If Thomas wrote the dissenting opinion in opposition to Obamacare, he would be doing what everyone expected him to do, regardless of how his wife makes a living. Only if he flipped flopped and went against everything he has stood for during his entire professional career, could you claim he appeared to less than impartial. What this means is Thomas will be not compromised by his wife's employment.......period.
The funny thing here is that your defense of Thomas' impartiality relies
entirely on him being anything
but impartial. In fact, your argument is basically "We know he's going to be impartial because he is so heavily biased already that we know how he's going to vote regardless!'
My position on this ethical question is based on the presumption that these judges are
actually impartial (which is, of course, a false assumption, as you have so clearly demonstrated here in your "defense" of Thomas' impartiality).
Kagan, on the other hand, may be asked to judge her own legal work.....we don't know what she or who she consulted while Solicitor General of the US while this bill was drafted into law and utlimately signed by her former boss. Yeah, that's the same thing as the tortured and impossible assumption that Thomas may be biased and will show this bias by reaching the very predictable conclusion everyone expects of him in this case.
Two things:
1. Kagen's former boss is also her current boss: The American public. Ultimately, we are all of these people's bosses.
2. You are speculating based on her previous job and
inventing the claim that she would be judging her own work. That, by it's very nature, makes your questioning of her impartiality in this case unreasonable.
Where your logic really fails, though, is that by pointing out that Thomas' conclusion in this case is predictable regardless of financial gain, you are accusing him of being partial
regardless of any monetary rewards he might receive. Thus, your argument would require him to recuse himself of
any and all cases from this point forward since he is not, by his very
nature, impartial.
Your psycho-babble on who is impartial enough to form a valid personal opinion is lame.
You previously accused me of creating a strawman clearly indicating that you were ignorant of what a strawman is. As a service to you (because I am a helpful sort of chap), I will demonstrate how the above is a strawman.
Here you have altered my argument that your lack of impartiality makes you
an incompetent judge of another person's impartiality to being about the formation of valid personal opinions in general. This is an
extremely distorted variation of what my actual claim was.
See, a strawman is when someone creates an exaggerated or distorted form of another person's argument and ignores the actual argument made by the person. Now that you know what a straw man is, You should be able to do two things from here on out:
1. You can avoid accusing someone falsely as you did before with me
2. you can avoid creating them yourself.
This is, of course, assuming that you are competent enough at logic to recognize the difference between my actual argument and the one you have invented and attributed to me.
rof Your literacy issues do not make me a hypocrite. 