Fix the Court

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target of CRC

an 6 24

for more than 20 years U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and often his wife, Ginni Thomas, were the guests of billionaire Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow, who reportedly treated the couple to luxury air and sea travel and trips to his resort and other destinations, complete with gifts including clothing, all expenses paid. Now, following years of reports on the alleged ethics and corruption scandals of right-wing Supreme Court justices, and after an ethics policy newly-adopted by the SCOTUS justices, the latest disclosure report offers critical revelations.

“Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has disclosed for the first time trips to Bali and to a private club in California in 2019 paid for by his friend and benefactor, Texas billionaire Harlan Crow, according to financial disclosures released Friday for eight of the nine justices,” The Washington Post reports.

“The required annual reports, covering activity in 2023, also show three justices — Brett M. Kavanaugh, Neil M. Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson — received six-figure book payments,” The Post adds. “Jackson also accepted four concert tickets from Beyoncéworth nearly $4,000 and two pieces of art to display in her chambers.”

On Thursday, Fix The Court revealed over the past 20 years Justice Thomas has accepted nearly $6 million in what the government watchdog believes are gifts disclosed by Thomas, gifts reported by the media including especially ProPublica, and “likely” gifts its investigation identified.

According to Fix The Court’s publicly posted spreadsheet, tallying up all the gifts Justice Thomas accepted, including disclosed, identified, and “likely” gifts, based on their investigations and on news reports, Justice Thomas appears to have accepted $5,879,796 worth of gifts.

The total of all gifts all justices accepted over the past two decades, not including amounts in today’s disclosure report, according to Fix The Court, is $6,592,657.

Responding to Friday’s disclosure news, retired White House correspondent Peter Maer, an award-winning journalist, wrote: “Cashing in on #SCOTUS.”

Thursday night MSNBC’s Chris Hayes reported on Fix The Court’s investigation.

Watch below or at this link.

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GGL AI 6 25

In 2023, the Capital Research Center (CRC), a conservative think tank led by its president Scott Walter, was involved in facilitating nearly $600,000 in anonymous donations to "Crowdsourcers for Culture and Liberty," a group led by Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Key facts about this relationship:

Fiscal Sponsorship: The donations were channeled through CRC via a "fiscal sponsorship" arrangement. This allowed Crowdsourcers to receive and use these funds without establishing its own nonprofit status and disclosing donor information publicly.

Purpose: Crowdsourcers was formed to battle "cultural Marxism" and wage a cultural fight against the left.

Conflict of Interest Concerns: Some critics argue that this arrangement raises concerns about potential conflicts of interest, especially considering Ginni Thomas's relationship with a Supreme Court Justice and the fact that CRC had business before the Supreme Court around the time the donations were funneled.

CRC's Mission: CRC describes itself as an "investigative think tank" that examines how foundations, charities, and other nonprofits spend money and get involved in politics. It often focuses on uncovering anonymously funded influence campaigns by left-leaning organizations.

Ginni Thomas's Role: Ginni Thomas has a history of conservative activism and engagement in political matters, and has been the most politically active spouse of any current Supreme Court Justice.

Scott Walter's Role:

President of CRC: Scott Walter has been the president of the Capital Research Center.

Funneling Donations: According to reports, Walter was involved in funneling the anonymous donations to Ginni Thomas's group.

Controversial Statements: Walter has also been noted for making or defending statements that some find offensive regarding race, gender, and sexual orientation.

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ggl 6 25

[### Activist group led by Ginni Thomas received nearly ...

_The Washington Post_

https://www.washingtonpost.com › ... › Investigations](https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/03/28/ginni-thomas-crowdsourcers-anonymous-donations/)

Mar 28, 2023 — In 2019, anonymous donors gave the think tank Capital Research Center ... Its president is Scott Walter, a former aide to President George W.

[### Scott Walter

Capital Research Center

https://capitalresearch.org › person › swalter](https://capitalresearch.org/person/swalter/)

Scott Walter is president of Capital Research Center. He served in the George W. Bush Administration as Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy.

