(Dobbs) Ginni Thomas, Clarence Thomas, They Matter
Given his wife's zeal for Trump, Justice Thomas should not hear cases about the insurrection.
“A week has gone by and I’m still aghast.”
Columnist Frank Bruni wrote that seven days after news broke late last month that Ginni Thomas, whose husband Clarence is the longest currently-serving justice on the United States Supreme Court, supported, encouraged, arguably even urged the overthrow of the democratic process, culminating in the insurrection of January 6th.
The news was that in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s electoral defeat— in some cases just days after the election was called for Joe Biden— Mrs. Thomas sent almost 30 texts to Trump’s chief-of-staff Mark Meadows with messages like, “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!,” “Save us from the left taking America down,” “Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,” and “We just cave to people wanting Biden to be anointed?”
The news was that the spouse of a Supreme Court justice, as NYU law professor Stephen Gillers put it, was “part of the team,” the team that tried to overturn the legitimate presidential election of 2020.
But as columnist Bruni bemoaned, the news about Ginni Thomas’s un-American exploits faded away almost as quickly as it broke, pretty much replaced within a week by the Oscar-unworthy slap by Will Smith.
“Let’s please, please move past Will Smith… and reallocate our attention to her behavior.”
If only. Because we might already have moved past Ginni Thomas too. As law reporter Dahlia Lithwick wrote in Slate.com, “The Thomases, who have not offered up one word of explanation or justification for this new apparent conflict, yet again surf the wave of public outrage to the peaceful shore of ‘Nothing Matters LOL’.”
Everyone is entitled to their opinions, of course. Everyone is entitled to advocate for whatever they like. But Ginni Thomas is not your everyday advocate. She founded and runs a political lobbying firm in Washington. She was part of a group of Republican politicos who met nearly monthly in the Trump White House. She personally was at the fateful “fight like hell” rally on January 6th from which insurrectionists descended on the Capitol (there are reports that she even helped organize the rally, although she denies it). And although she insisted to the Washington Free Beacon that “Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work,” her most egregious eminence is that she is married to a justice of the Supreme Court, a justice before whom cases have been heard over the years in which his own wife’s clients have had an interest, these clients in some instances actually filing briefs about which her husband would sit in judgement.
Now, there will likely be cases before the Court about the insurrection itself.
There already has been one, the fight over the release of White House documents from the National Archives that Donald Trump tried to block. Eight justices voted against Trump, including five of the Court’s conservatives. Only one voted in his favor: Clarence Thomas.
No one can say for sure whether his dissent was in deference to his wife’s fervor for Trump. But one can say for sure that, as law professor Gillers put it, Justice Thomas “has an understandable interest in protecting” his wife and that therefore, “his impartiality might reasonably be questioned, which the law says requires recusal.” One also can say for sure that morally, if not legally, Ginni Thomas should not have played any part in the counterfeit campaign to overturn the election. “What a terrifying moment,” Frank Bruni wrote, “in which the wife of a serving Supreme Court justice unabashedly exploits her insider access, ignores the idea of checks and balances, (and) promotes conspiracy theories.”
But since she and Meadows are on the same side, here’s how he responded to her texts imploring him not to “cave to the elites”: “We will fight until there is no fight left. Our country is too precious to give up on. Thanks for all you do."
As we all know, they didn’t give up. They did everything they could not to “cave.” Ginni Smith is in the thick of it.
Yet today, if you’re not reading anymore about Will Smith, you might be reading about Ben Affleck and JLo. Or perhaps, as columnist Maureen Dowd recently pointed out, about Kim Kardashian.
"Please, Kim Kardashian, don’t elope with Pete Davidson,” is how Dowd sarcastically started her piece. Her point wasn’t that she cares about their nuptials. Rather, what she cares about is our collective attention span. “Can we find ways to keep our attention on things that require our attention? Do we have any mental discipline at all?”
Things like Ukraine. Things like Covid. Things like our democracy. Things like Ginni Thomas.
The realistic answer is, maybe not. As Dowd wrote, “We live in a world of endless distractions.” I have no doubt that more people this past month were talking about Will Smith and JLo and Kardashian than about Ginni Thomas. Most might not even know who Ginni Thomas is.
They should, because we’re not talking here about other insurrectionist enablers, not even the likes of Donald Trump Jr. whose texts to Mark Meadows two days after the election, claiming “We have operational control,” explored ways to steal back the presidency. Donald Trump Jr. does not share pillow talk with a Supreme Court justice. Ginni Thomas does.
Although federal law says that a judge should recuse himself or herself from a case when a spouse has “an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding,” Supreme Court justices pretty much police themselves. They are the sole arbiters of whether there’s a conflict of interest with the cases they hear.
So if cases about the insurrection or the election itself do make it to the High Court, what will Clarence Thomas do? That’s up to him. Hopefully he understands that the Court’s legitimacy rests not only on the Constitution but on trust of the people it protects. Even the appearance of impropriety— and I’d argue that this is more than just “appearance”— erodes that trust.
Should we hear more about any role Ginni Thomas might have played in the insurrection? Absolutely. But an even higher priority is that if more cases about the election or the insurrection come before the High Court, we shouldn’t hear from Justice Thomas at all. Because he should not, in good conscience, even be in the room.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
I do take the point here but also think of the recent example of Kellyanne Conway and George Conway, who clearly were on very visible opposite sides of the aisle, with at least one side worshiping at the altar of moralistically vapid self-serving spin!
Irony upon irony; the currently sitting President Biden apparently gave a pass to Clarence Thomas despite a lie to advance his nomination to SCOTUS, and now the spouse of that nominee, who became Justice Thomas, is a ringleader in trying to eject President Biden based on a lie.