The Supreme Court from Hell, Part IV: Clarence (and Ginni) Thomas
With Thomas, it's graft, misogyny, and a wife guilty of election-tampering.
We’re going to take a quick look at Clarence Thomas, whose misogyny first revealed itself in the “Coke bottle” testimony of Anita Hill at his Senate confirmation hearing in 1991. That hearing reveals a shockingly sleazy man who made comments to women so degrading and vile that the daytime TV coverage was the average American’s first brush with real porn. His treatment of women was central to the debate, but he eked out a 52-48 win, largely on a Republican wave of support that ignored the damage to women’s rights it was clear he would do.
Expectations proved true. He voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, a decision written by Alito and decades in the making, but one that had to wait for Trump to stack the Supreme Court with a majority of right-wing Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants. Seven of the nine justices went to Catholic school. Six of the nine are male. And one of the females is a woman (Coney Barrett) hand-picked by the Evangelicals.
And Thomas, of course, isn’t through making sure women stay barefoot and pregnant—he is promising to deny even married couples birth control rights. Although many pro-life people are expressing a genuine concern about termination of life, the hidden undertow of this wave is that if you force 20-25 years of pregnancy and child rearing onto women, they will largely not be in the work force to compete with men for … MONEY. And that puts control into men’s hands. And that’s what he’s about.
What people didn’t expect was Thomas’s war against affirmative action and his opposition to welfare for the poor—even lying about his sister to claim she was “addicted to” public assistance when she was not.
What they couldn’t have imagined the two things that would make Thomas unfit to sit on the Court:
1. Clarence and Ginni live the high life accepting payoffs.
Any money, gifts, or perks personally changing hands between corporate billionaires and high government officials is illegal. Citizens United—which should never have been validated—allowed corporations to be people and give enormous amounts of money to public officials who will pander to them. But Americans assumed the moral and legal wall holding such graft from the hands of Supreme Court justices was inviolable.
To the dismay of those who cherish what remains of public-service honestly, we now find that two sitting justices are tainted by accepting gifts valued in the millions. One is Samuel Alito, whose case we’ll hear next time, and the other is Clarence Thomas, probably the most spectacularly financially festooned Supreme Court justice ever—and the one who has recused himself not once when a case involving one of his benefactors lands before the court.
In fact, it’s widely speculated that his palm, greased to a glisten by these “friends”, is exactly why Thomas has voted to refuse Supreme Court access for a case these people would likely lose or has voted in favor of his dispensing angels when they got there.
News of Thomas and Ginni’s lavish lifestyle started attracting attention in 2021. By August of 2023, ProPublica had the goods on the gallavanting graft-guzzlers, and it was far, far worse than initially suspected. As PBS summarized it:
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accepted more vacations and gifts from billionaire benefactors than previously reported, according to a report by ProPublica.
The conservative justice, who has come under scrutiny for his failure to disclose such gifts, took at least 38 vacations, 26 private jet flights, eight flights by helicopter, a dozen VIP passes to sporting events, as well as stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica, the nonprofit news site reports. ProPublica notes that Thomas appears to have broken the law by failing to disclose flights, cruises and sports tickets.
So, who was paying? The first revealed was
… Texas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow [whose] generosity toward Thomas [included] vacations, private jet flights, gifts, the purchase of his mother’s house in Georgia and tuition payments. In an April statement, the justice defended his relationship with Crow. The Crows “are among our dearest friends,” Thomas said. “As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips.”
The New York Times recently surfaced VIP treatment from wealthy businessmen he met through the Horatio Alger Association, an exclusive nonprofit. Among them were David Sokol, a former top executive at Berkshire Hathaway, and H. Wayne Huizenga, a billionaire who turned Blockbuster and Waste Management into national goliaths. (The Times noted Thomas gives access to the Supreme Court building for Horatio Alger events; ProPublica confirmed that the access has cost $1,500 or more in donations per person.)
Records and interviews show Thomas had another benefactor, oil baron Paul “Tony” Novelly, whose gifts to the justice have not previously been reported.
