Sedition pays

It’s a hell of a racket:

Eastman, once a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was a mainstay of the institute from its earliest days and an architect of its approach to the Constitution. He argued, against centuries of legal precedent, that Kamala D. Harris was ineligible to serve as vice president because her parents weren’t American citizens when she was born in California. Then, in the final months of 2020, he burst into the national consciousness as he helped leadTrump’s drive to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He wrote confidential memos urging then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject officialelectoral vote totals and went on former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s show to build support for his widely discredited theory. And, on Jan. 6, he rallied Trump supporters at the Ellipse before a mob stormed the Capitol.

As dozens of courts rejected Eastman’s arguments, he fell from grace in many quarters. At Chapman University, where he was a professor and former dean of the law school, more than 140 faculty members signed a letter demanding he be disciplined. The university quickly announced his resignation.

But the Claremont Institute, where he sits on the board of directors, stood by Eastman, keeping him on as head of its Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a position for which he was paid $120,000 in 2020, tax records show. An institute statement condemned “widespread lies peddled by malicious domestic political opponents” and decried a “blackout on the Claremont Institute or on John.”

That statement belied thedebates and tensions that have persisted for more than a year, as the institute remains divided and other conservative journals ask what “happened to the Claremont Institute?”

And God knows how many sources of income on the MAGA grift circuit supplement the six-figure no-work job. Maybe Hoover or the Nino Scalia School of Law can hook him up too.