Missing: ginni ‎| Show results with: ginni

[### Marjorie Taylor Greene accused of assembling 'rogues' ...

The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com › us-news › jun › marjori...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/04/marjorie-taylor-greene-hearing)

5 hours ago — Walter leads the Capital Research Center, “a secretive organization that won't disclose its donors while attacking others for lacking ...

[### Fix the Court

Capital Research Center

https://capitalresearch.org › tag › fix-the-court](https://capitalresearch.org/tag/fix-the-court/)

In the second quarter of 2023, CRC reported on new investigations into the groups targeting Clarence Thomas ... Scott Walter Testifies to a Senate Judiciary ...

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https://yyy.theguardian.com/law/2022/jan/28/clarence-thomas-supreme-court-affirmative-action-case-ginni-thomas

GUK

Who has more influence on supreme court: Clarence Thomas or his activist wife?

Justice’s wife, Ginni Thomas, sits on the board of conservative group that backs lawsuit seeking to end affirmative action, raising concerns it could present potential conflict of interest

Ed Pilkington

@edpilkington

Fri28 Jan 2022

Clarence Thomas, the hardline conservative supreme court justice, is facing calls for his recusal in the case over race-based affirmative action in college admissions that the court agreed to hear this week.

US supreme court will hear challenge to affirmative action in college admission

The case, which is being brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, is the latest potential conflict of interest involving Thomas and his wife Virginia Thomas. Ginni, as she is known, is a prominent rightwing activist who speaks out on a raft of issues that frequently come before the nation’s highest court.

A one-person conservative powerhouse, she set up her own lobbying company Liberty Consulting in 2010. By her own description, she has “battled for conservative principles in Washington” for over 35 years.

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The challenge to the two universities’ race-conscious admissions policies is being brought by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA). Its leader Edward Blum has been a relentless opponent of affirmative action and voting rights laws.

His argument that race-based affirmative action is a quota system that discriminates against Asian students is framed with the supreme court’s newly emboldened rightwing majority in mind. A central player in that new six-justice conservative supermajority is Clarence Thomas, who is the longest-serving of the justices and at 73 will be the oldest once Stephen Breyer retires.

Justice Thomas’s influence has soared in recent months with the rightward shift of the court following Donald Trump’s three nominations, to the extent that some pundits now dub him the unofficial chief justice of the court.

SFFA’s lawsuit seeking to strike down affirmative action has received the enthusiastic backing of the conservative National Association of Scholars. It filed an amicus brief in support of the suit, accusing Harvard admissions officials of being prejudiced against Asian students and stereotyping them as “uninteresting, uncreative and one-dimensional”.

Ginni Thomas sits on the advisory board of the National Association of Scholars. Observers are concerned that her position with a group that has intervened in the affirmative action case could present appearances of conflict of interest.

Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas, wife of the supreme court Justice Clarence Thomas, watches Amy Coney Barrett take the constitutional oath in the White House on 26 October 2020. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP

Noah Bookbinder, president of the government ethics watchdog Crew,told the Guardian that while supreme court regulations may not legally require Thomas to recuse himself, there were serious questions to answer.

“Ginni Thomas is an advisory board member of an organization that has taken a very specific position on a case in front of her husband. That will make it hard for the public to be confident that he’s going to be totally unbiased.”

Bookbinder said that in the circumstances “the better course of action would be for him to recuse or for her to cease her involvement in that organization.”

The potential appearance of a conflict of interest over the Harvard case was noted in a recent investigation by the New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer that takes a deep dive into the overlapping interests of the couple. The article chronicles in devastating detail the many instances where Ginni’s political activism appears to present problems for the image and integrity of the court.

“Ginni Thomas has held so many leadership or advisory positions at conservative pressure groups that it’s hard to keep track of them,” Mayer concluded. “Many, if not all, of these groups have been involved in cases that have come before her husband.”

In the most troubling recent instance, Ginni Thomas lent her voice to Trump’s big lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. She was vocal on the subject in the buildup to the violent insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6 last year that led to the deaths of five people and left more than 100 police officers injured.

