becomes highly suspicious when her husband is the ONLY Supreme Court Justice to voice dissent after the U.S Supreme Court rejected Donald Trump’s 2021 efforts to stop the National Archives from releasing documents to the January 6 House Select Committee – a release of documents that eventually uncovered Meadows’ and Ginni’s text messages.
This Meadows/Ginni text episode is in addition to the facts that 1) Ginni has often been cozy with many right-wing individuals and groups with interests before the Supreme Court, and 2) that Crowdsourcing for Culture and Liberty, a right-wing think tank she led, received nearly $600,000 in anonymous donations between 2019 and 2022 to ostensibly bring together – in the words of Mark Paoletta, Ginni’s personal attorney – “conservative leaders to discuss amplifying conservative values with respect to the battle over culture.”
The anonymous donations came to Crowdsourcing for Culture and Liberty via the think tank Capital Research Center (CRC) as a “fiscal sponsorship,” with at least $400,000 routed through yet another nonprofit called Donors Trust, a fund also known to support conservative causes. The same year CRC funneled the money to Ginni Thomas’ organization, the organization filed an amicus brief before the Supreme Court requesting the Court hear a case to limit fuel emission regulations in Oregon. This was the only time CRC filed a brief with the Supreme Court since at least 2001, which is the latest information available.
Then there is this. Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo, a conservative judicial activist, directed GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway (yes, the same Kellyanne Conway who became a senior adviser in the first Trump White House) to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Ginni for “consulting work,” telling Conway he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K.” Leo helpfully added to his directive: “No mention of Ginni, of course.” Yes. Of course.
That very day, Conway’s firm, The Polling Company, sent the nonprofit Judicial Education Project a bill for $25,000. As Leo instructed, Conway listed the purpose of the payment as “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting.” All in, The Polling Company paid Ginni Thomas’ firm, Liberty Consulting, $80,000 between June 2011 and June 2012, with the expectation they would pay another $20,000 by the end of 2012.
In what must be the craziest “coincidence” in U.S. history, in 2012 the Judicial Education Project filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder, a landmark voting rights case that challenged a civil rights law that protected minority voters. The Court held the predominately conservative view that it is unconstitutional to use the coverage formula in the Voting Rights Act to determine which jurisdictions are subject to the preclearance requirement. Clarence Thomas was part of the 5-to-4 majority.
But the worst was yet to come. Soon after all these revelations, it got much darker for Clarence Thomas. ProPublica reported that Justice Thomas accepted luxury trips (think huge yachts and private jets) for over twenty years from Dallas real estate tycoon Harlan Crow, a well-known, wealthy Republican donor. Just one of the luxury vacations Clarence and Ginni enjoyed – a 2019 trip to Indonesia – would have cost the couple over $500,000 if they had paid for it out of their own pocket. Associate Supreme Court Justices earn $274,200/year.
ProPublica also revealed that, in 2014, one of Harlan Crow’s companies bought several properties in Savannah, Georgia from Clarence Thomas, his mother, and the family of Clarence’s deceased brother. Not long after the purchase, contractors began an extensive remodel of the home, where Clarence’s mother still lived.
Yet another story showed that, although Thomas reported on financial disclosure forms that his family received between $50,000 and $100,000 a year from an entity called Ginger, Ltd., Partnership, this partnership has not existed since 2006. Evidently, the family created a new company when Ginger, Ltd., Partnership was supposedly shuttered but, as is everything with this man and his wife, the details are murky and the record-keeping at best sloppy.
Unfortunately for Clarence, the ProPublica exposé brought back to the front-page other articles from the past, like a 2011 New York Times report that Harlan Crow had made other huge gestures for Clarence and Ginni since they all met in the mid-1990s – like giving them a Bible once owned by Frederick Douglass and coughing up $500,000 for Ginni to start a Tea Party-related organization.
And it just goes on and on and on. Next, we heard that Crow paid for two years of private-school tuition for Clarence Thomas’s grandnephew, who Thomas has said he raised as a son.
In what comes as no surprise, Harlan Crow isn’t the only generous Thomas benefactor – and the grift goes way, way back. It started just months after Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation hearing, when he was accepted into the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, a club ripe with wealthy, mostly conservative members.
The New York Times reports that “over the years, his Horatio Alger friends have welcomed him at their vacation retreats, arranged V.I.P. access to sporting events and invited him to their lavish parties. In 2004, he joined celebrities including Oprah Winfrey and Ed McMahon at a three-day 70th birthday bash in Montana for the industrialist Dennis Washington. Several Horatio Alger friends also helped finance the marketing of a hagiographic documentary about the Justice in the wake of an HBO film that had resurfaced Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations against him during his confirmation.”
ProPublica confirms much of The New York Times reporting, revealing Justice Thomas’ wealthy friends “have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into the premium suites at sporting events and sent their private jets to fetch him – including, on more than one occasion, an entire 737.” These gifts include “at least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas;” a “dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox;” “two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica;” a “standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast;” and 26 private jet flights and eight helicopter flights.
One of the most fun examples is from 1999, when Justice Thomas purchased a $267,230 40-foot Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon R.V. Over the years, he described to friends and colleagues how he sacrificed and saved to purchase it, and he often used the R.V. to polish his down-to-earth, I-was-born-in-poverty-but-somehow-pulled-myself-out-of-it-by-my-bootstraps persona: “I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States. There’s something normal to me about it. I come from regular stock, and I prefer being around that.”
Problem is, Thomas didn’t buy the R.V., at least not outright. His rich buddy Anthony Welters – who made tons of money in the health care industry – “financed” it for Thomas with terms Thomas would never have likely received from a bank. Thomas would not comment on the transaction and beyond a cryptic email, Welters would also not answer straightforward questions, despite repeated requests from The New York Times: Anthony Welters “would not say how much he had lent Justice Thomas, how much the justice had repaid and whether any of the debt had been forgiven or otherwise discharged. He declined to provide The Times with a copy of a loan agreement – or even say if one existed. Nor would he share the basic terms of the loan, such as what, if any, interest rate had been charged or whether Justice Thomas had adhered to an agreed-upon repayment schedule. And when asked to elaborate on what he had meant when he said the loan had been ‘satisfied,’ he did not respond.”
We later found out why Anthony Welters was so unforthcoming. After reviewing loan documents, Democratic members of the Senate Finance Committee found that “Welters forgave a substantial amount, or even all of the principal balance of his loan to Clarence Thomas, constituting of the forgiveness of approximately $267,230.00 of debt owed by Justice Thomas.”
When these extremely concerning revelations about Clarence and Ginni Thomas came to light, much of the debate in political circles and on cable news revolved around things like when should Justices have to disclose certain things OR when should Justices recuse themselves OR what is the definition of things like “personal hospitality.”
But to us, this behavior goes far beyond nuisance. Clarence Thomas’ behavior is corrupt, plain and simple. Only one Supreme Court Justice – Samuel “Old Bacon Face” Chase – has ever been impeached, and that was in 1805. It’s time for it to happen again with Clarence Thomas. At a bare minimum, the charge of bribery applies.
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