Of Course He Did

Leonard Leo, briber in chief of Supreme Court Justices, is refusing to appear before a Senate committee and discuss the gifts that he arranged.

He's a corrupt son-of-a-bitch, so it is no surprise that he is trying to avoid public scrutiny:

The Senate Judiciary Committee sent a subpoena Thursday to conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo as part of a months-long inquiry into undisclosed gifts to Supreme Court justices and he promptly rejected it, calling the move “politically motivated.”

“I am not capitulating to his lawless support of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and the left’s dark money effort to silence and cancel political opposition,” Leo said of Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the committee’s chairman, in a statement to The Washington Post.

The committee voted along party lines on Nov. 30 to authorize subpoenas for Leo and Texas billionaire Harlan Crow following reports that Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. accepted — and did not disclose — free luxury travel and gifts from Crow, Leo and conservative donor Robin Arkley II.

Crow did not receive a subpoena Thursday, his spokesman Michael Zona told The Post.

Because Crow is dodging service maybe?

 ………

With Leo’s refusal, Democrats would be forced to hold a Senate vote if they wanted to seek enforcement of the subpoena in court — a nearly impossible task in a narrowly split chamber with 60 votes needed to break a filibuster.

Merciful heavens, what about the norms? 

………

Republicans on the committee have criticized the subpoena effort as a political attempt to discredit the high court’s conservative majority. Republicans walked out of the November meeting in protest and later questioned the validity of the authorization vote, accusing their Democratic counterparts of violating procedural rules.

The Democrats would not be looking into rampant corruption at the Supreme Court if the conservative members of the Supreme Court were not relentlessly corrupt.