Each of these men — Novelly, Huizenga, Sokol and Crow — appears to have first met Thomas after he ascended to the Supreme Court. With the exception of Crow, their names are nowhere in Thomas’ financial disclosures, where justices are required by law to publicly report most gifts.
All four of these benefactors have had cases come before the Supreme Court, cases on which Thomas ruled without ever first disclosing gifts—except in the case of the partially disclosed-disclosed gifts given by Harlan Crow.
Last month, Thomas pulled “a Trump” claiming everything said about him was “lies” and playing the Trump-stamped victim card.
Nope. Clarence Thomas is a disgrace and a fraudster. And maybe there’s not a damned thing we can do about it. But maybe there is …
2. Ginni Thomas’s treason and Clarence’s refusal to recuse.
Ginni Thomas’s election interference could unquestionably be construed as criminal election fraud. Do note that the Arizona fake electors scheme, which Ginni Thomas hawked to members of Congress, has resulted in indictments of nine Arizona “electors” (fake) and two Trump aides, including Rudy Giuliani. Ginni Thomas should also have been indicted, and may yet be. Here’s how PBS described her involvement.
The wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas contacted at least two Wisconsin state lawmakers, including the chair of the Senate elections committee, urging them to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 election win in the tightly contested state, emails obtained Thursday by The Associated Press show.
Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a conservative activist, also had sent messages to more than two dozen lawmakers in Arizona.
In her communications with lawmakers in both states, Thomas urged Republicans to choose their own slate of electors after the election, arguing that results giving Biden a victory in the states were marred by fraud. Despite numerous reviews, lawsuits and recounts, no widespread fraud calling into question the results has been discovered in either state.
The emails received at the exact same time on Nov. 9, 2020, by Wisconsin state Sen. Kathy Bernier and state Rep. Gary Tauchen were first reported Thursday by The Washington Post. The AP obtained the email from Bernier, and the watchdog group Documented posted the email Tauchen received.
The emails were sent at almost the exact same time as the ones Thomas sent to lawmakers in Arizona.
That’s an open-and-shut case.
Now, as Trump’s immunity case is debated in the Supreme Court, Thomas, whose wife was integral to plots to overthrow the government of the United States, refuses to recuse himself from the decisions around Trump’s claim that presidential immunity would allow him to “shoot political opponents.” It’s a Supreme Court decision that will also determine if Trump can get out of:
the Mar-a-Lago classified docs case,
the federal election interference case,
the multiple lawsuits brought by those killed and injured in the January 6 attacks, and
the Georgia election interference case.
And given Ginni’s outright treasonous behavior and the doubt it casts on Clarence’s trustworthiness—you’ll note Clarence Thomas didn’t stop her from doing any of this illegal election-tampering and it’s reasonable to surmise he knew—he should recuse. He refuses.
Representative Jamie Raskin, after an exhaustive search of the law, believes he has a way to force Thomas—and Alito, who’s even worse and whom we’ll deal with next time (Part V)—to recuse themselves. Let’s hope this is true.
Given Ginni Thomas’s complicity in the fake electors’ scheme and Clarence’s silence-gives-consent treatment of her around it, he isn’t fit to sit on the court at all.
But expect no help from Chief Justice John Roberts—whose Mafia-like “omerta rules” will be our subject in Part VI).
We’ll begin that one with the question, “If John Roberts says he can’t talk to Sheldon Whitehouse because of the separation of powers, why is Mike Johnson saying he’s polled the Supreme Court justices, and they’re in favor of a case challenging Trump’s porn-star, hush-money conviction making it to the Court?”
See you next time …
PS I just guffawed out loud at the image. Priceless if it were not so tragic.
Really interested in Jamie Raskin’s theory of justice for The Thomas Twosome and the Alitos. He is very sharp, experienced, patriotic and I expect getting fed up with the antics of the Supremes. Hope he is working behind the scenes to reverse the trend. He is a good man, perfect for the task!