NewSpeakers & Politicians Claim Supreme Court Justices Mate For Life. Not True!
Constitution says: Scalia and Thomas are through. — by NormanB ("Deviations from the Norm")

The theory and practice of NewSpeak is to repeat a lie over and over again, louder and louder, until it becomes The Truth. Or, as some call it, the Big Lie.

Yesterday it was Eliot Spitzer, but don’t blame Spitzer. College was so long ago. And, like the rest of us, he’d heard it over and over and louder and louder. Surely by now it must be Truth!

The Big Lie: Supreme Court Justices serve for life.
The actual Constitutional truth: Just the opposite.

See Article 3, Section 1 of the US Constitution.

Supreme Court Justices serve only until there is an Appearance of Impropriety. The Constitutional phrase is "good Behavior." The bar is pretty high for judges. No ethical lapse or misconduct need be proven, or even alleged.

For instance, no Justice may serve on the Supreme Court who has gone on an weekend sporting outing with a Litigant before the Court. According to the Constitution, Justice Antonin Scalia removed himself from the Supreme Court by going to Texas in early 2001 for a fun few days of killing things, with then-newly "elected" Vice President Dick Cheney. Now, there’s nothing wrong (Constitutionally) with sportsmen bonding over the blood of creatures they aren’t going to eat.

But Scalia had recently (December 2000) rendered an official judicial opinion that Dick Cheney’s right (and that other newly "elected" guy’s right) to keep their "legacy" intact superseded the rights of all other US citizens combined to have their votes counted. That ruling in itself gave the Appearance of Impropriety, to people all over the world. But for Scalia to then go hang out with Cheney, and stay at his house, is just flaunting violation or the highest law of the land.

Very recently, Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s wording gave Chief Justice John Roberts just the excuse he was looking for, in order to inject US elections full of unlimited corporate cash. Oh, but not just from corporations, also from certain other groups. Immediately, Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife ran out and started one of those "other groups." As soon as her husband ruled it legal. That’s a conflict of interest, an Impropriety. According to the Constitution, this alone renders both Thomas and Kagan unfit to serve on the Supreme Court, or any other court, for that matter.

I am confident, that once Scalia and Thomas read this column, both will realize that they have already ended their terms on the Court. What if they don’t read it? Well, you’d think that by now they’d have read the US Constitution, at least as far as Article 3.

With Kagan, the appearance of Impropriety goes much deeper than that;
Since:
A. Goldman Sachs retained Kagan for $10,000 per year; and
B. Goldman gave $1,000,000 to Barack Obama’s campaign, his 2nd-biggest donor; and
C. Harvard, where Kagan worked, gave Obama almost as much (3rd-most); and
D. Kagan stated in 2001 that human rights and territorial rights don’t exist if we (as Hitler put it) "tell the people that they are under attack;" and
E. Goldman Sachs and its 5 to 7 peers just caused the collapse of the entire capitalist economic system; and
F. Goldman and its few peers profited obscenely from said collapse; and
G. When Obama Administration determined that Goldman had committed major crimes contributing to said collapse it decided not to prosecute anyone for those crimes; and
H. Instead of seeking to punish Goldman for its crimes, Obama decided to have Solicitor General Kagan’s office prepare a lawsuit, well aware that Goldman Sachs had better lawyers:
It Appears Goldman and its peers Improperly hired Obama and Kagan to allow Goldman unlimited spending to control elections, and to suppress human rights worldwide.

The President is lucky that he doesn’t have to clear that Appearance-of-Impropriety hurdle, like Spitzer did.