On the morning of the January 6 itself, Mark Joseph Stern of Slate reported, Thomas posted on her Facebook page words of encouragement for the “Stop the Steal” marchers in Washington. “LOVE MAGA people!!!!”, she said., “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING!”

Soon after the insurrection, Thomas was forced to apologise to her husband’s former supreme court law clerks for comments she made privately to them that appeared to lament Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election. The remarks were sent to a private email list called “Thomas Clerk World”.

In the emails, disclosed by the Washington Post, she wrote: “Many of us are hurting, after leaving it all on the field, to preserve the best of this country. I feel I have failed my parents who did their best and taught me to work to preserve liberties.”

An even more direct intervention in the politics surrounding Trump and the big lie was made last December when Thomas joined 62 other influential conservatives in signing an open letter to the leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy. It urged him to expel the Congress members Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from the Republican party.

Their sin, the letter writers opined, was to serve on the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. They described the committee as an “overtly partisan political persecution that brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law [and] legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong”.

Since the Capitol insurrection, the Department of Justice has arrested more than 725 defendants in relation to the storming of the building. Federal prosecutors have charged 225 with assaulting, resisting or impeding police officers, including over 75 charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily harm to an officer.

Last week the supreme court rejected attempts by Trump to block the January 6 committee from acquiring his White House records from the time of the attack. There was only one dissent from the bench to that 8-to-1 decision: it came from Clarence Thomas.

“Ginni Thomas’s activities are unprecedented in supreme court history in terms of a spouse engaging in issues that are constantly before the court,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a non-partisan group which advocates supreme court reform. “The appearance of impropriety is in itself impropriety – all the supreme court has is the trust of the public, and once you chip away at that you are in trouble.”

Roth added that Thomas’s comments in the days before January 6 were clearly problematic given her husband’s vote on the Trump documents. “It’s possible that the January 6 committee has emails between Ginni Thomas and administration officials from that day or the days leading up to it given how vocal she was. That’s definitely a place where Justice Thomas should have recused himself.”

Should the rightwing majority around Thomas use its newfound muscle to ban affirmative action, as is widely predicted, it would mark the negation of more than 30 years of settled constitutional law on the matter. What lies ahead bears strong resemblance to Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that made abortion legal which the court is probably poised to weaken or even overturn outright.

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Mayer points out in the New Yorker that an amicus brief was filed in the supreme court case challenging Roe by Robert George who also sits on the advisory board of the National Association of Scholars alongside Ginni Thomas.

Roth told the Guardian that a simpler solution to the full recusal of Clarence Thomas from the affirmative action case might exist. That would be to remove the National Association of Scholars’ amicus brief.

“There is an easy way to deal with this perceived conflict of interest – strike the amicus brief,” he said.

It is established practice in all federal appeals courts, though not in the supreme court, that amicus briefs brought by anybody with a connection to a judge hearing a case are routinely thrown out.

The president of the National Association of Scholars, Peter Wood, told the Guardian that he knew of no conflict of interest relating to Thomas’s position on the advisory board. “Ms Thomas’s role is to provide advice to NAS in response to questions I put to her about NAS policy and initiatives. I have never discussed with her any NAS matter that was likely to come before the supreme court,” he said.

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The Boston Globe

no lnx

Tight bond between Clarence Thomas and his activist wife Ginni raises conflict of interest concerns

By Jim Puzzanghera Globe Staff, UpdatedJune 25, 2022,

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/06/25/nation/too-close-comfort-tight-bond-between-clarence-thomas-his-activist-wife-raises-conflict-interest-concerns/

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas and Justice Clarence Thomas, married for 35 years, refer to each other as “best friends."PATRICK SEMANSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife of 35 years, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, refer to each other as “best friends,” their bond built on deep conservative beliefs and forged tighter by decades of fighting attacks they perceive as unfair that began with his turbulent 1991 confirmation

“She was a gift from God that I had prayed for,” the justice said in a new book about him, “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in his Own Words.” “She’s been as dear and close a human being as I could have ever imagined having in my life.”

