The Ginni and Clarence Show
Wife of Supreme Court justice actively involved in political issues before the court ... Mrs Thomas - a conspiracy theorist and extremist who wants to overthrow the 2020 election results ... Clarence Thomas a poor quality court appointment ... The race issue ... Anita Hill ... Conflicts ... Failure to recuse ... Further blight on an already damaged US Supreme Court ... Roger Fitch reports
"Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back".
"Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters,etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition" - emails of Ginni Thomas (Mrs Clarence), to Mark Meadows, White House Chief of Staff.
Ginni and Clarence Thomas at Trump's White House dinner for Scott Morrison
Clarence Thomas has a "woman problem", and it's not the first.
In March, just as the supreme court justice found himself deep in his latest such problem, the US congress was - at last - adopting a federal Anti-Lynching Law.
One was immediately reminded of 1991, when the newly-appointed Justice Thomas, an African-American, famously claimed he had received a "high-tech lynching" at the hands of the Senate Judiciary Committee vetting him for the court.
Thomas survived his senate ordeal, and is the longest-serving member of the present court, but in 1991, credible allegations of sexual harassment nearly prevented his confirmation.
Even before the harassment allegations against Thomas arose, there were many reasons that Democrats and lawyers might have questioned his suitability for the court. He had reactionary legal views, and was inexperienced; more than that, it was an insult to the person he would succeed - Thurgood Marshall, the great civil rights lawyer, the US's first African-American solicitor-general and supreme court justice.
Of course, appointing justices who are different in judicial philosophy to the justices they replace is not unknown, witness the recent confirmation (but only by Republicans) of the anti-feminist and extreme conservative Amy Coney Barrett for the position of the late feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
To many, however, the nomination of the unremarkable Clarence Thomas seemed to reflect a cynical assumption by Republicans that nomination of a mediocre and little-known black lawyer would be enough to assure confirmation by Democrats, who would not wish to be seen opposing a black candidate.
Clarence Thomas had attended Yale Law, and had briefly served on the DC Circuit, but only one of the 12 members of the American Bar's prestigious Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary found him to be "well-qualified", and three found him "unqualified" or abstained; the overall vote was "qualified". It may be the lowest level of support ever given a US Supreme Court nominee by the ABA.
The Democrats had a majority, 56 of the 100 senators, and need not have confirmed Thomas at all: aside from his lack of qualifications, he had already demonstrated incompetence in the Bush administration, as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where he employed the lawyer Anita Hill.
The Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, avoided the competence issue. Instead, the ultimate success of the appointment was to turn on allegations by Anita Hill of sexual harassment during Thomas's tenure as chairman of the EEOC. It proved to be an unwise issue, with the presence on the all-male committee of morally-compromised men, e.g, Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts.
In the end, the Democrats were successfully wedged on the race issue, and 11 Democrat senators joined 41 Republicans to get Thomas across the line. There were abstentions, and two Republicans voted against him. It remained one of the lowest votes for a justice until 2018 when Brett Kavanaugh crept in, 50-48, despite his own, similar, problems.
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It's fair to say that Justice Thomas has long had another "woman problem": his wife Virginia Lamp Thomas, who's always been known as an active and partisan Republican, from the same extreme conservative Catholic strain as her husband.
In 2000, as the NY Times noted at the time, Ginni Thomas was working at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, a Republican Party surrogate, matching CVs of the party's faithful with anticipated positions in a Bush administration, at the very time the election was being determined in the misbegotten Bush v Gore then being argued before her husband.
Justice Thomas did not recuse himself, and Gore lost before the court by a 5-4 vote. In fact, there were two other "Bush" justices who should have recused: then-CJ William Rehnquist, and then-Justice Antonin Scalia, whose lawyer children expected high positions in a Bush administration (Janet Rehnquist became Inspector General for Health & Human Services, and Eugene Scalia became Labor Department Solicitor).
More recently, questions have been raised about the political activism of both Justice Thomas and his wife, who openly admits attending the January 6 Trump rally that led to the Capitol break-in.
The New Yorker's Jane Mayer and the NY Times have responded with deep dives into Ginni Thomas's political activities and the possible conflicts for her husband arising from them.
The problem is not that Justice Thomas's wife is a political radical, or even (as is suggested) an insurrectionist, but that the documents disclosing this were contained in the materials provided by Trump's former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows under subpoena to the congressional committee investigating the January 6 Capitol break-in, and the validity of such subpoenas was subject to a supreme court appeal.
In that appeal, Clarence Thomas was the only dissenter in the court's decision declining to interfere in the disclosure of the Trump documents to the congressional committee. Among those documents were the arguably seditious (if not outright crazy) emails sent by Ginni Thomas to Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows following the election.
The documents urged Meadows to overturn the 2020 election.
Anita Hill ... the Clarence Thomas scandal has a long history
It's an unprecedented scandal: Ginni Thomas's emails even allude to her views being shared by her "best friend", surmised to be her husband.
Leading legal ethics experts say that Justice Thomas must now recuse himself from any matters arising from the events of January 6th, including "insurrection" cases.
The liberal New Republic sees venality and "bottomless corruption" in the couple and speaks of Thomas's impeachment, but to the conservative Bulwark, Ginni Thomas is just a "silly woman with a powerful spouse" who everyone regards as "an idiot".
Unfortunately, the US judicial code of ethics applies to all federal judges except the supreme court, whose individual justices are the sole arbiters of whether they have conflicts of interest that merit their recusal from consideration of matters before them.
Chief Justice John Roberts seeks to protect the institutional integrity of the country's highest court, and he must be concerned that Thomas's failure to recuse will bring the politically-compromised court into new, ethical disrepute.
Should Justice Thomas recuse himself from cases implicating events in which his wife may have played a part? The Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee certainly thinks so.
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