AOC Opens Pandora’s Bloodbath
The Clarence Thomas Impeachment Resolution is a Template for Impeaching Joe Biden
As someone with no real stake in most of federal government, someone who doesn’t care who wins, and someone who thinks that we all probably live in a protofascist oligarchy anyway and treats politics as nothing more than a game show, I love impeachments. They’re great. Deep down, I wish every politician was constantly impeached by every other politician all the time, because the entertainment factor would be unfathomable. That’s why I absolutely love Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s impeachment resolution of Clarence Thomas that hit today. It broadens the criteria for impeachment in several notable ways, and if used as a template could be used to impeach a large swath of the District of Columbia itself, including most notably the current sitting president Joe Biden.
It’s great. There are two main claims within it:
It designates “failure to disclose gifts” as a high crime and misdemeanor worthy of impeachment itself, without a need for any “quid pro quo” trail indicating that Thomas made a specific ruling because of a gift. That Justice Thomas failed to disclose gifts from the Crow family is enough, without evidence of any exchange of gift-for-official-act taking place, as is usually required by bribery law.
It states that Thomas should have recused himself from various Trump Election related trials because his wife was active in the “stop the steal” movement and a big Trump supporter. It hammers this home by saying that Thomas cannot claim ignorance of his wife’s views because his wife is his family.
Applied evenly and without political bias, this upends the two only remaining defenses of Joe Biden’s own influence-peddling behavior, which is that (1) any gifts he received were just gifts with no quid pro quo, and (2) Joe didn’t know Hunter was peddling influence on Joe’s behalf. Therefore, Joe Biden is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors worthy of impeachment by the framework presented in AOC’s resolution.
Let’s start by taking a look at the resolution in detail.
Resolution
Notably, she is not accusing Clarence Thomas of accepting bribes, merely of non-disclosure.
Similar law exists for the office of the President, which we will get into later. The resolution continues:
We’ll skip the wall of gifts, and accept as given that it’s a large sum exceeding the disclosure limit. It seems quite large to me, and smells quite a bit like gifts.
Article I ends by stating that violating the non-disclosure code constitutes a high crime and misdemeanor warranting impeachment. Article II gets spicier, when it questions Thomas’s impartiality because of his wife’s job. Stick around, each Article is spicier than the last.
The resolution states that Justice Thomas’s wife received money from the American Enterprise Institute, which Harlan Crow is a part of.
And so forth. So Clarence Thomas is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors for not recusing himself from any case for which a brief was filed by an entity with a money paper trail to his wife. The third article, as promised, is the most spicy.
The resolution lists several instances where the Supreme Court heard information about the January 6th “insurrection” and/or “mostly peaceful protest” depending on your point of view, fails to mention that Thomas ruled against Trump on some of these, says he should have recused himself anyway, and refocuses on Clarence’s wife’s behavior during the power transition:
It goes on to detail Mrs. Thomas’s activity during this time, and then drops the hammer:
That’s the real zinger. If Clarence Thomas didn’t know about his wife’s deeply held opinions and actions regarding the controversial power transition, then he was derelict in his duties to know, and being derelict in his duties to know is a high crime or misdemeanor worthy of impeachment.
Biden
This line of reasoning quite honestly isn’t that bad. I rather like it. But what AOC fails to realize is this exact same line of reasoning applies to most or all of our elected federal government positions, and especially the current sitting President of the United States as of this writing. Let’s go through it.
Like Justices, Presidents are required to disclose gifts under the Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act of 1966, and the Ethics in Government Act of 1978. Unlike Justices, these disclosure requirements specifically require gifts to family to also be disclosed. There’s even a White House Gift Unit that’s supposed to process and log all these gifts to ensure they’re legal and publicly known.
Based on the framework presented within AOC’s impeachment resolution, any gift to Hunter Biden must be disclosed, and failure of Joe to know about a gift places him derelict in his duties as President and guilty of a high crime and misdemeanor worthy of impeachment.
For instance, the consternation over Biden selling letters of recommendation to Brown University and using Hunter as the bag man fell flat because of two important things. The kid’s dad could easily just give Hunter a gift, and there’s no quid-pro-quo because writing letters of recommendation isn’t an official act of the President. It fell flat because doing that was legal. But according to AOC’s resolution against Clarence Thomas, failing to disclose it is an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor.
When Hunter sold influence to Burisma in Ukraine, or to Chinese business concerns, it was all smoke and no fire because nobody could point to a quid pro quo. According to the new AOC resolution, whether Hunter was telling his influence-peddling cronies that Joe Biden was “The Big Guy” literally doesn’t matter anymore, because Joe had a “duty to know what his family was doing,” and dereliction of that duty is an impeachable offense.
It’s beautiful.
Bloodbath
Upon realizing all of this, a blue might think, “Whoa, we have to reign AOC in or else Joe is going to get caught in the jetwash.” A red might think, “Whoa, we should crank out fifty of these impeachment templates and throw them at the blues, including possibly AOC.” A high-thinking red might realize that if they were to do Biden, and the blues then did a bunch more reds, and the reds then did a bunch more blues, then the entire District of Columbia would get caught in such an impeachment shitstorm that they could never “do the government’s work” of diverting taxes to whatever weird thinktank that’s paying them under the table. A plugged-in politician who’s making bank from the system might get with other politicians across the aisle and put a lid on the whole thing.
But I’m really rooting for AOC here. This impeachment is exactly the kind of “Drain The Swamp” hand grenade that the MAGAs wanted, and Occupy before them, and the Tea Party before them, and that Obama literally ran on.
And it would be so, so, so entertaining.
The reason AOC is not thinking about the consequences of passing these articles of impeachment is because she doesn't expect or want them to pass, any more than the Dems actually wanted to pass any of their assault weapons bans, or the Rs actually wanted to pass any of their abortion bans. These things are re-election fodder, not serious attempts at actual legislative action. AOC wants to go back to her constituents, shrug her shoulders, and say "oh well, I tried, vote for me again so I can continue to do highly visible but ultimately meaningless things intended solely to convince you to keep voting for me."
Personally, I just wanna see the whole damn system crumble to the ground. Both sides just burnt up. Maybe even see the whole lot dem and rep thrown in prision. I really can’t think of a single hood or honest one of them.