A longtime conservative activist, Ginni Thomas has seen her profile rise in Washington with her husband’s increasing clout on the Supreme Court in its steady shift further to the right. For years, Thomas was known as the silent justice, at one point going a decade without asking a question during oral arguments and joining fewer opinions than his fellow conservatives.

But he’s an outlier no more. Clarence Thomas’s newfound influence among the court’s conservative supermajority was evident this past week in the major decisions expanding gun rights and overturning the constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade. He wrote the gun decision, which for the first time granted a broad right to bear arms in public. Then a day later, he urged his fellow justices who gutted Roe to go even further and take aim at precedents protecting contraception, same-sex intimacy, and gay marriage next — a radical agenda that no longer seems so far fetched.

Now, even as Thomas has found his voice in this emboldened right-wing court, revelations about his wife’s involvement in attempts to overturn the 2020 election could mar his moment and fuel the public’s increasing distrust of the institution.

Ginni Thomas’s advocacy on controversial matters that have reached the Supreme Court is unprecedented for the spouse of a sitting justice. Their close relationship — and Clarence Thomas’s refusal to recuse from cases touching on the election and its aftermath — has the court in uncharted ethical territory at a perilous time for its credibility.

Ginni Thomas has agreed to appear before the special House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection to face questions about her communications with the team trying to help former president Donald Trump overturn the election results. Some legal ethics experts said Clarence Thomas might have broken a federal law covering judicial conduct when he did not recuse himself from a case related to the attack on the Capitol. He was the only dissenter when the high court rejected Trump’s assertion that executive privilege shielded White House communications about the incident.

Those ethicists warn Clarence Thomas definitely would be in violation of the federal law if he participated in any new cases involving the election or its aftermath, now that there’s no doubt he knows about his wife’s involvement. Ginni Thomas reportedly sent texts to Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and e-mails to 29 lawmakers in Arizona urging them to improperly replace the state’s electors for Joe Biden. (The Justice Department is conducting a separate inquiry into the fake electors scheme.)

“The more we learn about her activities, the even clearer it becomes that Thomas cannot sit in any case concerning the election or the ‘Stop the Steal’ effort or the insurrection,” said Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor and author of a widely used casebook on judicial ethics.

But with no binding code of conduct, the only check on a Supreme Court justice who refuses to recuse from case that poses a conflict of interest is impeachment by Congress. That step has been taken just once in the nation’s history, in 1804, and is highly unlikely in today’s polarized political climate.

The controversy surrounding the Thomases, one of Washington’s premier power couples, comes as the court’s approval rating has fallen to a five-decade low at just 25 percent, according to a new Gallup Poll, after pitched battles over nominations and in anticipation of Roe’s reversal following an unprecedented leak of a draft opinion. The Roe decision Friday sparked protests nationwide and intensified the spotlight on Clarence Thomas.

President Biden specifically called out Thomas Friday in warning the court was taking the nation on “an extreme and dangerous path,” citing his concurrence urging the reconsideration of other landmark rulings such as one protecting the right to access and use contraception.

“Courts don’t have armies. They don’t have the power of the purse. What they have is a public that’s willing to abide by their rulings even when they don’t agree with them,” said Alicia Bannon, director of the Judiciary Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank. “When that trust is faltering, that really goes to the very core of the court’s role in our democracy and the justices ability to do their job.”

But legal experts predicted there’s little chance Thomas would recuse himself from any case revolving around the 2020 election, even though the court is under increasing pressure to adopt a code of conduct amid a push for one from lawmakers.

“If you look at anybody on the court who’d probably be most immune to public criticism by now, it would be him. He’s been going through this for 31 years now,” said John Yoo, a University of California, Berkeley, law professor and a former Thomas clerk who has known him for years and believes the conflict of interest allegations are unfair.

“I don’t think it would cause him to change his mind in how he votes on any case,” Yoo said. “And I don’t think it would cause him to change his mind on how he applies the conflict of interest principles to himself.”

Ginni Thomas acknowledges in the new book that, “I’ve been a pretty political person” and asserted that “the left” has been trying to take her and her husband down for years.

