Was Scalia on the Take?

In the Republican debate last night all the candidates said that Antonin Scalia was the kind of justice they would appoint. But what kind of judge was Scalia? 

A judge who accepted hundreds of free trips from private individuals, universities and corporations between 2004 and 2014. The question must therefore be asked: did Scalia clearly separate these private gifts from his court decisions? Or did Scalia receive quid pro quos for the decisions he made?

If Scalia hadn't been gallivanting around the country with elitist wanna-be Knights Templar, and had instead been at home in his own bed, would he be alive today?

The ranch where Scalia died may hold some answers.

The owner of that ranch, John Poindexter, had a case before the Supreme Court just last year. It involved an age discrimination lawsuit at the MIC Group, in which the Supreme Court rejected the plaintiff's petition.

That wasn't Scalia's only connection to Poindexter. Poindexter is an officer in an elite secretive religious organization called the International Order of St. Hubertus. The order is also linked to other secret societies:

The society’s U.S. chapter launched in 1966 at the famous Bohemian Club in San Francisco, which is associated with the all-male Bohemian Grove — one of the most well-known secret societies in the country.

It's not certain what Scalia's relationship was to the Order, but Scalia obviously liked to pal around with wealthy, titled and entitled European nobility. The group’s Grand Master is “His Imperial Highness Istvan von Habsburg-Lothringen, Archduke of Austria.” There were also persistent rumors that Scalia was a member of Opus Dei, another secretive religious organization.

Members of the judiciary are supposed to recuse themselves in cases where there are conflicts of interest or any appearance of impropriety. But the conservative wing of the court has taken hundreds of trips paid for by private groups, corporations and individuals, many of who have cases before the court.

Now, not every trip the justices take is suspicious. Many of them are on the up and up: it's completely reasonable for a university to pay for a justice to make speeches before a conference of legal scholars and allow law students to directly interact with a justice of the Supreme Court. But is it right for conservative "think tanks" and foreign entities to give Supreme Court judges free junkets to Hawaii, Hong Kong and Singapore?

This is particularly important, because one of the court's most controversial decisions in recent years was Citizen's United. In that decision the conservative majority threw out most campaign finance laws, removing almost all limits on corporations trying to influence elections. The conservatives completely rejected the idea that there would be corruption when corporations can give infinite amounts of cash to politicians. Indeed, the first thing Clarence Thomas's wife did after the decision was to go out and start a Tea Party group so she could cash in on the decision.

The vast majority of Americans know Scalia was full of crap in Citizen's United. Democrats and independents certainly do, and the popularity of Donald Trump -- whose big claim is that he's so rich he can't be bought -- shows that most Republicans also believe that unlimited campaign contributions corrupt the political process.

Now, despite rumblings from morons like Trump that Scalia was murdered, all indications are that Scalia died of "natural causes," perhaps because he forgot to use his CPAP machine at the ranch. Yes, Scalia snored himself to death.

But here's the question that conservatives should ask themselves: if Scalia hadn't been gallivanting around the country with elitist wanna-be Knights Templar, and had instead been at home in his own bed, would he be alive today?