“They really don’t like Black conservatives,” she said. Thomas was just the second Black justice to join the court, replacing the first one, civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall.

Ginni Thomas dismissed criticism of her activism by noting “there have been other judges who have had spouses in the public sphere.” She cited Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who was married to Marjorie Rendell, a federal appeals court judge. They divorced in 2016.

But there are binding conflict of interest rules for all federal judges below the Supreme Court. And Ginni Thomas’s activism as the spouse of a justice stands alone. Over the years, she has worked as an aide for a top Republican congressman, then at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, before running her own advocacy group. She now operates a Washington firm called Liberty Consulting. Supreme Court rules do not require Clarence Thomas to disclose who his wife’s firm works for or funds it.

While at Heritage in 2000, Ginni Thomas gathered resumes for a possible George W. Bush administration. But Clarence Thomas rebuffed calls for him to recuse from the Bush v. Gore case that decided the election. Thomas cast the deciding vote in the 5-4 ruling that made Bush president.

In 2011, 74 House Democrats wrote to Clarence Thomas asking him to recuse from any cases involving the Affordable Care Act because of his wife’s work for Heritage, which opposed the law. He declined and voted against upholding the law in 2012.

“She’s working on the nascent Bush administration before Bush v. Gore is decided. She’s trying to overturn Obamacare. She’s trying to overturn the [2020] election,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, which advocates for a more open and accountable federal judiciary. “It’s a real Forrest Gump-type existence that none of the other previous hundred-odd Supreme Court spouses have lived.”

Ginni Thomas’s involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election take the conflict of interest concerns to a new level. She sent 21 text messages to Meadows in the weeks after the election urging a push to overturn the results, The Washington Post reported in March.

“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” she wrote in one of them. In response to a Nov. 24 text from Meadows that he was intent on fighting for Trump’s victory, Ginni Thomas replied: “Thank you!! Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now … I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!”

The e-mails did not make clear who the “best friend” Ginni Thomas was referring to, although she has frequently referred to her husband that way. But amid questions about her Jan. 6 involvement before the texts were revealed, she said in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news site, that “Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.”

Meadows provided the text messages to the House committee after the Supreme Court turned down a request by Trump in January to block the release of White House records. Clarence Thomas filed the lone dissent.

“He never should have participated in that case,” said Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor who served as the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. “He absolutely needs to stay away from these Jan. 6 cases. This is going to lead to the furthering of the impression that the Supreme Court is just a political body where justices are put on there to carry out the will of the political party of the president who put them there.”

The pressure on Clarence Thomas to recuse from new cases increased in recent days after The Washington Post reported that the committee had obtained e-mails between Ginni Thomas and John Eastman, a lawyer at the center of the discredited legal theory that then-Vice President Mike Pence had the power to overturn the 2020 election results.

At the same time, The New York Times reported that Eastman said in a December 2020 e-mail to another lawyer there was a “heated fight” among the Supreme Court justices about whether to hear arguments about overturning the election. Eastman has denied the information came from Ginni Thomas. Still, the Jan. 6 committee wants to speak to her and she told The Daily Caller she looked forward to the opportunity to “clear up any misconceptions.”

Committee chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, said Friday that he had concerns about Clarence Thomas ruling on any cases involving the election or the insurrection, although he stopped short of calling for his recusal.

“It raises significant flags obviously just because the wife of a Supreme Court justice is so prominently positioned in this situation,” Thompson said.

Others lawmakers have been clear that Thomas should recuse. Two dozen congressional Democrats, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, sent a letter to Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John Roberts in Marchcalling upon Thomas to explain his failure to recuse from earlier cases involving the election or the insurrection and to recuse himself from any future ones.

They cited the judicial conduct law that applies to all federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, requiring recusal from any proceeding in which their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

But Thomas has given no indication he intends to do so. A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not respond to an e-mail request for comment. Warren and others are pushing for a binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court that would cover recusals. But the court has resisted putting one in place and there are constitutional questions about whether Congress could impose one.

So, if Thomas stays the course, he and his wife are risking further harm to the court’s standing, said Gillers, the NYU law professor.

“Nothing she did that we are aware of yet is illegal,” he said of Ginni Thomas’s involvement in efforts to overturn the election. “She has a right to do it, but it’s not the norm. And by behaving this way, she has endangered the credibility, the reputation of the court.”

Jim Puzzanghera can be reached at jim.puzzanghera@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter: @JimPuzzanghera.

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john s edit bd 3 22

It’s not clear to me yet why Virginia “Ginni” Thomas admitted to being at the gathering that came before the J6 insurrection. But I’m sure the spouse of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has her reasons.

Ginni Thomas told the Washington Free BeaconMonday that she attended the rally organized by the former president to “stop the steal.” She said she left before Donald Trump ordered a throng of insurgents, some armed, to sack and loot the seat of government.

“There are important and legitimate substantive questions about achieving goals like electoral integrity, racial equality and political accountability that a democratic system like ours needs to be able to discuss and debate rationally in the political square. I fear we are losing that ability,” she told the Free Beacon, a rightwing paper.

Thing is, those “important and legitimate substantive questions” had been addressed and settled by one federal judge after another. They had been answered by Republican secretaries of state in states won by the current president. You’d think the wife of a Supreme Court justice would respect court rulings. I suppose that might be too much to ask.

Like I said, it’s not clear to me why she outed herself. It could be she’s aware of a forthcoming story about to come to light, and turned to a sympathetic news outlet to “get ahead of the story,” as elites say. That way she can minimize damage to her and her husband’s public image.

If I were to guess, I’d say Ginni Thomas was aware of Donald Trump’s effort to pressure the former vice president, Mike Pence, into sending certified electoral votes back to states, which would reelect Trump, or otherwise sabotage the situation so the Supreme Court had to decide.

That would be bad. It would mean some people are above the law. Unfortunately, we don’t need a treasonous conspiracy to know that.

Ginni Thomas is untouchable.

She’s a leading figure in right-wing politics. Her activism frequently involves cases Justice Thomas will hear. She is a middleman, as it were, between the GOP’s very obscenely rich donor class and the court’s GOP supermajority, which is eager to give what’s asked of them.

There’s nothing you can do about it.

When the people are powerless, democracy isn’t all that.

Even if Congress were to pass laws regulating the behavior of Supreme Court justices, who would enforce those laws. The US Department of Justice? The FBI? Which among all the federal law enforcement agencies would investigate a justice’s spouse? The Congress? Hardly. It couldn’t remove a president for extortion.

I talk about this and other depressing things with Gabe Roth. He’s the executive director of Fix the Court, a nonprofit dedicated to reforming the federal judiciary, especially the highest court. When no one is above a justice, Gabe said, “you're free to do whatever you want.”

“I think that bulletproof-ness rubbed off on Ginni Thomas.”

With normal people in mind, can you explain whether it’s wrong for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice to be politically active?

It's not wrong for a justice's spouse to be politically active. Justices' spouses can and should have their own lives and their own jobs.

But Ginni Thomas is different from any other Supreme Court spouse in the history of Supreme Court spouses in terms of her brand of activism and how so much of it intersects with the court’s work.

She's been the for the last three decades. WhenBush v. Gore[which decided the 2000 election] was at the court, she was vetting resumes for a potential Bush administration.

As Obamacare reached the court, she was lobbying against the law.

When a case on whether Congress could subpoena certain J6-related records was at the court, she was signing a letter saying Congress was harassing “private citizens who have done nothing wrong."

Supreme Court justices are supposed to recuse themselves from cases in which their "impartiality might reasonably be questioned."

Justice Thomas has often said he and Ginni are one – fused together in the fire of his confirmation. He’s said there’s no daylight between them.

These comments make me — and I think I'm pretty reasonable about this — question his impartiality on several issues before the court.

Has Thomas ever ruled against his wife's interests?

It's hard to quantify since the court has issued more than 2,000 rulings since Thomas joined it in 1991. But in general, the answer is no.

On major cases, the Republican justices rule the way average Republicans would want them to rule. Similarly, the Democratic justices rule the way average Democrats would want them to rule.

The Republican exceptions — Roberts on Obamacare, Kennedy on gay marriage, Gorsuch on tribal sovereignty — don't include Thomas.

How would you characterize Ginni Thomas's brand of politics?

Mean-spirited and misinformed. How can you be a functioning adult and think it's OK to share memes on Facebook related to the Holocaust, saying gun control is the reason 6 million Jews died?

Hoo-boy.

She gives out awards every year to some of the most brazen, shameless and horrible people you can imagine. Covid deniers, election-fraud maker-uppers, anti-Muslim bigots, the works.

With respect to gun control causing 6 million Jews to die, I wonder if perhaps she does know it's not OK, but she’s saying it anyway. From that perspective, we can see the role of bad faith. Someone like that could violate conflicts of interest norms knowing they were.

The truth is there really are no set conflict-of-interest rules if you're a Supreme Court justice. Rules only work if there are consequences. If there's no one above you, if you're never going to be impeached and removed since it's too hard, you're free to do whatever you want.

I think that bulletproof-ness rubbed off on Ginni Thomas.

With that in mind, there's no way of holding a justice’s spouse accountable for her role, however, minimal in J6. Am I correct?

Correct.

I would bet the J6 Committee would be squeamish about subpoenaing Ginni Thomas, though they did subpoena Donald Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, with whom Ginni is close.

They don't want to be seen as "political," and I could imagine some of them think that going after a justice's spouse would be seen that way.

So it's possible for the spouse at the Supreme Court justice to be engaged in sedition, a crime that could rise up to the Supreme Court, and the justice in question could rule in favor of his spouse?

Yes.

That’s fucked up.

Ginni Thomas would say she left before the crime happened.

She already said she left in remarks made to the Washington Free Beacon. If she's bulletproof, why bother going to a sympathetic newspaper to explain why she's not guilty of anything?

My guess is enough people saw her at the Ellipse that the story of her being there was going to get out. She wanted to get ahead of it.

So what if the story got out, though?

My guess is that more is coming out – that she was in touch with Meadows or someone on J6 who’s been subpoenaed. She wanted to quash the rumor she paid for buses to get people to DC that day.

So what’s the solution to a laughably corrupt system, as it appears to be? Can Congress put teeth in conflict-of-interest norms?

First, they can require justices to write and adopt a code of conduct that sets expectations for conduct inside and outside the court.

Second, they can require justices to explain when they recuse themselves and make it easier for litigants to ask why they don't recuse in cases in which there's a perceived conflict of interest.

Third, they can amend the federal recusal statute to say that if you as a justice received a benefit from an individual or group — whether a gift, a free trip or personal hospitality — you have to sit out SCOTUS cases brought by that individual or group for a certain number of years

Fourth, they can hold more oversight hearings so judicial ethics issues are in the open, not merely discussed whenever a justice messes up.

I could keep going.

Yes, please.

Fifth, they could require that judges and justices put annual financial disclosure reports online (currently they're placed on thumb drives and the disclosures office always has a multi-year backlog).

Congress could require that every time a judge or justice buys or sells a stock, or other financial instruments, they have to file a contemporaneous transaction report, as members of Congress must.

Sixth, Congress could write a law that would require justices to take senior status after 18 years, so they'd keep life tenure, but after 18 years, they'd have to move to a lower court – or they could fill back in at the Supreme Court in case of an unexpected vacancy.

Seventh, they could require judges and justices to fill out contemporaneous travel reports, as members of Congress must. These show in real-time who's paying who for what (flights, hotels, etc).

These sound good, but rules and laws don't mean much unless they're enforced. Assuming Merrick Garland would never touch a case involving a Supreme Court justice’s spouse, who would enforce these laws and rules even if they were enacted?

That'd be my assumption, yes.

The DOJ wouldn’t bring charges against a Supreme Court spouse.

It'd have to be a bribe to get to that point.

A bribe would be blessedly simple, but what about a spouse of a Supreme Court justice who’s cheerleading sedition?

I don't see how that's enforced, correct.

This is very depressing isn't it?

I guess. I'm used to it.

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